Google’s newest mobile marketing campaign in Google Places –focuses on providing “QR Codes” for your local business.

Recently Google began by sending out QR Code Decals to over 190,000 local businesses across the United States. Google is determining the highest traffic and most clicked Local Place pages for the initial roll-out, following with a full release.

The main reason for the QR Code is so that local businesses can display a unique QR Code on their place page so that people can scan the image with their smart phone and find detailed information about their business. (Our QR Code in in the image to the right)

The store owner can also place the QR Code on the store front of their Brick and Mortar Store and even use the QR code in their traditional advertising such as newspaper/magazine ads, fliers and even menus.

When a prospective customer scans the printed QR Code image from their cell phone, they will immediately get reviews, comments, coupons and etc for that business. This would combine all the information that can be found in Google places from a mobile phone at the store location.

QR codes have become hugely popular in other parts of the world and considering that there are more hand held devices that now connect to the Internet then traditional desktops and laptops

Understandably there will be a huge learning curve and an adoption period with local business and mobile phone users, but it is certainly the Google’s intent to frame themselves as the leading provider in local search and mobile marketing with this new campaign and if anyone can pull it off, I’m sure it will be Google!

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