Cracking the Code: Using QR Codes to Engage Your Customers on Their Smartphones #smb #smallbiz

If you haven’t been to HP’s 367 Addison Avenue Blog, it’s a great resource for small-to-medium business owners with helpful tips, tricks and advice to help bring your business to the next level.  Melissa Zieger, the editor at 367 Addison, has been kind enough to share some of her content with us; it will be cross-posted here from time to time.  – Tina

A few generations ago, a set of car keys changed everything – the way we work, the way we shop, the way we live. Today, smartphones are assuming their place on the very short list of innovations that really do have transformative powers. Whether smartphones will prove themselves as transformational as the automobile remains to be seen, but marrying the worldwide Internet to a handheld device is certainly an impressive start.

If you own a small business, are you factoring the proliferation of smartphones into your strategy? If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, I recently read an article about quick-response codes in the Wall Street Journal that provided plenty of both.

Visually, QR codes resemble the universal pricing codes that appear on nearly every piece of merchandise. Where QR codes differ from the UPCs is that rather than consisting of a bar of straight lines, the QR codes appear as a maze of black boxes.

While QR codes are not new – large corporations have been using them for some time now – they are a fairly new marketing technique for small businesses. And that’s due to recently introduced services that offer an avenue for creating QR codes easily, quickly and free of charge. Concurrently, many smartphones now ship with an application for reading QR codes, or have application stores where they can be downloaded for free. In response to these two factors, according to the article in the Wall Street Journal, small businesses in the U.S. “have flocked” to the technology over the past six months.

Given the fact that small businesses are often the harbingers of innovation, coupled with the fact that there are an estimated 30 million people in the U.S. alone who have code-reading capabilities on their smartphone, the rush to harness the QR code technology doesn’t surprise me.

Before I go into a few examples of how QR codes can support the growth of small businesses, I want to highlight a few concerns.

• First, there’s cost.  While the coding itself is free, the work that goes into incorporating the codes into something that will eventually reach your target customers is not.
• Number two, the majority of consumers remain unaware of QR codes and their capabilities.
• Finally, QR codes do not currently adhere to a single standard, so the potential for confusion among your customers is considerable. And confusion, of course, generally leads to purchasing goods and services elsewhere.

There are some positive points, too. Customers of a coffee chain are no longer standing in line waiting for their lattes: instead, they’re ordering them from the train, via QR codes in the chain’s advertisements, and finding, as if by magic, that their drinks are ready for them when they arrive at the café. Customers who buy premade bases for soups scan the QR codes on the packages to discover not only recipes but detailed shopping lists as well. A direct-mail postcard created for a landscaping company includes a QR code that links customers to the firm’s mobile site, which features a video of the landscaper discussing his work and an offer for a free tree. It’s a great way for the landscape business to build its community, but it’s also a strategic business move: already, the company has hired two new employees to handle the increase in demand.

This article inspired me to imagine a few new scenarios. I started thinking about how nice it would be to scan QR codes at tradeshows instead of having to lug around all the brochures people hand out. Or how about using them on “For Sale” signs, instead of having to find a pen and paper to write down the realtor, street address and phone number when house hunting?

Then I started thinking about how my friends and colleagues who are running small businesses could use QR codes, and since I don’t want to give away their trade secrets without checking with them first, if you have any ideas about how you could use this technology to potentially reach 30 million people – a number that will doubtlessly increase dramatically – I’d love to hear about them.

Thanks for reading,

Melissa Zieger

Melissa Zieger (@HP_SmallBiz) is the editor-in-chief of HP's SMB blog, 367 Addison Avenue and a worldwide public relations manager for HP's Personal Systems Group.