Summertime means longer days–but also shorter URLs.
During long, hot summer days, your audience has an even shorter attention span than usual. It’s important to quickly catch their eye and make an impression. You don’t want them to see a long, intimidating URL.
For example, instead of leading new customers to https://mad4marketing.com/about-mad-4/ (42 characters long) can send them to a new address like https://tinyurl.com/yxfmvqj8 (28 characters long).
Automatically generated URLs, like the one above, are perfect for social media, like Twitter, where it’s important to keep your character count short. But they’re not easy to remember.
However, you can also create custom links that are easier to memorize. A URL with custom wording is known as a “Vanity URL.” This way, you can offer an attractive first impression–and follow it up with a wealth of information behind the click.
Free websites let you customize links slightly. For example, https://tinyurl.com/yxfmvqj8 can become https://tinyurl.com/aboutMad4.
But you can also customize links further, using your own domain name in the URL. This will also allow you to welcome different audiences in more personalized ways. For example, you can lead vanilla-lovers to your ice cream business with a Vanity URL like www.icecream.com/Vanilla. Then, you can welcome chocolate freaks to your site with a special link like www.icecream.com/Chocolate.
Last but not least, shortening your URL is a way to disguise any UTMs that you might want to hide in the longer version of your link. If you want to track where your traffic is coming from, you need to add special coding (UTMs) to your URL. But then, you can easily hide all of that extra coding with your Vanity URL. It’s an easy way to collect very useful marketing information about your audience–while staying short and chic.
You can easily shorten your URLs using free web services like Bitly, Rebrandly, Po.st, and TinyURL.
Stay light and breezy in your summer marketing with custom, short URLs.