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Should I Use QR Codes for My Marketing Campaign?

No.

I hate QR codes and rail against them whenever they come up, because no one scans QR codes. And yet we want to augment physical experiences with digital information.

Apparently my flat “no” isn’t nuanced enough for some, so here are a few thoughts I’ve developed over years of begging people not to create them:

If you must use them, point them to a URL you can control, like example.com/qr/destination and redirect that link to whatever landing page or 3rd-party site you use for the content. Then when the contract expires and you no longer want to pay for it (true story), you can redirect it to a sensible location. I would do this even if you are redirecting to a landing page you own. It gives you flexibility.
Use short URLs instead. example.com/keyword is just as likely to get typed in as a QR code is to get scanned…at least in the U.S., which leads me to:
Asia-Pacific. There is a very different set of expectations here. Smartphone use is extremely high, and popular apps like WeChat include QR code scanners. At a recent C-level event in Hong Kong, nearly everyone used their phones to either scan QR codes or to connect to Bluetooth iBeacons for more info (partially due to this functionality being a part of the popular WeChat platform).

So now my advice is “run away” except for maybe in AP, where I am only able to share 2nd-hand experience. I’d look into the bluetooth beacons first though.

Don’t Forget to Humanize Your Brand

As we become more sophisticated digital marketers, it is easy to get enamored with all the cool things we can do to push our content to new eyeballs. Even saying it that way sounds crass. Here are some examples of cool things we can do, none of which are wrong to do per se:

Put insights and research content in front of readers of top publishing sites like cnn.com and health.com, based on complex algorithms to target the right content and the right people (via content marketing tools like Outbrain)
Profile people who visit our websites—with both demographic and psychographic data—and target ads to similar groups of users who may not have heard of us yet
Send emails or show ads to people who were shopping our ecommerce sites, reminding them of the products they were looking at and didn’t purchase (retargeting)
Automate the timing of our social media posts based on when the largest number of our followers are online and likely to see our posts (via tools like SocialFlow)

I am concerned that we may focus so much energy on these really cool tactics that we might begin to sound robotic, forget to respond to (all) customer inquiries/brand mentions, and lose our human-centered approach when it comes to digital marketing, especially social media.

This article from Moz, 4 Ways to Build Trust and Humanize Your Brand, offers 4 ways to humanize our brand, and some great reminders of why we need to.

Photo credit: File:Nao robot, Jaume University.jpg – Wikimedia Commons