If you stop to think about it, branded links should be a marketing no-brainer. Your brand is in the spotlight AND you get additional analytics — what’s not to love about that? Unfortunately, branded links are often overlooked as a meaningful, memorable way to convey both valuable content and brand impressions.
Read on to learn how to branded links can help you improve your content strategy results.
Branded links are exactly what they sound like — short domain names or URLs you use to share content or to connect with target audiences. Anyone can register a branded short link easily on BL.INK here.
But not all branded links are equal. Research shows users are far more likely to click on branded links that contain real words and/or include a brand’s name.
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as, “creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
A content marketing strategy should
As you construct your own content strategy, you should also ask yourself:
Producing content is content marketing, but the central themes, format, and distribution of content are where content strategy comes in.
Short links can help content marketers improve their content marketing performance by:
So, how do you do start using short links in your content marketing strategy?
With ever-shrinking attention spans, marketers have less time to make an impression. When every pixel has a purpose, your links become high-value real estate. Whether a link appears in social posts, news pieces, podcasts, videos, or on printed materials, simply swapping out a long link for a short, branded link can drive your message home and entice people to click.
By using a suite of branded domains, you can make links that contain your brand and your message in-line with your content strategy.
For example, mybrand.news, mybrand.social, mybrand.support, and mybrand.video all convey useful information to the audience about what content lies at the other end of the link; these short links also help a busy content marketer unite various forms of content under central themes.
When a content marketer creates a piece of content and distributes it across multiple channels, you can bet that they will soon be asked, “How did that content perform? Is it working?” followed by, “What should we do next?”
Answering these questions isn’t always a straightforward process. Information about content performance lives in multiple places. Content marketers might have to hunt for engagement stats on several different social posts, look at web analytics data, and perhaps export data from advertising platforms – all to cobble together an assessment of what happened, once a single piece of content was released into the wild.
Enter tags. When you tag your links with the content category or campaign, you can filter and quickly evaluate performance. Whether looking at a single piece of content, or all of the content in a category, your BL.INK dashboard will show you what’s working, and what’s not. This gives the content marketer agility to optimize ongoing campaigns and improve results.
When you use short links for every piece of content produced, you can spot macro-trends and use them to your advantage. For example, you might see that certain times of day have the most click activity, regardless of what time a post was published or an email was sent. You may notice that Q&A blogs get more clicks from Facebook than other channels. You may observe that one content category just isn’t “clicking” with your audience. All of these insights can influence your marketing strategy and tactics and help you achieve greater results. More bang for your content marketing buck? Yes, please!
Ready to step up your content marketing strategy?