How To Use Branded Short Links To Drive Traffic To Your Landing Pages

When you have a specific marketing goal or a campaign to deploy, a landing page can be an awesome tool. Landing pages deliver specific, relevant information to page visitors and encourage them to take the next step toward conversion. Landing pages provide rich analytics for marketers. Read on to learn how the right short link strategy can drive even more (and better) traffic to your landing pages.

The basics of landing pages

What is a landing page?

MailChimp, a popular provider of email campaigns and landing pages, defines landing pages as tools that “help you build customer loyalty and increase profits by focusing on a specific short-term goal.” Landing pages are self-contained websites created by businesses specifically to promote a single call to action (CTA). The CTA can be anything from “Buy Now” to “Sign Up” to “Enter To Win”.

So, why landing pages?

While fully-featured brand websites help maintain a steady, prominent internet presence and provide a place for consumers to browse products or services, they are not built to quickly convert users clicking through from search, social media, and display ads with specific calls-to-actions (CTAs). Landing pages enable marketers to quickly create, deploy, and measure specific marketing campaigns.

The online clothing retailer, SheIn, uses a branded short link in their Instagram bio that takes visitors to an Instagram audience-focused landing page:

SheIn’s Instagram landing page features a curated selection of products relevant to their audience, and links to purchase recently-featured items. The page also offers a single CTA: “Sign up to receive trending news”

This accomplishes two things:

1. A custom landing page immediately serves up the relevant content the visitor is looking for (e.g. the link to purchase the dress they just saw in their feed).
2. The clear CTA on the landing page asks the user to take action. In this case, buy the dress you loved on Instagram, or sign up to see more great outfits from SheIn.

The landing page builder Unbounce notes that “Having fewer links on your landing page has been proven to increase conversion rates with paid advertising, as there are fewer available distractions.”

Compare this to SheIn’s official US website:

For a visitor seeking to buy a dress they saw in an Instagram post, SheIn’s store page might be overwhelming or distracting. With multiple offers and categories to explore, the next step toward conversion isn’t always obvious for a specific visitor.

This is why landing pages work – they allow you to deliver the most relevant content and CTA to specific visitors based on the specific marketing messages to which they are responding.

Use branded short links to drive traffic to your landing page

How to create a great landing page link

The best kind of landing page link is the kind that people click. If you can efficiently get users to your landing page, that link has done its job. Here are six attributes that can make links great:

Short: The link shouldn’t take up a lot of space. Not only does it look cleaner and less intimidating, but it also fits better into certain places, such as your Twitter post, your Instagram bio, on a mobile device, or even printed on a billboard or flyer. Compare the two links below:

https://conversionsciences.com/blog/ab-testing-guide/

becomes

https://popular.guide/testing

Memorable: The best kind of link is the kind you can say out loud (if you need to). What if you were promoting a link in a radio or TV ad? Ideally, someone who hears or reads the link could recall it long enough to speak it to a smart speaker device, when clicking isn’t an option.

Descriptive: The link should accurately tell a user where they’re going when they click. Using real words in your links gives visitors confidence. Avoid random, meaningless characters in your links.

Branded: Reinforce your brand and messages with a branded short link. Here’s an example of Patagonia using a branded short link to a) showcase their brand and b) the specific landing page for mountain bike gear:

https://www.patagonia.com/mountain-biking.html?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=MTB

becomes

https://pat.ag/mtb

Enticing: Short links can act as their own CTA, telling a reader what to do without any other supporting text. For example, this long link can become an enticing CTA:

https://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

becomes

https://visit.social/blog-generator

Trackable: By using short links, you are able to collect data on the channels and links that are most effective. This data can help verify and support other campaign data sources, as well as give you the ability to integrate with Google Analytics.

Click here to learn more about the types of links users are more likely to click.

Use different names for your links

There are many different kinds of domains you can use to make meaningful branded short links.

Get creative by using a suite of domain names with your brand and different top-level domains specific to offers and promotions, such as .holiday, .events, .shopping, .sale, .promotions, .news, .coupons, .deliver, .deals, and .bargains.

By using multiple names for different campaign links, marketers are able to maximize the strategic “last inch” of marketing and make their link meaningful, memorable, and highly clickable.

Use one master dynamic link

Dynamic links, made in BL.INK, allow you to route where a visitor lands based on specific parameters. Imagine a global store’s website that automatically routes you to your country-specific site, without you, the visitor, having to specify your language or country. It’s a better user experience. With dynamic links, you can route traffic by location, device, (iOS vs. Android, mobile vs. desktop), time of day, date, and more.

With one master dynamic link for a broad marketing campaign, you can lead your audience to separate, appropriate landing pages without having to change the link or segment ad targeting. Since landing pages are tailored to the audience, a dynamic link helps ensure that a visitor is sent where they will have the best experience, and hopefully lead to a conversion.

Use several links for one landing page

Opposite to the approach above, you can also use many different links to direct traffic to one landing page. The benefit with this option is that you can apply tags and other tracking parameters to each short link. This allows you to compare marketing channel performance by easily spotting which channel sends the most traffic.

Plus, you’ll only have to manage one landing page for all your incoming potential consumers. This gives you the freedom to customize URLs to best suit each platform. You could have different short links for your Instagram bio, Facebook posts, and printed promotional materials that are relevant to each audience and that help you see which audience is clicking.

Use one link, but update the link destination with each campaign

Use one link that you can update with each campaign or launch. This strategy cuts down on admin work (updating every link in email signatures, social media profiles, and printed materials) and allows you to capitalize on the click traffic you’re already generating. If you have a link to your current promotions in all your social media profiles, simply change the destination of that link in BL.INK when you launch a new campaign. This helps drive traffic to the most relevant destination while leveraging links that are already getting clicks.

Where to put your landing page links

Social Media Profiles: Every social media channel has a space for links in your main profile. On channels such as Facebook and Twitter, you can put clickable links to your landing pages in the posts themselves.

Car Wraps: Printing short, memorable landing page links on the sides of vans, trucks, and trailers give potential customers an easy-to-remember destination to learn more about a service or product when they get back online.

Via CarWrapsNYC

Printed Material: Landing page links also work for printed materials. They’re especially useful on postcards, flyers, brochures, and business cards. Plus, by using unique tags for printed links, you can track the effectiveness of different printed materials, something that isn’t always an easy task!

Paid Advertising: Paid search and paid social campaigns that lead to your landing page can reach consumers who are less likely to come across your website or social media presence organically. A link with meaningful words can improve the click-through rate (CTR) on ads, as 75% of users prefer them over long links or short links with random characters.

Use BL.INK to Maximize the Value of your Landing Page Links

While having a clean, sleek landing page helps you share your latest products and promotions with your audience, it’s important to make sure users are enticed to actually click through with effective links. Maximize your click potential and link smarter with BL.INK.

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