This video demonstrates how to add QR codes to your Creative Studio print marketing designs.

Video Transcription

Harley:

Hello and welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group, where Harry Potter is not a Christmas movie. It's not. I know you want it to be, it's not a Christmas movie, it features a Christmas scene but it is not a Christmas movie. So today we are going to take a look at Creative Studio and specifically did you know that you can add a QR code to a designing creative studio? Well you can and I'm going to show you how to do it.

Harley:

So let's take a look at Creative Studio overall, we're going to run over here to marketing and then down and click on Creative Studio. Now it may or may not be available to you as it can be turned on and off on a per company basis, or it may just not be available in this location. So remember that you can always go up here to the Quick Actions bar and you can type Creative Studio up here as well. And you can see that it comes up as one of the options there, which actually both of these options will take you to the same page.

Harley:

So we'll clear that out. Now from here what you'll typically do is just choose a design you like, so we'll grab one here, and that will open us up into the Creative Studio interface. We have a message here that it tried to populate some text, that it didn't fit properly, so we can click on this to highlight the text that it didn't like and make changes to that. You can see that there was more of a description here than it could handle. So we can modify that. However, we don't need to do that here so we're going to close this out and we're going to head back over to page one. This just happens to be a two page design for a two page flyer.

Harley:

But typically what you'll do is you'll load this up and you'll go over here to listings and you will just select the listing that you would like to populate this template with and click apply data. And you can see it swaps out the picture, it changes out all of the information, the address, prices, beds, bath, any information that's related to the listing on this template will automatically be pulled from the listing that you selected or that you to apply data for. So typically that's all you'll do, you'll load up the template, you'll apply the data for the listing you'd like, you can give it a once over, make sure that everything's in the right spot, make any changes that you would like. And we can even go over here, this one happens to have a page two like I said so we can check our page two, make sure all that looks good as well.

Harley:

And then as long as everything does we'll go up here and click on download to download our flyer, or we can share and send it and either email it out or share it to social media, things like that. Or even send it off to a third party printer potentially if that is turned on for your company as well. So generally that is how you would use Creative Studio and that's all you'd need to do here.

Harley:

However you can now add QR codes to your designs as well. So to do that I'm going to go over here and click on right now it's set to stock images but really it's this option, has several different options underneath it. So elements would allow me to select from different shapes that I can pull into my design and change the colors of, just kind of personalize the design further. Typically you'll only use those features if you are creating a new flyer from scratch, but that is where that information is. I can also grab stock images for essentially the same reason. I can change the background of a whole page for that same reason, but mostly those are just things that you'll use when building out your own template.

Harley:

But something you can use all the time is we have an option here for QR code. So if I click on that it brings up our QR code interface. So first I'm going to select my type. So if I select website you can see it populates with my website automatically just to make my life a little easier. Telephone is about the same, SMS, and you can see it puts this little code in here ahead that will help the user's device do what you want it to when they scan your QR code. So this is telling you you want this QR code to initiate a text message, and telephone is initiating a call basically.

Harley:

Or we can do custom. Basically all a QR code is is a code that represents some amount of text. And that text can be a website address, it can be a phone number, or it can be just a message if you want it to be. So if you set this to custom you can make this message whatever you want. There we go. So when you type out a message if you have a custom message here when they scan your QR code just instead of being a link to a website or a link to a phone number to make a call or a text message it will just show this message. So just know that you do have that option. But typically you'll want to set this up to be something like your website. And you may even go as far as making this the URL of specifically the listing detail page for this listing. That way if somebody does scan the QR code on this flyer it takes them straight there.

Harley:

So once you have this set up with the content you'd like I'm just going to click insert and you can see there's my QR code. Now from here I can move it around on my design, I can resize it just like any other image, put it right here in the middle, there we go. And then when I print this out or when I share it with anyone if they do scan the QR code in this design with their phone it will come up. And in this case it will be a link to my website. So really it's as simple as that.

Harley:

The only other advice to add when it comes to adding a QR code to these designs is make sure that the whole QR code is exposed wherever it is that you put it. It will still work if you resize it, so if I want to make it a little smaller, if you make it too small phones may not be able to read it so you don't want to get too overboard with how much you shrink it down, but make it a reasonable size and make sure that the entire thing is exposed.

Harley:

So if we have it up here in the corner, these are actually bleed lines, these dotted lines here, so if you did send this to a third party printer there's no guarantee that what is outside of these lines won't get cut off. And that's where you want to be particularly careful when it comes to these QR codes. If I set it up here like this and then I send this off and a third party prints it out it may actually cut off part of the QR code, and if any part of this QR code is cut off it just won't work. So you always want to make sure to place it safely within your bleed lines. Some even call them safety lines, which is fitting right? So once you have your QR code in place you're all set to go. So at that point you can download this as a flyer or you can share it or send it out just like you would have even if you had not added the QR code. So that's all there is to it.

Harley:

Now there are a multitude of other features available within Creative Studio but in the nature of taking this very big thing and breaking it down into some more bite sized pieces I'll just leave you with QR codes for today. So as always if you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call and we can help you out with this or whatever else you need. And have a wonderful week and I will see you again next week. Thanks a lot.