Using business cards to drive web traffic with QR codes

Using business cards to drive web traffic with QR codes

Yeah, we said it. You can use your business card to drive traffic to your website.

One of the cool things about web marketing these days is that it’s getting easier and easier to bring ‘the offline’ online. In this post, we’ll show how we used our business cards to drive web traffic from mobile phones based on our own ‘guinea pig’ campaign. To do it, we used standard print business cards, qr codes, and mixed in a little web…

For this to work, you’ll need the following things:

  • Brand Identity / Business Card Design
  • Website (ideally one with a mobile device version)
  • Clients with smartphones that can scan QR codes
  • Google Analytics account (if you don’t have one, shame on you)

The Steps

  1. Step 1:Tag URLS in Google Analytics – Tagging URLs allows you to track the source, medium and campaign in analytics that brought your visitors to your website. To tag a URL, use the Google Analytics URL Tagging Tool

    2. to set campaign, source and other data for the page to which your business card will link.

  2. Step 2: Generate the QR Codes – there are many websites out there that help you generate a QR Code, here’s a short list:

    3. Qrstuff.com
    Qrcode.kaywa.com
    Qurify.com

  3. Step 3: Business Card Design – If you already have a business card design, see if you can insert the QR Code in a way that works with the design. In most cases, the business card design will have to be redone in order to allow sufficient space for a QR code.

  4. Step 4: Be friendly (the fun part) – This one is obvious. Meeting people and having the opportunity to present a business card must happen in order to drive traffic. Granted, not everyone will have a smartphone, but hopefully they’ll at least understand the concept.

  5. Step 5 (Bonus Points): Capture leads – We’re still not sure on this one, but we know it’s possible to get contact details via mobile if they fill out a form. Personally, we think this last step would prove to be a bit difficult.

The Takeaway

The jury is still out on this one as we need a bit more time to evaluate results. At the end of the day, we all need to answer the question, ‘was it worth it?’ Overall, we didn’t spend too much time or resources on our ‘mini-campaign,’ but at least it has been interesting to test out. If anything interesting develops, we’ll be sure to post about it.

Have any other cool ideas of using QR codes? Let us know below!