Vanity URL - Short to Success
Vanity URL has been a blindspot for marketers in this age of mass sharing. Trust us when we say that your life is worse without it.
This is the age of marketing through content. When was the last time you shared your content marketing collaterals without your brand name all over it? Hard to recall isn’t it? Well, if branding is one of your main motto, why leave out your brand name in the URL that you share on social media channels ( & elsewhere)? A simple way to achieve this is vanity URL.
What is Vanity URL?
Simply put, they are shortened unique URL’s created to enhance your brand identity of owned and earned content. A great vanity URL is short, unique easy to remember and hence easy to share.
But, why should I be using vanity URL?
Increased CTR
There we are again. Yet another method to increase your ‘awareness’. People are 40% more likely to remember and click on a URL with brand name as compared to amorphous amphigory URL found in most shorteners. As a user which of the following are you most likely to click on: goo.gl or http://goo.gl/6vB19a? Enough said.
Social Activity Tracking and Optimisation
Almost all URL shorteners provide insights on sharing patterns, click through patterns of content posted on various social media platforms. Simply looking at these insights, can tell you the sources from where people clicked your URL, which platform has a maximum CTR for your business, and which content gets your customers ticking! Here's a screenshot of how a insights you get from one of the URL shorteners.
Easier to remember and share
How often have you recommended/been recommended of a website and totally forgot its name by the time you reached home? Even worse-You found something supercool on the web, but you are unable to recall or find it on the search engine after applying a couple of keyword combos (this means the article had a poor SEO. But we’ll keep it for some other blog :P )
With a short and easy to remember URL, the user is unlikely to forget where and how he found the content. And guess what? It will be easier for him/her to communicate the URL verbally. We had this tested.
When we were taking baby steps towards creating more engagement, we found that by shortening the URL and changing it to brands name increased our social sharing for a client in the luxury travel sector by 103%. We haven’t looked back since then.
Get into people’s personal space
No, we aren’t asking you stalk people’s profile. But what If we tell you that 77% content shared falls into ‘dark social’ i.e. people sharing links from Facebook, twitter with friends on WhatsApp and other IM applications.
When people copy and share links on dark social the ‘brand recall’ is lost. With vanity URl, you are earning consumers trust ( as the link remains the same as brands name)which is really hard to earn in this digital age.
It’s amazing how a small cosmetic change can enhance and boost your shareability. Try this now, and thank us later!
