Real world buttons for instant digital actions
For years, many solutions have tried to connect the physical world to the digital world so that brands and customers can engage directly. Think of the hundreds of Quick Response (QR) code based systems. Think Augmented Reality (AR) like Blippar for images or Shazam for audio. Think beacons for location or NFC for contactless payments. Success has been varied - but is the problem being approached in the wrong way?
From a consumer point of view, all of these offline-to-online bridging technologies can be amazing in certain situations. They are extensions of our senses – vision, audio and touch. They are cool tech that we can use to digitally interact with the real world – but it isn’t always clear to us why we want to do that. There is too much ambiguity. ‘Find out more’ is a vague call to action that is only interesting if I have time to explore – hoping to discover something useful. But I usually know what I want and my time is precious. Don’t assume I have time to kill and that I will interact with your brand out of curiosity.
On the web if I see a button, I know what it will do; ‘like’, ‘follow’, ‘play’, ‘register’, ‘buy’. If I’m interested, I click the button and the thing I expected to happen does so immediately. No guesswork. No form-filling. No barriers. Just a shortcut to immediate action. Why can’t the real world be like that?
There are 2 main aspects at play:
- I need a clear reason to press the button. It has to promise me something that I want.
- It needs to deliver on the promise. Lightning fast with no hassles or barriers.
Actions not discovery: I know what I want and I want it now
Many of the readers of this article will have tried AR, QR etc, and will have had to take a leap of faith that something interesting will happen. QR is an old tech that often disappoints because of dead ends or generic websites (did you know that QR was invented before the popular internet and before mobile phones?). AR can be amazing, but results are often unexpected because I don’t really know what to expect – in effect I need to be feeling lucky.
Cloud powered action tags
At Quikkly we want to take the luck and hassle out of everyday things by leveraging a perfect storm of new technologies and changing consumer behaviours (mixed with a bit of common sense). Cloud systems are established, smartphones are ubiquitous, apps reign supreme, scanning and NFC are becoming normal in spite of the known limitations (especially with mobile-savvy millennials who engage 3 times as often as Gen-X’ers). The desire is there from brands and consumers to make offline-to-online crossovers work.
Quikkly harnesses these developments in the simplest possible way. Quikkly is a cloud based platform for managing digital Actions triggered from the physical world.
- Actions can be anything in any app (e.g. Enter Competition, Vote, Get Voucher, Watch, Listen, Like, Follow, Connect, Comment, Buy etc). No form filling – just Action done!
- Triggers can be Quikkly’s Action Tags (which anyone can create in seconds), existing QR codes, existing Barcodes or NFC. Anything anywhere.
The Quikkly scanner is the fastest in the world, and because the intelligence is in the Cloud, it’s easy to add a few lines of code to any app to enable scanning. Or just use the Quikkly app.
Unsurprisingly, consumers respond well to a clear call to action and the reward of the action taking place immediately. In exchange, consumers are proactively happy to give a small amount of anonymous data (eg Age, Gender, Location and Time). Nationwide activities in the UK show that engagement is 10 times that of QR – presenting a great opportunity for brands to build positive direct relationships with users (which often wouldn’t be possible unless something goes wrong and a customer complains).
We believe that by focusing on self-explanatory actions as opposed to discovery, we have created something simple, clear and immediate that works for brands and consumers. Just like online buttons.
Ken Johnstone, Founder and CCO, Quikkly
Tel: 07782 333007
Web: www.quikklytags.com
Twitter: @quikklytags
Content by The Drum Network member:
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