Are links just a commodity—something every business needs, but the specifics don’t matter all that much? Or are they a powerful tool for marketing, branding, and analytics?
When it comes to branding, most people think of signage and logos. Links are, at best, a second-tier discussion. But we think it’s time to change that.
You may be thinking, “Logos and links are two very different things.” And you’d be right, of course. A logo is a visual representation of your business. It can be abstract or figurative.
A link is practical. It takes your customers or employees from one webpage to another. But, used strategically, it’s also a powerful marketing tool that can grow your business—and here’s how.
How can a link represent your data?
Think of how many links you share a day. Chances are, it’s a lot. People share links so regularly—in emails, texts, and social media—that they don’t always realize how often they do.
Now, imagine if every link you shared had your brand in it. How many more customer touchpoints would include your brand? How many more brand impressions would you drive for your business?
Links can be critical tools that help grow your brand. Let’s look at how to use short links in your day-to-day communications to do just that.
Improved social media impact measurement
First, you can use branded short links to measure the impact of social media campaigns. On platforms that allow links in posts or comments, the connection is pretty straightforward. For example, you can track short analytics like impressions vs. number of clicks to measure click-through rates.
You can also use Link-in-bio tools to measure social media impact on platforms like Instagram and TikTok that don’t allow direct links in posts. If you want to track them separately, you can even create a custom short link for each social media platform, allowing you to analyze performance by network.
Better custom links for personalized marketing
You can personalize your marketing even further by customizing your short links so they look and sound like your brand.
For example:
- yourbrand.co/TistheSeason
- yourbrand.co/connect
- shelter.pets/give
You can also segment your marketing using custom links. During McDonald’s famous “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign, the burger chain targeted Spanish-speaking customers with a parallel “Me Encanta” campaign. Short links for that campaign might have looked like:
- mcd.food/ImLovinIt for English-language customers
- mcd.food/MeEncanta for Spanish-language customers
Enhanced brand visibility and recall
By sneaking your brand name into your short link domain, you’ll increase your brand’s visibility. Branded domains help customers remember your brand and make it easy for them to type the URL into their browsers.
Long strings of jumbled letters and numbers don’t offer these advantages. No one’s going to sit down and type out an 86-character URL, and your brand name gets lost in the chaos.
Take Beats.is/ and bzfd.it/ as examples. Both are short and memorable, immediately drawing the reader’s mind to Beats headphones or BuzzFeed News.
Why branded links are essential for growing a brand
Branded URLs are especially important for up-and-coming brands looking to grow, and here’s why.
Branded links keep you on prospects’ minds
Prospects typically check out multiple brands while evaluating their options for a particular service or product. This can involve several phone calls, email exchanges, and hours spent researching different solutions.
Keep your brand name in front of potential customers by using branded links in your communications. The more they see your brand, the more likely they are to remember it. Some popular ways to do this include using branded links in marketing SMS campaigns and sales follow-up emails.
Branded links boost visibility in the market
Beyond sales and marketing, encourage other customer-facing teams to share branded links in their communications. Larger organizations often utilize multiple custom domains for different teams and projects.
On the support team? Use 👉 yourbrand.support/
HR? Use 👉 yourbrand.people/
Marketing? Use 👉 yourbrand.co/
Using your brand in your links ensures that you present your brand consistently—no matter the channel. Brand consistency has proven benefits, including greater brand recognition and the potential to impact your bottom line.
Around half of consumers are more likely to use brands they recognize easily. And direct traffic is still the strongest performer overall, but your audience can only reach you directly if they know who you are. The takeaway here? Repetition is key, and branded links help you amplify that repetition.
Branded links position you as an expert
Own a design firm? In the education space? Work at an event planning business?
Whether you’re emailing prospects or sharing thought leadership content across your social media channels, branded links can reinforce your business’s authority and expertise.
Contentsquare found that, across all industries and page types, people spend an average of 47 seconds on a page before moving on. This is true from long blog posts like this one (hopefully you’ll stick around longer than 47 seconds!) to bite-sized consumable pages and everything in between.
But no matter the content format, you must establish expertise sooner, not later. Using custom domain extensions like .design, .education, and .events shows people, at a glance, what sort of work you do.
Branded links give you credit for your content
Copy the URL below and use your Bitly account as a URL shortener.
https://www.bose.com/c/headphones
See how the short link that generates uses Bose’s custom domain? That’s called auto-branding. Cool, huh?
A URL shortener like Bitly allows you to get credit for your content by injecting branding into the link itself. Your audience will know the content belongs to your brand before they ever land it—because it’s right there in the shortened URL.
This keeps your brand front and center. With auto-branding, any time someone copies a web address that directs to one of your sites and shortens it in Bitly, the generated short link will use your custom domain.
Not only does auto-branding increase awareness for your brand, but it also gives you additional insight into what your audience is doing with your content. This means you’ll have more information to help you improve your brand’s messaging and communications so they’re more effective.
