Being a part of the public relation sector, it is your job to keep your customers, clients, or fans engaged. You have to maintain constant communication with the audience in order to provide the latest news/updates coming from the firm you are working with.
And for this, you devise powerful strategies. But sometimes, you face challenges to keep your audience engaged. For example:
1. Problem to keep audience engaged
Though engaging your clients is your primary task—you want to adopt different strategies to keep them engaged. That is, you constantly look for ways, which are modern and tech-savvy. The purpose is to bind the audience to your story.
2. Quest to stand out
There are many PR companies in the market. And you want your one to stand out. You always have to look for new ways to connect more and more with fans. And you are looking for modern, tech-savvy, and actionable plans to engage your jaded audience.
3. Problem in measuring impact
Say you want your audience to visit a website. So you add the website link in one of your stories and hope that people visit it.
How would you actually measure the impact here? Can you actually measure how many people actually visited your website after seeing your story update?
As a PR professional, you know that this data is important to keep an eye on your conversions.
You are looking for ways to resolve such challenges. The best part is that there is a solution, which is impactful, tech-friendly, and actionable.
Keep reading.
A. QR Codes to your rescue
QR Codes are advanced barcodes that are easily scannable via a smartphone.
They are not only a modern solution to all your problems. They are also sustainable and easy to create and use. And are used in a variety of industries such as press/media, cosmetics, finance, and energy, for both operational and promotional purposes.
Plus, do not think that QR Codes are just a matrix of black and white squares. That is, boring to look at. You can add design to your QR Code and make them look fully branded.
Besides, with Dynamic QR Codes, you can record the scanning activity of your QR Code. This way, you can get information based on region, district, device, browser, and time on which the QR Code was scanned.
This analytical data is important to give you useful insights on how well your QR Code campaign performed and scope of improvement. And lead you to make better decisions next time.
So using a QR Code in public relations companies is a great idea. The great news is that big names in the public relation sector such as Weber Shandwick are already running QR Code Campaigns for their clients.
B. What challenges can QR Code solve in your industry
QR Code in public relations companies can prove to be an effective solution in the following use cases:
1. Drive traffic to website
Say you want your audience to sign up for a newsletter on your website. Here, while promoting the product, you can encode the website link in QR Code. And print it with the content you are broadcasting.
Upon scanning your audience will be redirected to your website. This eliminates the tedious process of typing the whole address manually. People simply need to scan the QR Code to visit your website. And since the process becomes easier, the traffic to your website will automatically increase.
2. Get people to follow you on social media
Social media is a great platform to reach out to your fans. And keep your fans updated about your brand. And QR Code in public relations companies will provide an impetus to your reach. How?
You can link QR Codes to social media channels, which you use to promote your product. For example, you can add Instagram, Snapchat, or Linkedin links to your QR Code.
Upon scanning, the audience will be redirected to your social media accounts. Here, they can like your post and follow your account. This way, you can encourage social engagement.
Again, this will cut the user’s time in manually searching you on the web. The more user-friendly techniques, the better the results.
3. Lead visitors to online newsroom
It’s not only journalists visiting your online newsrooms. Bloggers and consumers also visit it for more brand awareness.
So make their task easy by linking your online newsrooms to a QR Code. Upon scanning, your audience can find the content in one place—your tweets, facebook fanpage, YouTube channel, and your blog.
You can place this QR Code alongside the content that you publish/broadcast.
This will provide visitors an easy and effortless access to press release and online newsrooms.
4. Connect with audience better
As a PR professional, your motive is to keep the audience engaged. And some of the common ways to do this can be:
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Add a short quiz
In the conventional way, you publish quizzes and give your audience content where they can submit their response. And not many people take the burden of typing the the link and submitting their response.
With QR Code in public relations companies, you can make the task easier. Just one scan and your audience will be redirected to the link.
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Encode a short video
To keep your audience engaged, you give relative video links with your article. But again it is a tedious task to manually type the link and see the video. Link the QR Code with a short video or a teaser to make tasks easier.
For example, say you are a PR specialist in the entertainment industry. And you have written content on the work out routine of a particular celebrity. Here, you can use a QR Code to link it with a short work out video and print it along with the content.
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Link an audio file
In the same way as video, you can add audio files to keep your customers engaged. But when you link an audio file to a QR Code, the audience can easily listen to it upon scanning.
For example, if your content entails information on the latest song of a popular singer, you can place a QR Code linking the singer’s audio file
5. To provide additional information
You can use QR Codes where there is limited space to provide information. For example, when you write promotional content, you may want to include interesting facts about that personality. But due to limited space, you abstain from this idea.
And placing a QR Code and encoding that piece of information can help.
This way you can create full brand awareness about your product.
QR Code in public relations companies: A use case
Weber Shandwick is a globally acknowledged name in the public relation sector. The Seattle tech team of the firm started a QR Code campaign for its client in 2011.
The team prepared a dynamic QR Code scavenger hunt in order to engage their client better.
These are some ways PR companies can use QR Codes for various use cases to keep their clients engaged. Be it entertainment, technology, sports, or any other industry—QR Codes will prove an impactful solution to engage and impress your clients.
But before you get started with QR Codes, you must know the best practices. They ensure that your QR Code scans well and gets as many scans as possible.
C. QR Code Best Practices
Now you must be convinced that QR Codes are a worthwhile solution. So, as you go ahead to create them, here are some things to keep in mind to create QR Codes flawlessly.
1. Customize QR Codes
You should add design to your QR Codes to make them visually appealing. That is, you can add a logo, change the background color, or add a background image to your QR Code. And make them completely branded.
Custom-designed QR Codes act as a point-of-engagement. And attract 50-200% more scans as compared to plain black-and-white QR Codes.
And given the nature of your task as basically promotional, you should customize your QR code.
Also remember that while customizing background color, ensure that there is adequate contrast between the color you choose and the data modules. That is, if the background color is dark, so the color of data modules should be light and vice-versa.
2. Add call-to-action element
It is very important to tell your clients what they will get on scanning the QR Code. That is, add a help note such as ‘Scan for product information’.
You can also add quirky help notes such as ‘Scan if you dare’ to attract more scans. And hence, build the interest of your clients.
So, guiding them what to do will direct them to do the needful action.
3. Export in vector formats
Exporting QR Code in the right format is important.
Vector images are high resolution images and they come in SVG, EPS, PS, and PDF formats. These images do not pixelate, when they are scanned. That is, they keep their quality intact.
Plus, images in these formats can also be edited. You can easily use QR Codes in Vector formats if you want to use large surfaces for promotion such as billboards.
So, keep these practices in mind to fetch best results.
Hence, you just read the ways through which you can engage your clients better. With QR Code, now in almost every sector, there is no reason for you to not start a QR Code campaign for your firm.
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