5 important tips for using QR codes at your community hospital

QR Codes—or quick response codes—bridge your hospital's traditional advertising with ease into web rich content. Follow these five tips to best use QR Codes for your community hospital's marketing campaign.

• Go mobile: Get your mobile site ready for all the attention it will be getting! Or at least get popular sections of your web site ready to direct your audience to.
• Motivate: Build responses by letting your audience know what's in it for them. Scanning a code does require a few extra steps, so adding value to your campaign will make a huge difference.
• Know your audience: Your new QR Code audience is more tech-savvy than average. When making your first QR Code campaign, don't hide the QR Code, make the code icon the centerpiece of the campaign. But for other audiences just learning about QR Codes, the QR Code might be included next to the contact information along with a simple explanation of how to scan the code. Finally, with 81 percent of doctors owning a smartphone, your next campaign targeting physicians can breathe new life!
• Test: Work with a web specialist to ensure that the page your QR Code directs recipients to is displayed correctly on commonly-used platforms (Blackberry, iPhone, Android, etc.).
• Be savvy: QR Codes are new territory and an exciting innovation to enhance print communication. Encourage activity across different media, consider multiple types of information that you can deliver and think of unique applications to apply QR Codes to.

"That's GREAT!" blog post offers 101 Uses for QR codes, including use on business cards, books and other published literature, billboards and even clothing. Look to other campaigns for inspiration to spice up your community hospital's campaign.

Stacy Carter is partner and creative director at ABZ Design Group. You can read the ABZ Design Group blog here.