Links play a crucial role in your digital marketing campaigns, directing your audience from your marketing assets to your website. However, long, complex links are difficult to remember and frustrating to type, preventing your audience from moving through the sales funnel.
Short links solve this problem by condensing long URLs into shorter, more convenient alternatives. You can even create branded short links for more cohesion and professionalism in your marketing strategy. Here’s how to use short links to streamline your marketing strategy and direct more traffic to your site.
What are short links?
Wondering how to shorten a URL? Use a URL shortener, which takes your site’s existing URL and makes it more concise. This short URL redirects to your target URL.
You can also customize a shortened URL to create a branded link that includes your organization’s branded domain name or other recognizable identifiers. Branded links are a small detail that can really boost the appeal of your digital marketing campaign.
Short links create a streamlined browsing experience for your audience. They fit neatly into fields with character limits, such as social media profiles and posts, giving you more opportunities to share your links. Short links are also much easier to remember and type than long links, in case your audience needs to enter the link manually.
Short links can also result in tangible marketing growth and tend to generate more clicks than longer alternatives. By boosting your click-through rate, shortened links could potentially increase your digital engagement and conversions as well.
Effective ways to use shortened links in digital marketing campaigns
You can use URL shorteners to create custom links for your entire marketing campaign. Here’s how to use shortened links throughout your marketing assets.
Email marketing
You likely already use email to communicate with both existing and prospective customers. As of 2024, 73% of B2B content marketers use email marketing to reach their audience.
To turn email opens into sales, you’ll need an easy way for recipients to get from your email to your site. Incorporating short links in your call to action is a very effective way to drive traffic to the product, service, or promotion featured in your message.
You can also include short links in your email signature. This ensures that there’s always a link to your site in every message. Shortened links are particularly helpful if you’re sending plain-text emails without graphics. Adding a shortened link rather than a full URL makes your message easier to read. A shorter URL is also easier to open on a mobile device than the full destination URL.
Paid advertising
When advertising online, you won’t have much space to work with. Both display and PPC ads have strict character limits, so you’ll need to be concise with your copy. Shortened links make it easy to fit your web address into your ad without compromising space.
Using shortened links also allows for more accurate conversion tracking. Bitly’s URL shortening service has analytics features that allow you to monitor your link traffic. This will help you determine which ads are most effective and drive the most conversions.
You can also use your link traffic data to support ad retargeting efforts. When someone clicks on your ad but doesn’t make a purchase, retargeting ensures that the same ad reappears for them. Compared to other ad placement strategies, retargeting results in the largest brand search increase at 1,046%.
Social media
Social media is one of the most effective places to use shortened custom URLs. There are ways to use short links on all of the world’s most popular social media platforms. These include:
- YouTube: On YouTube, you can use short links in video descriptions, comments, channel descriptions, and in videos themselves.
- LinkedIn: Shortened links fit perfectly into LinkedIn posts and comments.
- TikTok: Adding shortened links to your TikTok video descriptions is a great way to add more context to your posts. Shortened links also fit perfectly into TikTok bios, which have very limited space.
- X (formerly Twitter): X posts are some of the most character-restrictive social media posts you can make. You’ll need to use the shortened version of your URLs to stay within the 280-character limit.
- Instagram: You can use shortened links on Instagram the same way you would on TikTok by adding them to your post descriptions and profile. You can also use a link-in-bio page for link management. This is a page that displays relevant links for each of your posts in one place.
- Pinterest: On Pinterest, you can use short links in your bio, on boards, and in pin descriptions.
- Facebook: You can use shortened links almost anywhere on Facebook, whether that’s in your profile, timeline posts, event posts, or Marketplace listings.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of working with third-party media outlets to promote your products and services. These media outlets will feature your company in a product or video and use an affiliate link shortener to link to your site. Affiliates receive a commission from sales associated with your link.
One subset of this marketing strategy is influencer marketing. With this approach, influencers serve as your affiliates, mentioning your brand and using your affiliate links in their social media posts.
Short URLs work perfectly as affiliate-sharing links. Because short links are trackable, you’ll be able to closely monitor traffic from each affiliate page to your site. You can use this information to determine which affiliate strategies are most effective and adjust your marketing budget as necessary. This will also help you accurately calculate commissions when necessary.
SMS marketing
If you want to reach your audience directly, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of SMS marketing. Texting prospective customers helps you build a stronger relationship with them. A well-timed SMS message can also move a prospect from the middle of the sales funnel to the end, resulting in a purchase. For existing customers, you can use SMS marketing to announce new products and promotions to keep them engaged.
SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters. While most carriers now allow you to combine multiple messages in one, it’s still best to keep your messages short for clarity. Shortened links are easy to read on a small screen and fit easily into an SMS message without compromising space.
