The following is from an article in Techspot News.
"Kraay Family Farm, a Canadian-based grower nestled near the town of Lacombe, has set the world's record for creating the largest QR code ever made. If that weren't enough, what makes this QR code even more special is its composition: farmers carved out the QR code from a gigantic corn field. The Minecraftian feat covers 7 acres or about 95,000 square feet and incidentally doubles as the largest corn maze on record."
Evidently, it only works for pilots and space aliens.
With all of the attention surrounding social media these days, it’s hard to be swayed away from the online marketing temptation and back into traditional offline marketing while using such items as calendars to sell your products. Sure, you can send out a Tweet promoting a product special or event, but that tweet is out of view for many in mere seconds. Yet, these same “old-fashioned” offline marketing tools are not only essential parts of your marketing mix, but you’ll find you will get a lot more bang for your buck when mix up your strategy cost-effectively.
Calendars Sell
One of the most overlooked marketing tools is the simple calendar and, yet, it packs a tremendous amount of punch. There are many advantages to using them to sell get in front of your customers for long periods of time.
1. People like freebies: Participate in a Mardi Gras festival and you’ll see teems of people scrounge for free beaded necklaces or pull your shopping cart up to a food sample stand at Costco and you’ll understand the power of freebies. You don’t have to give a high-priced item away in order to promote your business, and calendars are inexpensive tools that have high perceived value.
2. They last 365 days a year: Most consumers need to see an advertisement or message at least seven times before they take notice and if you’re spending your marketing dollars on ads, you’ll know the cost quickly adds up. With calendars, your advertisement, message and contact information is in front of your customer all year long. You could spend thousands of dollars on advertisements in your local newspaper to reach potential customers multiple times or you could spend a few dollars to have multiple advertisements right in front of your customer 365 days a year.
3. Calendars contain many messages and promotions: When you are able to customize your calendars to give to new or existing customers, you can add multiple product messages about features and benefits. Essentially, you have 12 spaces to add content. Add monthly coupons or even have your business card perforated on the calendar so that your contact information can be given away in referrals. Your calendar can be as functional as you make it.
4. Calendars are useful: Calendars actually serve a purpose and despite the latest technology with smart phones, iPads and such, people still find traditional calendars useful. They’re easy to use and you don’t have to plug them in at night to recharge. Have a pen handy and you can mark down appointments, birthdays and events quickly.
5. You have multiple channels to give them away: When giving away calendars or any other promotional product, there are numerous channels by which to reach customers. Of course tradeshows are the most common venue, but your sales personnel can hand them to prospective customers door-to-door. You can include them as part of your direct mail strategy or at the point-of-sale. You can even sell them for a nominal amount and donate the money to charity. (You not only would be showing your customers your commitment to good will, but advertising your products to them annually.) Promotional product distribution has many avenues that traditional advertising and even social media do not offer.
Greenway Print Solutions has a variety of calendars to choose from and at amazingly lower costs than their competition. And they can be customized to precisely fit your business goals.
Go to our Calendars Page
I’m seeing QR codes in more and more places all the time. Menus, shirts, flyers, business cards and more.
However, this has got to be the most innovative QR code application that I’ve seen so far. In fact it’s brilliant.
If you want an innovative QR code campaign, call us. We can do it. We can do anything! Call 602-482-1100.
Before the vast use of the internet to reach potential customers, direct mail was king of the marketing world. It’s true a lot of business marketing and advertising strategists are adding more online campaigns to their mix these days, making traditional offline campaigns seem outdated and ineffective. But with the wide use of the internet and it’s low to no cost to enter, is offline marketing and direct mail really dead?
Just the other day as I sat outside, I noticed the majority of my neighbors coming home only to stop by the communal mailbox to grab their snail mail. If what lands in that mailbox is so unimportant, so unexciting to receive and so ineffective as sales pieces, why do we still stop at our mailbox each day to see what’s in there?
Has Direct Mail Been Replaced?
There has been an ongoing debate about whether or not direct mail is dead. The jury is still out despite the “hyper” hype about the internet, email marketing and how much less it costs to send virtual mail. After all, it isn’t so much about the overall cost of a campaign as it is the effectiveness of the piece in relation to the cost. You could send 100 emails to customers with little or not sales or you could send a direct mail piece that yields a high return. Is your goal to get traffic and make sales or is it to flood cyberspace with free campaigns that bring in zero dollars.
