Mobile Marketing: Why It Makes Sense to Use Near-Field Communication and QR Codes

After QR codes, near-field communication is all the rage now with more and more high profile companies getting into the action. And most of the time, when people talk about NFC, they almost always think about wireless payments.

But have you ever thought about mobile marketing as well? If you have mobile strategies into your marketing mix, you can use NFC technology to help give it a boost. If you are not convinced, check out the latest report from ABI Research that shows that mobile marketing applications of NFC will net $300 million by 2016.

This figure includes smartphone sales, smart posters and check-in devices.

How Do You Use NFC to Market Your Products?

Near-field communication works like QR codes in that they make it easier for you to present information to your customers.  But instead of scanning a QR code, you customers would simply wave their NFC-enabled phones in front of tags, which are called smart tags or posters.

Doing so, they are taken to the information you encode behind the tags. You could show them a mobile website, a YouTube video, and just about anything you would want them to see.

Yes, it really is very similar to what you have been doing with QR codes.

Making NFC Work with QR Codes

The question is, why not just stick to QR codes?

As marketers, we work hard to come up with innovative content for our customers.   Would you alienate a segment of your customers who use NFC exclusively?  NFC is currently heavily promoted by big names in the tech and mobile industry, so there is a chance that some people would hear about them and be interested to use them.

NFC has already been used alongside QR codes before. There is really no reason to choose one over the other. Think of it as having two doors leading to your store. It certainly does not hurt making your customers feel twice as welcome!