Not Just for Social Media: How Short Links Improve Performance Across Your Organization

We’ve all seen short links in social media posts, where every character counts. But keeping things short and sweet is only as important as the memorability and the meaning of the links themselves. That’s because marketers and brands are recognizing the strategic value of this “last inch” of digital marketing. If your branded short link can convey key messages or brand impressions, then it’s even more likely to get clicked on. 

Once you consider the power and reach of short links that convey key messages, you can deploy them across the entire ecosystem of your business, from digital marketing, advertising, product packaging, and even recruiting top talent.

Here are some of the creative ways our customers are using BL.INK short links.

Social media

Social teams hold broad marketing responsibilities, ranging from social listening to content creation to planning and publishing. Given the level of social engagement with brands, this is challenging for (usually) small teams with limited resources. Go-Gulf research reports that most social media teams consist of fewer than four people.  Despite the success and ROI of social marketing, only 22% percent of companies are planning to expand their social teams within the next year.

With everything else on their plates, Social media marketers don’t have much time for data analytics. According to Sprout Social, 80% of businesses are planning to incorporate social media analytics into future marketing campaigns. While it’s tempting to measure success based on engagement such as “likes” and “follows,” it’s actually more important to also measure customer follow-up. How many people actually click the link in your Facebook post and follow through to purchase? Using branded short links in social media can help you track these conversions, giving you hard data to prove that your company’s investments in social media are worth it.

Digital marketing

While digital marketing team structures vary from company to company, they’re almost always the ones choosing and using digital marketing tools, so they’re often the best champions for using branded short links.

Digital marketers measure and assess the success of digital campaigns. Pulling data from branded short links platforms such as BL.INK can be much easier than pulling data from each individual platform and then aggregating data into a report. For example, if a team runs a campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, it’s easier to look within a link management system such as BL.INK to integrate analytics and then assess relative performance.

Most social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. have different ways to measure user interactions. For example, Twitter recently announced it was changing its user assessment strategy, which is entirely different from other social platforms. Our informal experience at BL.INK indicates that these platforms each define a “click” differently, and often include other types of engagements in their click count reporting. So, what’s a marketer to do?  

When you use a link management system such as BL.INK, you know exactly how we define a “click” and you can use that definition across different platforms, to ensure greater consistency in your analytics.

eCommerce

For many companies, eCommerce (both B2C and B2B) is the final frontier. Once packing is out and on the shelves, it’s hard to tell how customers are reacting until the sales data starts rolling in. Some savvy companies are beginning to use branded short links on their packaging (QR codes) to monitor in-store customer engagement with their products. The short links in these QR codes direct potential customers to helpful content that encourages them to buy, all while reinforcing brand presence. 

Beacon technology is also being used “in the wild” in retail stores to attract customers to retail products. Beacons ping the phones of customers as they physically pass through an area, pushing content through a link embedded in the beacon. If your organization is considering using beacons, be sure to use a short link that can be easily read, remembered, and edited. This will save you money and time by allowing you to change the destination URL along with your campaigns while re-using the same beacons for each initiative.

Human resources

Human Resources departments care about recruiting new talent, cultivating company culture, managing employee wellbeing, and much more. They use branded short links for a variety of tasks ranging from job postings to event promotion. For example, TMobile has a dedicated website, www.tmobile.careers, for all of its recruiting activities. HR teams use branded short links to see which channels attract the best applicants, so they can focus their resources on the areas that have the most impact. They also use short links to see how users engage with various types of content and resources, so they can offer the most useful information.

No matter what your charter is, branded short links offer powerful ways to help you be a more effective, results-driven marketer. Click here to learn more about the ways that BL.INK can super-charge your digital marketing efforts.

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