Enlighten yourself by capturing latest News and unique articles from Business and Tech world daily on your mail box. Subscribe Siliconindia Dailydose Now!!
Fremont: QR codes have become omnipresent--magazines, shops, newspapers, they are everywhere. They are similar to the bar codes (in terms of tracking information) and are helping consumers get immediate access to what is relevant. QR codes are two-dimensional, which makes them hold thousands of alpha-numeric characters, much larger than what barcodes can store.
These matrix shaped codes can help businesses in a lot of ways like on a business card, which can be scanned by a smartphone to transfer the information, encoded to text, added as a vCard, give information over the web and much more.
Startups can store details about their websites on the QR codes, and lead their customers to the relevant sections on scanning the code. This will help garner more traffic to the sites, more specifically relevant traffic. This way, they can translate their real-time consumers to online consumers too.
QR Codes are in vogue in the print also, where magazines and newspapers are using it to bridge the gap between the print and online versions. Startups can use it as a cost effective way to market their products. Since the codes take a small space but contain lot of information, startups can make a catchy heading and put their QR code to be scanned. This way they can reach out to different segments of the market and provide them with more information than can be up through the traditional advertisements. Even if it doesn't show up in the profits, the company has still managed to hook on a lot more customers.
A point to be noted is that QR codes should direct to another set of information, and have to be visibly there, else a ill-placed QR code will just make the company end up spending money, without getting any returns in form of customers or even enquiries.
Companies which are present on social networking sites can make use of the codes to reaffirm their presence on the sites by giving links to their pages also; it reduces the effort in writing a complex URL.
QR Codes can be used on business cards, on product brochures, delivery vehicles, products, event tags, restaurant menus, tickets, and many more.
Though it has multiple advantages, it can be used to new markets (people would be curious) or high income groups or tech-freaks. It cannot be used for mass marketing, as many of the people would be unaware about the usage or find it unattractive. Startups can provide instructions on how to use the code, but more importantly provide something of value to the people who scan it--scanning a QR code is a public activity, where a person may have to walk upto a store and scan the product in presence of others.
Though QR codes are gaining more thumbs up due to their capabilities galore, they may still take time to become a rage. Like in the case of barcodes, they became more user-friendly to the consumers only after smartphones started providing apps to scan the code in order to gain more info. QR codes hold ahead a lot of opportunities and only time will tell how much of use they can be to businesses, and not to forget--the people.
Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