How to create effective branded short links for growth
Branded short links can do plenty to help businesses grow, and execution makes all the difference. Here are a few short URL best practices for creating branded short links that drive conversions and build your brand.
Keep your links short and memorable
First, keep your short links as short as possible and make sure they’re memorable!
yourbrand.co/megasale is pretty memorable.
yourbrand.co/2bk2m3—not so much.
Something like yourbrand.co/en/products/248jmfk3w48/quantity=3/&utm_source=google? Yikes.
Keeping links clean and short is essential because users are much more likely to click on links that are recognizable and appear trustworthy. Shorter links also save on character count—which is still an important consideration on some social media platforms, in SMS marketing, and print and graphics media.
Use relevant keywords in the short links
Choosing the right keywords can make a big impact on how people interact with your content. Take this blog post, for example: if you scan through, you’ll see we’re intentionally using terms like “short links,” along with variants like “branded links” and “branded short links” and related terms like “custom domain” and “custom URLs”).
Doing this well is a big part of search engine optimization (SEO), which is all about helping the right people find your content.
The same principle works in your short links. You want people to see terms related to what they’re looking for right there in the link itself. Seeing that keyword provides confirmation that they’re on the right track, plus the motivation to click.
Keyword selection can get pretty complicated, but at a basic level, it doesn’t need to be. What are your target customers searching for? Whatever those things are, put those terms into your content (including your links).
If you’re not sure how to find the right keywords for your content and short links, there are tools that can help. Semrush is one market leader, and Google Search Console gives you insights directly from the world’s largest search company. Other big names include Ahrefs, Moz, and AnswerThePublic.
Maintain consistent branding
Another way to reinforce brand identity is to ensure consistent branding across all links. In other words, try not to mix and match unbranded short URLs, long links, and short custom URLs in your branding:
- See more at yourbrand.co/promo!
- See more at bit.ly/2MqrmMx!
- See more at yourfullbrandname.com/en/us/promotions/fall-sale!
These links will get people to the same (fictional) destination, but it’s a little jarring when a company’s branding switches back and forth. Doing so can be visually confusing and suggest a lack of cohesiveness or planning.
So start by identifying which brand elements should go into your custom short link’s domain name (the yourbrand.co part). It’s good to establish this upfront and stick with it. If your brand eventually needs more than one custom domain, keep them in the same brand voice.
As you continue to use short links in your marketing strategy, you might want to formulate guidelines on what your brand will and won’t do with slugs (the back half of the URL, such as /promo above). This way, your branding stays consistent and clear.
Integrate UTM parameters for advanced tracking
Most link-shortening platforms already offer detailed short link tracking analytics that help you understand the effectiveness of links and channels. For example, you can measure user engagement levels, geographic user data, and the paths users take to conversion.
But many brands want to go even deeper, and that’s where UTM parameters can help. UTM parameters are tags you can attach to the end of a URL so you can perform more advanced tracking. These tags can show five elements:
- Source: Where a user came from
- Medium: The marketing channel that brought the user to you
- Campaign: The marketing campaign that led to the click
- Term: The paid keyword the user searched for to get to you
- Content: The specific part or piece of content the user clicked
Analytics software can read these tags and then produce reports showing sources, campaigns, terms, and so forth to track link performance.
Here’s an example of how a brand might benefit from using UTMs.
Let’s say an upstart apparel company is spending big on digital marketing for the next seasonal sale. They’ve done their market research and have already had some success, but they’re trying to aggressively grow their customer base. They need a way to measure which marketing channels are performing well, and they choose UTM codes. On social they add source and medium UTM codes to their URLs, and then they can see via Google Analytics or other tools how many clicks are coming from which social media network. They do the same with paid search terms using term UTM codes, which gives them insight into which keywords are working and which aren’t worth paying for.
This company can crunch the data from all these UTM parameters and refine its marketing strategies. They can ditch poor-performing channels or dig deeper into why their current ads aren’t working there, and they can focus ad spend on the keywords that are really driving clicks and sales.
Bitly users can gain even more from UTMs because the platform can add UTMs to long URLs but keep them hidden neatly in short links. All you have to do is:
- Sign in to your Bitly account.
- Go to your link (or create a new one).
- Toggle the “Add UTMs” switch.
- Follow the prompts.
If you need more information, here’s a more detailed guide on how to add UTM parameters to a link.
Try Bitly for brand growth and personalized marketing success
Short links can improve brand awareness, grow conversion rates, and help you gain a better understanding of link performance through improved analytics. And Bitly is a market leader in helping brands build stronger digital connections.
Bitly is a trusted platform for growing your brand with links. It includes a URL shortener that thousands of businesses rely on, plus the ability to create short links with custom domains and back halves to reinforce branding.
More than just a tool for shortening links, Bitly is your central hub for managing and redirecting those links, along with analyzing link performance to help you build data-driven campaigns in the future.
Sign up for Bitly now and start creating purposeful short links that enhance your brand!