Email Versus Direct Mail
Email is supposed to be the preferred way of getting your advertising message out to masses of people on your list. It is supposed to be cheaper to execute, doesn’t irritate the recipient by the ugly “junk” mail that lands in their real mailbox and is more efficient because you can measure ROI metrics within minutes of doing an email blast.
The assumption, however, is that since you sent an email campaign, it must mean that everyone on your list opens it and reads the clever words you’ve used to entice them to buy. Yet, emails can go unopened and they can go unread – possibly much easier than direct mail. At least with direct mail, the recipient has to take the piece inside his house to throw it away.
At least he’s read it.
Direct Mail Still Gets High Marks
One key factor as to why direct mail works better than email is the list. While you can rent a prospect list in the online world, there’s a 20 percent undeliverability rate from these online lists for the internet marketing crowd. Reason is there are more spam filters, corporate firewalls are set even tighter to keep out even legitimate emails and there’s a higher frequency of the recipient to mass delete emails for fear of email overload. Direct mail, on the other hand gets almost a 95 percent deliverability rate because good list managers scrub their lists on a regular basis.
Finally, with email, you only get about two seconds or less to get the attention of the receiver or it gets deleted. Direct mail gives you a good five seconds or more to catch the attention of the receiver. That’s huge!
Your marketing strategies should include a mix of online and offline campaigns in order to reach maximum effectiveness. The fact is direct mail still works and it works well.
Computer graphics can be created as either raster or vector images. Raster graphics are bitmaps and a bitmap is a grid of individual pixels that collectively compose an image. Raster graphics render images as a collection of countless tiny squares. Each square or pixel is coded in a specific hue or shade. Individually, these pixels are worthless. Together, they’re worth a thousand words.Raster graphics are best used for non-line art images; specifically digitized photographs, scanned artwork or detailed graphics. Non-line art images are best represented in raster form because these typically include subtle chromatic gradations, undefined lines and shapes, and complex composition.However, because raster images are pixel-based, they suffer a malady called “image degradation.” Just like photographic images that get blurry and imprecise when blown up, a raster image gets jagged and rough. Why? Ultimately, when you look close enough, you can begin to see the individual pixels that comprise the image. Hence, your raster-based image of Wayne Newton magnified to 1000 percent becomes bitmapped before you can isolate that ravenous glint in his eye. Although raster images can be scaled down more easily, smaller versions often appear less crisp or “softer” than the original.Unlike pixel-based raster images, vector graphics are based on mathematical formulas that define geometric primitives such as polygons, lines, curves, circles and rectangles. Because vector graphics are composed of true geometric primitives, they are best used to represent more structured images, like line art graphics with flat, uniform colors. Most created images (as opposed to natural images) meet these specifications, including logos, letterhead, and fonts.Vector Images and the Scalable TruthInherently, vector-based graphics are more malleable than raster images — thus, they are much more versatile, flexible and easy to use. The most obvious advantage of vector images over raster graphics is that vector images are quickly and perfectly scalable. There is no upper or lower limit for sizing vector images. Just as the rules of mathematics apply identically to computations involving two-digit numbers or two-hundred-digit numbers, the formulas that govern the rendering of vector images apply identically to graphics of any size.Vector Images, Graphics and RasterFurther, unlike vector graphics, vector images are not resolution-dependent. Vector images have no fixed intrinsic resolution, rather they display at the resolution capability of whatever output device (monitor, printer) is rendering them. Also, because vector graphics need not memorize the contents of millions of tiny pixels, these files tend to be considerably smaller than their raster counterparts.
If you’re like me, you’re tired of people with a bad attitude who provide bad service. I mean waiters and waitresses, support people, customer service people and on and on.At Greenway, you’ll find a great attitude. So big deal, right? Right!Behind the scenes we deal with the bad attitudes to make your life easier. Printing is an industry where getting things done is often difficult (understatement). Promises are not kept, specifications are not met, and very lazy, uncaring people will catch errors but let them slide through.The secret to our success is that we deal with those bad attitudes FOR YOU.
You read it right. There's are companies selling QR codes for gravestones. When scanned, the deceased's biography and picture comes up on the mobile device.
I think this is an awesome use of a QR code.
The Companies are qrmemorials.com and
www.eloops.com
