We recently published five tours with Visit Abu Dhabi and they’ve gotten off to a strong start, despite travel restrictions. One major reason for this is the placing of QR code signs at the starting point of each tour, allowing the listener to easily discover and download the tour. You can create your own publisher or tour QR code by clicking on the tour’s Distribution tab.
This works if the creator is the tourism office, but if everyone starts sticking their QR codes everywhere…anyway, in cities that are organised, this would need permission or would be removed by the council. What is your take on this?
I’m not sure you need to stick the QR codes “everywhere” @cobbletales. The Abu Dhabi signs are only at the tour’s starting point, and so what you need to do – in any location – is choose the starting point carefully. This is why we encourage publishers to find somewhere that is excited about being at the start of their tour that wants to be a partner with them. They can then do things like:
- Put up signs or table talkers with the QR code
- Provide WiFi and in some cases even headphones
- Sell the tour using vouchers
- Receive a postcard from Google to verify the location, which gets them a listing on Google Maps
This is something we’d like to encourage with our interface eventually.
I just walked around a dense area of my town looking for a guerrilla marketing idea. All my largest commercial competitors have most locations blanketed with large visual, changing electronic advertisements. I couldn’t find a single honest place to sandwich my QR code.
Anyone have some free ideas for a rack card or QR code placement?
Hi, I have a similar issue here in Ronda so I will be targeting local hotels, bars and restaurants asking them to place an a4 poster advert with the QR code and a few details.
Is that an option for you?
Thanks, the problem is that I’d like to post the QR code at the traditional starting point for the Freedom Trail but it begins at the foot of government property; The Massachusetts State House.
I’m not sure there’s a solution for the Massachusetts State House @walkbostonhistory! But I’ll be in Boston briefly next month and I’d be happy to walk some of the tour with you and discuss opportunities for advertising the tour physically.
This is a tricky thing to get right. In the early days of VoiceMap, when we were experimenting in Cape Town, we had somebody go door to door asking businesses along routes – who also got a mention – to put a stickers in their shop windows. Many agreed, but I really don’t think the stickers drove many downloads – and they still don’t seem to, although many are still there. (They didn’t have QR codes because these were not widely used yet.)
At one point we I put up maybe 20 boards like this along a popular green belt trail:
It was a time-consuming job and two weeks later all the boards had been removed.
I’m pointing this out because I don’t want you to think we’re complacent about all of this. It’s just a tricky problem to solve – and the solutions in Ronda and Boston are probably going to look really different.
The best solution right now is to choose the starting point carefully, as I said further up this thread, and go with somewhere that is happy to help promote the tour in exchange for the foot traffic that will come from people who discover it elsewhere.
We are going to add a feature that allows you to create shortlinks to your tours – like how voicemap.me/theatreland redirects to voicemap.me/tour/london/theatreland-tour-with-ian-mckellen. We’re also adding a way to generate QR codes for each location on your tour, but this is going to most useful for free tours, I think, because you can play the audio for any location on free tours without buying the tour first.