QR Codes, Apps, and Mobile Marketing Tools Worth Your Time

I've tried most of the mobile marketing tools that get pitched to small business owners. Some of them were genuinely useful. A few were solutions looking for a problem. Here's what I actually kept using after the novelty wore off.

QR Codes: Good in Print, Pointless Everywhere Else

QR codes had a moment, fell out of fashion, and then got a genuine second life when camera apps started scanning them natively without requiring a separate app. Today they're a real tool — but only in specific contexts. If you have physical print materials, a QR code is legitimately useful. A QR code generator costs nothing, and putting one on a product box, business card, or storefront sign gives you a traceable path from offline to online.

What doesn't work is putting a QR code on a web page where your customer is already online. If someone is reading your email on their phone, they should tap a link — not photograph their own screen. I've seen campaigns with QR codes inside text messages. That's not a strategy; it's cargo-culting the format without understanding why it works.

Apps: High Investment, Narrow Use Case

Everyone wants an app, and most businesses that build one don't have enough of a reason for it. An app makes sense when you have a function that genuinely requires persistent installation — a loyalty punch card, a store locator, a scanner for in-store pricing. For most small businesses, a well-optimized mobile site accomplishes 90% of what a native app would and requires no download.

If you do decide an app serves your customers, the decision about how to build it matters financially. A custom app development service is expensive and requires ongoing maintenance. A no-code app builder is faster and cheaper but may not handle complex features well. The honest question to ask before building anything: "Would my customers actually install this, or am I building it for me?"

Social and Mobile: Better Together Than Separate

Mobile is where social media actually lives. Most people scrolling Instagram, reading Facebook posts, or watching TikTok are doing it on their phones. This means your social marketing strategy and your mobile marketing strategy should be coordinated, not siloed. If you run a text campaign promoting a product, the organic posts going out that week should reinforce the same thing. Repetition across channels works; scattered messaging doesn't.

Photo and video contests that involve user-generated content tap into mobile naturally. Asking customers to take a photo with their phone and tag you costs you nothing and produces content that's more credible than anything you'd create internally. A simple social media scheduling tool helps you coordinate the timing across platforms without manually posting everything.

What I'd Skip

Dedicated mobile website tools have been largely superseded by responsive web design. Any modern website builder handles mobile layout automatically. Spending money on a separate ".mobi" domain to host a stripped-down version of your site is outdated thinking — maintain one responsive site rather than two separate experiences.

Mass texting tools that don't provide delivery receipts are also worth skipping regardless of price. If you're paying to send 5,000 messages and you have no way of knowing whether they were delivered, opened, or clicked, you have no information with which to improve. The analytics are the actual product — the sending is just the mechanism.