On any given week, a brand may share more than a dozen promotional links across platforms. Whether you’re promoting a splash page, landing page, or webpage, your content should engage visitors, boost brand awareness, and spark long-term loyalty.
Do you find it hard to connect with your demographic in today’s noisy digital world? Do you want to improve your customer’s digital experience with your brand? A link management platform might be the answer. Link management can streamline and optimize your outreach efforts and, ultimately, lead to more recognition and enthusiasm for your business.
From common challenges to business use cases, this guide will help you better understand the importance of links and how they are as useful to the customer as they are to the marketer.
What is link management?
Link management is the art of organizing, shortening, editing, customizing, and analyzing links. Because links are a digital touchpoint for customers, they are a critical aspect of your business, and it’s important that you stay in control of them. Link management helps you track the details of internal links (those that link from within your website) as well as external links (those that link from outside sites back to your website) so you have a full view of link activity.
With link management, you can create a promotional link, shorten it, post it for a specific platform, and then track its engagement. You can also structure the link so it contains both your brand name and promotional details. Customers perceive customized links as more legitimate, and they also help improve customer recall.
So, if you offer a 20% off promotion via social media, paid affiliate advertising, and your email newsletter, your links will need to reflect the original source for each promotion. With Bitly you can shorten that information into digestible text. This way, your customers only see the link’s descriptive back-half that promises savings ahead.
At Bitly, we provide a complete link management platform, so you can keep track of your most important links with our comprehensive tools. As a leader in link management solutions, we help you improve brand awareness, ignite customer action, and substantiate resource allocation in your marketing campaigns.
Common challenges in link organization and tracking
Link management has become more complex for digital marketers as new platforms emerge and customers carve out their own digital spaces. Let’s look at some common stumbling blocks and the costs of poor link management.
Complexity of managing multiple links
Nearly every business or brand manages multiple links, from solo entrepreneurs to conglomerate companies. If you multiply those links across campaigns and platforms, the odds of errors or inconsistencies skyrocket.
Let’s say your brand launches two new B2B products, and you decide to market them separately through social media and email. For each product, you A/B test different features of each product to identify which claims resonate with your audience.
Without effective link management tools, you can easily end up reusing the wrong link for the wrong platform or posting content that promotes one product and links to another.
Lack of insight from untracked links
Untracked links provide no user engagement data, and this lack of insight can thwart your marketing strategies. For example, you might post a single link to a new splash page on all social media pages. After a week, you see the page garnered 1,000 unique views, making it the most successful campaign in your brand’s history. If 900 of those views came from a Facebook post, you might never recognize it since an untracked link will not reveal any data. This can cause marketers to waste time and ad spend optimizing posts on non-performing platforms.
Difficulty in measuring campaign performance
Marketing campaigns often promote the same link in different ways. If you don’t use a tracking link to differentiate each channel or content strategy, you might make incorrect assumptions about which tactics work best.
If social media posts for a specific campaign generate a lively and fun discussion in the comment section, you might conclude that new customer conversions are due to your engaging and thought-provoking posts. Without tracking capabilities, you could miss that the real conversions stemmed from a different campaign—one that targeted your less vocal but more supportive email subscribers.
Benefits of effective link management
Effective link management helps marketers pinpoint how their content lands with multiple audiences. We’ll look at how link management promotes short- and long-term success for brands in every sector.
Better user experience
Let’s say you see a 150-character, alphanumeric link posted by an unknown company side-by-side with a short and descriptive link: You already know which one you’re more likely to click. UTM parameters are the key to tracking your links, but by the time you add the source, medium, search terms, and content to each link, they can look unappealing to discerning customers. In other words, long URLS typically equate to fewer click-through rates.
Concise, branded links give a more polished and professional impression, and they subtly communicate that the link is from a trustworthy organization. Additionally, helpful and specific links entice more clicks and prevent confusion about the destination URL. A branded link with a back-half of /CONTESTSIGNUP tells the user exactly what to expect when they click that link–details about a new contest.
Improved analytics
The right link management platform helps marketers quantify their campaign performance and draw insights from user behavior. With Bitly Analytics, you can immediately see the platforms driving the best numbers, allowing you to tweak or adjust campaigns in real time.
You also see how people accessed the link (from an iPhone, Android, or a laptop, for example), and when you combine your analytics with other third-party tools like Google Analytics, you can even see how long they spent on the page and whether the visit resulted in a conversion. With better analytics, marketers can better understand how different audiences interact with the content, leading to more precise content marketing efforts.
More efficient marketing
If you want to seamlessly blend your offline and online efforts for a streamlined customer experience, Bitly can help. Create short and branded links for your online efforts and customized QR Codes for printed items like menus, stickers, billboards, storefronts, and more!