If your brand has a mobile app, SMS marketing is a very effective way to promote it. You can send SMS messages that link directly to your app store listing, making it easy for users to find.
Content marketing
Short links work well for linking to and from your content marketing assets. You can include shortened links in your blog posts to send readers to specific products and services—branded links with a custom domain work particularly well for this. Short links are easy to format as part of your blog post. Branded links are also very visually appealing.
You can also use short links to promote your content marketing efforts. For example, you can place a short link to your latest blog in a corresponding social media post. This makes it easy for your audience to find and engage with your content. Short links are also very shareable and can help your content go viral.
Short link tracking and analytics will also help you refine your content marketing strategy for better engagement. You’ll be able to identify which posts generate the most clicks to see what resonates with your audience. You’ll also be able to see the time and location of the clicks as well as the devices used, which can help you better understand your audience.
QR Code campaigns
You can pair your short links with QR Code campaigns to generate even more engagement. Bitly QR Codes each come with a corresponding short link. The QR Code sends the user directly to this link.
QR Codes are particularly effective for advertising your brand offline. Users can scan the QR Code with a smartphone camera to go directly to the target URL rather than having to type a link into their address bar. You can include QR Codes on print ads, billboards, business cards, and other physical marketing collateral to send people directly to your website.
Event marketing
When planning any event, it’s important to have a designated event web page with the time, location, admission fees, and other essential information. If you require ticket purchases or RSVPs, a dedicated site is also the easiest way to track them.
For convenience, place short links on all relevant marketing materials to your event site. This strategy works for both online event marketing, like social media posts and email alerts, and offline marketing, like flyers. Opt for a branded domain name for these short links to make them as memorable as possible.
Short links are also a helpful tool for post-event follow-up. You can reconnect with attendees using email, SMS, or social media messages to say thank you. Include a short link in your messages to a feedback form to get your attendees’ perspectives on the event.
Podcast marketing
Podcasts have been increasing in popularity as a content marketing strategy, and for good reason. They’re an effective way to demonstrate your industry expertise, and you can draw your audience in with entertaining stories and interviews. Podcast advertising is also effective. Research indicates that 88% of consumers are happy with their purchases after buying something advertised in a podcast.
Short links can connect your podcast to your other marketing materials to maximize engagement. When promoting your podcast on social media and in your email newsletter, use short links to send readers either to the podcast’s main page or to specific episode pages.
You can also use short links to enhance your podcast’s show notes. You could include links to your website as well as to other relevant content marketing assets, such as blog posts, e-books, and white papers. With these written content assets, you can expand on the topics you discuss in the podcast.
Using these short links throughout your podcast marketing helps you track engagement. You’ll be able to determine which podcast topics resonate the most with your audience and generate the most enthusiastic response for your brand.
How to track the success of your short links
You should monitor short links closely to ensure they are working properly and generating engagement for your campaigns. Here’s how to track the success of your short links.
Decide what success means
The first step to measuring the success of your short links is determining what that success would look like in the context of your marketing strategy. Identify clear goals for each asset and its corresponding short link. Are you interested in increasing traffic with more clicks? Are you looking to boost your conversion rate? Your goal for each short link should align with your broader marketing plan.
Use analytics tools
The next step is to track the progress of your short links using your analytics tools of choice. Google Analytics, Semrush, and Clicky are popular analytics tools for marketers, each with slightly different features (heatmaps, competitor analysis, etc.) and price points.
Bitly customers can take advantage of Bitly Analytics. With Bitly, you can track the number of clicks each link receives over time, which can help you identify engagement patterns. You’ll also be able to sort clicks by location, device, referral site, and performance over time. These data points will give you more insight into the customer journey.
(If you’re looking for even more granular insights, you can also use Bitly Analytics alongside your other third-party analytics tools!)
Measure ROI from short link campaigns
With your analytics data, you can then calculate the ROI for each of your short links. There are many ways to do this, depending on what platforms you’re focusing on and what integrations you have access to.
For example, if you use a short link in a PPC ad campaign that leads to a specific product page, you can determine the number of visits from that link that resulted in a purchase. To calculate ROI, you’ll compare the amount you made from each purchase to the amount you spent on the short links using the following formula:
(Net return / Cost of investment) x 100 = ROI (%)
In this scenario, say you spent $500 on your short links, which resulted in 50 purchases of a $100 product. Your ROI calculation would be:
((50 x $100) / $500) x 10 = 100% ROI
Explore how short links pave the way to better marketing
Short links are a powerful tool for your marketing campaigns. They streamline the customer journey and make your site more accessible. When implemented well, they can even boost your engagement and conversion rates!
With Bitly, it’s easy to create short links for your marketing campaigns that you can customize and track. Gain powerful insights into your audience engagement and make meaningful changes to future campaigns for even greater marketing success.
Use Bitly to create impactful custom short links for your brand. Get started today and start building your short link strategy!