How’s it hanging

We’re all familiar with posters. We used to tear these out of magazines plastering our walls with our favourite musician or actor (okay, I’m old as I don’t think today’s youth does this anymore). Nowadays posters are mainly used to announce events or dance festivals.

Posters are a great tool to use in (shop) windows as they’re easy to hang up and range in different sizes from A4 to A0, depending on your available space and needs. It’s a quick way to inform your reader about upcoming promotions or events. And you can use them playfully giving your reader an assignment, like scanning the QR code to recover the actual message.

Why was a QR Code used?

melondust rented a space in the centre of Volendam and was given the opportunity to hang a poster in the window to promote her business to passers-by. Only, how do get a message across to people walking by who often don’t have the time to stop and read anything? Nowadays nearly everyone walks around with their phone in their hand, so snapping a picture of a poster is easy. And when you take a photo of a QR code, you immediately get a link to a website on your screen. What easier way to generate traffic to your website?

Is a QR code measurable?

Yes, you can measure a QR code when the link is directed to a dedicated webpage. Google Analytics will then tell you how many people visited that page. Only with this poster I used the homepage instead of a dedicated page, resulting in not being able to monitor traffic. Meaning I can’t see how many people came to my website using the poster. But that wasn’t the point. I wanted to hang something in the window that would tickle people’s curiosity and get them to take a photo. As the position of the poster was too heigh, having any text on it wouldn’t work. Besides people nowadays tend not to stop and read anything. My goal was to get them to scan the QR code resulting in me popping up in their phones for them to view the page at a later stage.

So, when you’re thinking of using posters within your company, it’s good to also think about the goal of the poster. If you want to sell tickets or just inform people about an upcoming event, mention this on the poster. And though QR codes are a bit old school, they’re making a comeback proving to be quite useful on printed materials.