Centralized link management saves time and reduces errors across omnichannel campaigns. For example, if you were promoting a new landing page on both table tents and Facebook, you could assign a customized QR Code and customized link to each digital asset.
Your customers simply scan the code or tap on the link, and you can quickly quantify which effort was most successful. Bitly makes it easy for marketers to create a consistent brand experience through both online and offline strategies.
Optimized resource allocation
Organizing and tracking endless links is challenging whether you’re a digital, content, or social media manager. With Bitly’s API, integrating branded links in automated workflows cuts back on manual postings, allowing you to spend more time on strategic initiatives rather than tedious campaign audits and data entry.
Link management can also identify the highest-performing platforms so marketing managers can staff and budget accordingly. While we still recommend experimenting when new opportunities present themselves—such as a shift in consumer climate or a new media platform launch—you can drastically transform the hit-and-miss culture common in many marketing teams today.
Improved collaboration
In addition to improved customer engagement, link management can boost employee engagement as well. With Bitly, you can shorten long links for shared documents like spreadsheets or company handbooks.
This is particularly valuable for brands in litigious sectors, as organized and branded links can reveal gaps or errors in your compliance content. For instance, you might use dates in every link back-half so you can quickly ascertain whether the content needs to be swapped out or updated.
Internal communication is critical for all organizations. It’s the only way to keep people working toward common objectives, whether they’re in engineering, marketing, or IT. With Bitly, you can start organizing content with helpful links to put everyone on the same page—literally.
5 examples of how your business could use link management
Incorporating link management into your organization helps optimize campaigns and provides an exceptional experience for your customers. We’ll look at how you can implement these tools across different channels.
1. Marketing campaigns
Link management helps marketers organize links both within and across campaigns. So, if you simultaneously run five campaigns with 15 tracked links apiece, you can separate all 75 links into descriptive categories. In Bitly, you can create categories for each campaign and quickly assess link performance within and across campaigns.
Bitly’s link management platform can deploy branded links at every digital touchpoint, regardless of channel. Integrate your brand into every link’s framework for a better customer experience. Use our analytic and report features to identify your best channels and improve the ROI of every strategy.
2. Customer experience
Custom domains and back-halves reinforce the brand and communicate the digital destination. If your organization appears in third-party shortened links, you can also use Bitly to auto-brand them with your own custom domain to increase awareness. Link building is key for Search Engine Optimization rankings, so it’s important to optimize custom URLs whenever possible.
For example, let’s say that you market a fashion boutique that works with an affiliate fashion blogger. The blogger can use standard Bitly functionality to shorten your link, and you can elect to change the link from Bitly’s domain name to the boutique’s domain name. Branded links are small touches that communicate to the customer that the company cares about every step of the buyer journey.
3. Event promotions
Generating excitement for an event starts with a straightforward registration process. A URL shortener makes links more memorable and simplifies sign-ups for attendees.
Do customers access links via their iPhone or PC? What country or city are they in when they tap the link? Is your audience drawn in by your affiliate marketing or your email campaigns? How many people engage with post-event photos to relive the experience if they attended or to absorb the experience if they missed it? All of these questions are critical for optimizing success, and you can answer them all in detail with Bitly.
4. A/B testing
If you’re wondering how to use Bitly for digital marketing, A/B testing is the place to start. For marketers, this strategy is often the fastest track to understanding what your audience wants to know.
With A/B testing, you promote the same benefit in two different ways and see which one people respond to more. Link management allows marketers to compare the performance of both versions accurately.
Without proper link management, it would be easy to misunderstand your results. If you run A/B tests across the board for all promotions, Bitly’s tracked links boil down the metrics so you can make clean conclusions.
5. Personalized customer journeys
Personalized customer journeys leverage known customer data, like location, buyer preferences, time, or scanning device, to create dynamic links.
For example, a food-delivery app might use a dynamic link to take customers to breakfast menus if they tap in the morning. Or if you’re promoting a sale within the app and the customer doesn’t yet have the app, a dynamic link would first take them to the app store instead of displaying an error message or irrelevant branded content. A URL shortener paired with dynamic links can improve the user experience and conversion rates.
Experience digital marketing success with Bitly’s link management tools
Digital marketing is constantly expanding and evolving within the endless digital landscape. If you’re looking for ways to create powerful campaigns that find your customers and boost conversions, Bitly’s link management platform can track performance, derive actionable insights, and set the foundation of your future strategic decisions.
By integrating Bitly into your digital marketing toolkit, you can eliminate many of the challenges you face with link management and organization. What’s more, you can improve brand awareness and trust with condensed links that clearly illustrate what you can offer the customer.
If you want to organize and track your links for better campaign management, get started with Bitly today!