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Add QR Codes to all of your marketing. When we design any of your projects we will generate a QR-Code that will either have your contact info, website link, text advertisement, or location.

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Yes QR Codes are great for our real estate industry.  Everyone is noticing and more and more are trying to obtain their phone specific applications to read them.  Real Estate agents are very proactive in utilizing their mobile applications for their business, their cards, their inventory etc.

Below is a great resource for obtaining them, generating them and how to utilize them.

Everyone is familiar with bar codes. They make retrieving information easy with a simple scan, helping businesses run smoothly and efficiently.

Wouldn’t it be great if this technology could be used to market your real estate business and connect with your clients? Well, now you can using QR Codes!

What Are QR Codes?
QR Codes are the latest and greatest emergence in mobile technologies, allowing you to transfer and link to information with a simple click of a cell phone camera.

So what exactly are QR codes? QR-Codes are two dimensional barcodes, designed to have their contents decoded at a high speed. To put it simpler – think of them as a bar code that works like an online link.

The acronym QR is derived from the term Quick Response and that is just what these are!

How Do they Work?
Most mobile phones with a digital camera will work. The camera, along with decoding software, captures a picture of the QR Code and translates the information stored on that particular code.

This information can be a link to a website, contact information, MP3 file, a coupon, and much more.

Get Your Own QR Codes!
To get a list of decoding software/applications just do a quick Google Search for QR Code Generator and you’ll find a plethora of sites and widgets just waiting to create your QR Code. Here is a QR Code generator that we tried. You decide what type of information you want to store in your QR Code (Link, Contact information, Calendar Event, etc.), and then just add the information, click generate and there is your code!  You can save the image and imprint it anywhere you want!

Using QR Codes to Benefit to Your Business…
Imagine a potential customer walking past your window and noticing the black and white image that resembles something out of the magic eye book.

They take a picture of it with their cell phone and are instantly connected to your website, or they can find your contact information automatically stored in their phone.

QR codes are simple to generate and can be imprinted on countless objects and marketing materials such as T-shirts, business cards, flyers, postcards, signs banners, and much much more.

ALERT, INNOVATIVE IDEA!!
If your office puts flyers in a store front window, make sure your flyers have a QR Code for that listing which will of course lead the potential buyer to the listing on your website!

They may not want to go in to the office and chat, but you don’t want them to anyway… you want them to visit the website for more information and call YOU!

It maybe too soon to tell how mainstream these QR Codes will become, but they are so simple to use why not stay ahead of the curve!

Ask a Design Consultant on some uses for QR-Codes. Free set of business cards when we design them.

Google Places QR Code Google is making some big moves in local advertising lately.

A couple weeks back the search giant added a mobile couponing option to its Google Local Business Center listing. This means that when a mobile web search lands you on a business’s “Place Page,” you can get a coupon that is redeemable straight from your phone (no need for printing).

Now, Google has launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps.

They’re calling these businesses the “Favorite Places on Google” and you’ll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places in 20 of the largest U.S. cities at google.com/favoriteplaces.

Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR code that you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business’s Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you’ll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.

So just as businesses display a Zagat or Michelin sticker as a badge of honor, the Google sticker could come to be a more organic quality indicator as well as a link to a lot more information about a place. Creating links to Google in the real world is something they’ve also attempted with their Google Maps markers. The stickers seems a lot less obtrusive.

Citysearch pilot-tested a similar program in San Francisco back in March of 2008. In that trial, 500 businesses reviewed by Citysearch placed printed Scanbuy’s brand of bar codes in their windows. Scanning the photo with Scanbuy’s software would send you to the business’ corresponding Citysearch page where you can read reviews and other information.

Around the same time, QVC and Case Western University did some trials in which students could scan QR codes on outdoor print signage. These codes let users get campus bus arrival times, order magazines, enter sweepstakes and get text alerts from USA Today, among other applications.

As Ad Age reported, Google also dabbled with QR codes in newspapers last year: “Google has already seen results from a recent test campaign conducted in three markets with jewelry retailer Blue Nile. Each ad contained a QR code and a response tag, and was tested against the same ads without the tags. The code-enhanced ads ended up driving 6.5 times more revenue than the ads without.”

Despite these tests, QR codes have decidedly not caught on so far in the U.S. While a more concerted effort by Google could change this, they need to try harder than they did with newspapers. One good thing is you can use any QR reader to decipher their codes.

They are also giving away 40,000 Quickmark QR Code Reader apps for the iPhone, which normally cost $1.99 apiece, to promote it.

John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local, told Techcrunch that Google Maps on mobile phones will also start including businesses as points of interest. (You may have started to see this already and wondered why certain business were featured.) Google calls these “smart maps,” and they are based on a business’s PlaceRank, which tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.

Google has nothing to lose by trying this, and they know that both local and mobile are their future. Typing into a little search box is annoying on a mobile phone, and new “mobile paths” like shortcodes, QR codes and image recognition may soon replace text-entry search altogether. By helping businesses add these new calls-to-action that lead to Google’s Place Pages — as well as beef up their mobile presences with mobile coupons — they are attempting to own this emerging space.

Overall, this is good news for the mobile industry — Google can help push adoption of these technologies — but there is still the barrier of cost. QR decoding requires data, which requires money. Will people be willing to pay money (albeit tiny amounts) to read what is ostensibly an ad? Or will Place Pages provide enough value (through information, maps, reviews and now coupons) that people won’t even think twice about it?

One of the stories that I read recently in a website caught my attention. It’s about using QR codes (Quick Response codes) in mobile advertising. Even I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time and the person who wrote that story almost stole the words from my mouth.

For those of you who don’t know – unlike other ordinary codes, the contents of a QR code can be scanned and decoded at a very high speed.

QR codes are very popular in countries like Japan and Korea but not so in the U.S. or even in Europe for that matter. In Japan and Korea, these QR codes in advertisements can be scanned and decoded by mobile phones. So, when you see an ad, you can simply scan the code with your mobile phone and it will take you to a hyperlink or WAP sites where you can get a wealth of information about the product/service mentioned in the ad.

More than 40% of mobile users in Japan use their mobile phones to scan QR codes in adverts regularly. In fact, a lot of mobile phones in Japan come preloaded with the application required to scan such codes. If not, the app can be downloaded from the internet without much trouble.

This has helped mobile advertisers a lot in Japan and Korea. Mobile users find it easier to scan codes to get information rather than having to send a text message or make a call. So, this minimizes effort on mobile users’ part and makes the job of the mobile advertiser easier than ever.

It would be great if U.S. and Europe can catch up with this technology, as it can be a tremendous opportunity for advertisers to reach out to end users without much trouble. I think this idea will get a great response from mobile users as well, as all they need to do is, take a snap of the ad with their mobile phone and get all the information they want. What do you think?

QR Codes are a important advertising piece. They should be on all marketing materials! Creative Caldron will create your QR Code for free when we design for!

Tags: advertisements, Europe, hyperlink, Japan, Korea, Mobile advertisers, mobile advertising, mobile phones, mobile users, QR codes, Quick Response codes, text message, U.S., WAP

Technorati Tags: advertisements, Europe, hyperlink, Japan, Korea, Mobile advertisers, mobile advertising, mobile phones, mobile users, QR codes, Quick Response codes, text message, U.S., WAP