Measuring the effectiveness of the offline activities with a QR codes
The work of a Digital Marketing Consultant is often beyond the scope of online activities. In this article I will describe how you can increase the effectiveness of your printed items
In the not so distant past, I was involved in designing a leaflet for a trade show. After initial discussions, QR codes with links to various sub-sites were added. And this is where the essential article begins.
The initial draft looked like this:
This article will be about how to better use the potential of QR codes. The main problem was that there were the large number of codes. It is very difficult to control which code will be read. By default, the phone opens the link whose QR code loads faster - so the encoded link is shorter.
Link optimisation
The basic thing is that a simple link like:
https://yourdomain.com/downloads
and it is only the beginning of the journey.
What is an UTM link?
Do know that offline marketing activities can be monitored. The following address is used for this
https://ga-dev-tools.google/campaign-url-builder/
You type in the address of the landing page, the campaign ID, the campaign name and other details and at the bottom of the page you receive the generated URL.
https://yourdomain.com/downloads?utm_source=may-2024&utm_medium=leaflet&utm_id=trade (84 characters)
You don't put that address on the leaflet. Who would type it, memorise everything? Link shorteners come to the rescue.
What is a link shortener?
In a nutshell, it is a service for generating redirects from long addresses to short ones. A dozen years ago, with the rise in popularity of services such as Google Maps or Youtube - incredibly long links began to be shared. Today, you click 'share' and you have a short friendly link to a place on a map or a video on Youtube - but it wasn't always like that. Google has improved its services, and even killed off its own link shortening service (https://goo.gl/). Luckily, we have alternatives.
Bitly - link shortener as a service
If you don't want to specifically develop the topic, you can use a proven online shortener at
Bitly.com
You can "quickly" shorten the above link to the form
bit.ly/myleaf-dl (24 characters)
URL shortener on your own server
This solution is a bit of work at the beginning. In the long term, however, you have everything on your server and the links themselves look better and are more trustworthy if they have your address in the domain.
Install yourl on your own server.
Step 1.
The first step is to create a subdomain and redirect it to your own server.
Step 2.
The next step is to follow the instructions for installing yourls.
The yourls panel itself holds no secrets.
The resulting link after shortening would look like this:
https://go.yourdomain.com/myleaf-dl (35 characters).
Such shortening is not as efficient as bitly (unless you have a super-short domain name). But on the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, your domain is in the shortener - which increases trust, and more importantly, you have all the shortened names available - and you can edit them.
QR code generation
As with link shorteners, you can base your links on external services or create them yourself. Here, too, I recommend keeping everything in-house. Even the giant Google has closed down its shortener. It is not worth investing your work and visibility on the basis of a service with uncertain longevity. Especially since the QR generator I recommend is really very easy to use.
In case the link doesn`t work here is my mirror at Google Drive
What about the leaflet?
If you hold the leaflet with one hand and your phone with the other, you cannot cover up 2-3 QR codes. So placing such graphics next to each other will result in frustration for the potential customer. My suggestion is to have a maximum of 2 codes per page on the leaflet. This way the leaflet can be broken in one axis in the hand and the selected code can be scanned effectively.
Finally
The final conclusion is hardly revealing, the most effective marketing communication is simple and clear
Here you can see all the links converted to the QR code. What do You think about it?