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| By Michael Russer from Realtor.org
In case you haven´t noticed, there´s a crop of young, willing, and able future buyers who seem to have their heads buried in their smartphones. Their phone is their world, but they prefer texting to talking. How can you get their interest – and their business?
QR (Quick Response) codes were invented in Japan by a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corp. to help identify car parts. Once people recognized their flexibility of encoding links to the Web, they took off in Japan and other East Asian countries. (This is perhaps unsurprising, as mobile Web access is much more common in that part of the world than in the United States.) In fact, you will find QR codes plastered on billboards, signs, storefronts, and just about any place you look in all the major Japanese cities.
Think of the QR code as a two-dimensional barcode that can contain many different kinds of information and present that information in many different ways. QR codes can be read instantly from any number of free smartphone apps. The opportunities for real estate marketing are nearly endless since one of the main uses of QR Codes is to embed URLs that when scanned will take the phone user to wherever the URL was pointing (i.e. your Web site, listing detail information, etc.) They effectively turn anything they are printed on into an active and track-able hyperlink.
You can start your search for free QR code reader apps for your smartphone (by smartphone type) at these places:
There really are only two issues to consider when incorporating QR codes into your marketing:
If you do a Google search on “QR code generators,” you´ll find dozens of sites that will create them for you at no cost. My favorite is a site called BeeTagg QR Generator, which allows you to create any number of QR codes in different formats for free.
When you first land on this page, you can enter the URL of the page you want your code to go to and choose the type of code it generates. (Make sure you have the QR Code icon selected and uncheck “Optimize size.”) Then just hit the “Go” button, and you will instantly see your code with download options like this:
Now, this next part is very important. Of the six different download options shown, there are only two you will typically work with. Select Gif if you plan on placing the code on a Web page or e-mail, and Eps if you plan on using it in print.
GIF images are the smallest file sizes for this kind of image and are ideal for placement in Web pages. However, they are not good for print or other media because they don´t scale well. That is, they get blurry or pixelated if you try to blow them up beyond their original size and will become unreadable by the smartphone apps. The EPS file format is ideal for print media because it can scale to any size (including 16-foot billboards) without any loss of fidelity.
In addition to placing a page-specific QR code on every page of your Web site, you can incorporate them into your marketing in many innovative ways. Here are just some ideas that came out of a recent brainstorming exercise for QR code use:
Now before you go all-out with QR codes and start plastering them on every available surface (digital or otherwise), here are some best practices that will help you get the most out of these little boxes:
At this point, you might be thinking, “Is this thing really necessary for my business?” If you want to be a leader in your market and really catch the attention and business of up-and-coming buyers, then yes, it is.
Implementing QR codes is not about being a geek. It´s about staying up on things that matter to your customers and serving them in the way they expect. That´s more than a good technology or marketing strategy – it´s good business.
GEEK TIP: Here´s a quick shortcut you can use to place a QR code on any page of your Web site (with the code pointing to that page) just by including the following Javascript in your HTML code where you want the QR code to show up on the page:
script id=”qr_code” src=”http://s3.amazonaws.com/dakno-qr/qr.js”; type=”text/javascript/script
The resulting QR code will point to the page it´s on. Unless you are comfortable working with HTML code, it´s probably better to give this to your Web designer to implement.
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Zack Childress is a 10 year real estate investing veteran. He invests in 7 different markets simultaneously and doesn’t need to travel all the time to these 7 markets because he invests virtually. He’s coined a system where he doesn’t put any cash or credit down for his deals and he can buy and sell the property in just 7 days. You can get more details about this no money down strategy here. http://www.co-wholesaling.com