Are you experimenting with QR Codes?

There is no dearth for marketers to get their products/services across to businesses and consumers. In the highly connected world, we are all marketing our ideas to people and ourselves. Just when the smartphone is taking the US market by storm, marketers across the globe are investing in the 2-D dimensional bar code called the QR Codes or the Quick Response code.

It’s a Japanese technology trademark of Denso Wave and has been extensively used. With the evolution of smartphones, and digital content a part of our lives, the QR Codes is being extensively used by businesses and organizations. All you need is a bar code reader on your mobile phone which has a camera of course. Take a picture of the QR Code and get information fed into the code. The digital information here can be a link, a picture, video, website, contact details, customer feedback form, instructions, registration details, social media communities and many more!

They are placed on products, magazines, newspapers, catalogues, event venues, you name it! Be as creative and imaginative as possible when it comes to these as they are inexpensive to implement. The expense factor comes into play when marketers risk playing with these codes in a market that is still unaware about its usage and benefits both as a business and a customer.

In India, QR Codes have been initially used by Ford and Mid-Day. Ralph Lauren introduces QR Codes on its clothing and United Airlines used it as boarding passes! Sky is the limit! Businesses today are using technology like never before to reach specific and niche audiences in a short span of time making it profitable for both. The process is also known as tagging.

Advertisers and mobile services are cashing in on the experience here in India. Catch up on the Blackberry ads and look out for more such marketing around you :)

basics of marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): [searm] SEM comprises SEO and search engine advertising. Search engine advertising, in its current model, typically uses text-based advertisements that the marketer bids on based on the keywords the marketer wants to associate with the advertisement (contextual advertising). The business model is typically PPC. Goto.com pioneered the PPC model for search engine advertising. Goto.com was purchased by Overture which was ultimately purchased by Yahoo! Google's Google Adwords is the main competitor. Both these networks supply advertisements for other sites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): [searo] SEO refers to the art of designing a web-site for better listings in search engines. This includes ensuring you have the appropriate keywords in the body text of the site, in the title tag and the meta tags. Google's PageRank algorithm also rewards sites that have inbound links, and even considers the anchor text of the inbound links. Search engines also reward sites with fresh content. Regularly updated blogs therefore serve as a good SEO tool.

Viral Marketing: [vir] Is a marketing technique that takes advantage of a marketer's customers in promoting the product. This technique was pioneered by Hotmail. Hotmail launched its free web-based e-mail service with the tag line (at the bottom of each e-mail) "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail." As customers used this e-mail service, and were e-mailing others, they were effectively sending an advertisement for the product. This attracted new customers, who repeated the process. Once a critical mass of consumers were using Hotmail, a tipping point was reached, where the number of new users started to increase non-linearly. Hotmail soon became the fastest growing media company in history. Illustrations of its success include it being the leading provider of e-mail service in India, without having a physical presence in India.

Word of Mouth Marketing: [wor] Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) refers to the marketing that can be gained by actively engaging customers to share insights with each other (create buzz that goes viral). WOMM has clearly been around since the inception of marketing, but has gained more prominance with the evolution of the internet, and the ease with which customers can share their stories. Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs and News Readers are enabling WOMM. Discussion Boards have helped customers form communities. Good WOMM relies on great products that customers willingly evangelize. Marketers have been prone to try to 'effect' this by incentivizing 'fake' customers to talk about their products. This can backfire.

One can now consider marketing initiatives as three concentric circles: the inner circle representing traditional / push marketing; the middle circle representing a company's direct efforts to engage with customers with the web (hosting a blog, a discussion board etc.), WOMM; the outer circle representing the broader web, where the company's product is being discussed outside of its own web domain.

Word-of-mouth is now buzz marketing, viral marketing, community marketing, grassroots marketing, evangelist marketing, product seeding, influencer marketing, cause marketing, conversation creation, brand blogging and referral programs. That's the good stuff. What isn't so good is stealth marketing, shilling, infiltration, comment spam, defacement and falsifications

basics of marketing

B2C: [b2c] B2C refers to business-to-consumer trade, retail trade. Similarly B2B refers to business-to-business, distribution channel (value chain). C2B refers to consumer-to-business, and uses a reverse pricing model (Priceline for example). C2C refers to consumer-to-consumer, an auction-style model (eBay for example).

CPM, PPC, CPC, CPA: [cpm] CPM (Cost per 1,000), PPC (Pay per Click), CPC (Cost per Click) and CPA (Cost per Action) are types business models for calculating the charge for pages (advertisements) being served. CPM is a holdover from traditional media advertising, and does not take advantage of the Hypertext nature of the medium. It charges purely on the number of times the advertisement is served. It does account for branding effects that are not accounted for in the other models. PPC and CPC refer to a cost (payment) associated with each click on the advertisement to the target page. CPA is a cost associated with each lead created from a click on the advertisement (CPL), or each sale (CPS). Both PPC / CPC and CPA are much more accountable means of developing a price for the advertisement, and either are also used for affiliate programs and text advertisements on search engines. They become a variable cost in terms of generating the number of people exposed to the target page (this number is based on the CTR from the host vehicle), the number of leads generated (CPL) or the number of sales (CPS). The downside for the vehicles is they do not control the design of the banner (poor design = low click-through etc.) and they are not rewarded for the branding effect of the banner. Click fraud is also an increasing problem.

CTR: [ctr] CTR (Click-Through Rate) is the number of times an advertisement is clicked upon over the number of times the advertisement is served. Typical click-through rates have been declining (a click through rate of 1% would be very high). While click through rates help determine the effectiveness of the online advertisement, advertisements also contain a branding impact. The click-through rate will determine the cost of an advertising campaign that was based on PPC / CPC and CPA.

Hits: [hit] Hits refer to the number of files served when users access a web page. Total hits for a page will therefore equal the number of times the page is accessed X the number of files included on a page. Thus a page that includes one graphic file will serve two files when it is accessed; the html file of the page, and the image file the page calls. This is a metric that is often misused when media quote the activity a web page receives. (To double the number of hits, simply double the number of files the page includes.) Better metrics, for web analytics, include impressions and page views.

RSS: [rss] RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a means of distributing dynamic content (content syndication), using the XML format, to subscribers of that content. In order for a user to subscribe, he / she will need to sign up for a news reader aggregator (Bloglines etc.) RSS has become a popular technology for bloggers and podcasters to distribute their content, essentially 'pushing' content out to subscribers of the content rather than relying on readers to visit the site to determine if there is new content. RSS is also useful for news organizations which publish content as a matter of their business model (and update regularly). Examples include CNN and India Times. It would be useful for companies that publish news releases of newsletters for subscribers in e-mail form. While RSS does require a reader to subscribe to a news aggregator before accessing content (this may soon be bundled with the web browser which will surely impact its rate of adoption) it avoids the problem plaguing e-mail distribution of content: SPAM.