When it comes to analytics, many companies focus on online performance, but it’s also critical to understand the impact of offline marketing. Companies frequently run offline promotions to highlight specials, deals, new features/programs, and contests. Businesses will usually link these promotions to their website using URLs that are published across campaigns on TV, radio, print, and on social media. Using URL redirects for this enables marketers to control the message being delivered, but managing these URL redirects can be time consuming and costly. To help your audience easily connect with you, your published URLs should be easy to type, easy to remember, and easy to change.
Custom, Shortened Vanity Domains
Memorable URLs are important when grabbing a customers attention. Offline billboards and other print collateral aim to make a big impact, and making the URLs easy to type, and easy to remember are key to grabbing your audience. Not only do memorable domains have an impact on your branding, but they can save your offline marketing budget in two key ways:
- URL redirects enable you to re-use existing links for subsequent promotions and not have to worry about dead or outdated links on promotional materials.
- You can easily tell which campaigns are performing well. Analytics on your redirect can help you understand the ROI of your campaigns so you can save money and be more efficient with your marketing budget.
Eurostar is one of our customers at EasyRedir and a great example of a company that uses URL redirection to manage their hardcopy marketing collateral, such as promotions for ticket specials, new destinations, and contests. As part of the travel company’s marketing strategy, they link to these promotions using URLs that are published across campaigns on TV, in print, and on social media. Eurostar is able to save time for their IT teams by having these links managed by EasyRedir, and they are also able to track which marketing efforts are having the greatest impact.
By using memorable URLs to redirect to long, complicated URLs is an excellent branding and SEO strategy for your business. For example, tickets.now can redirect to a not so intuitive URL such as www.yoursite.com/events/tickets?type=upcoming.
This strategy will help your customers easily understand and remember the URLs to get them to your intended message. IT teams only need to point a DNS record to EasyRedir once and then we will manage and maintain this infrastructure. Marketing teams can then manage the URL redirects using our user friendly dashboard, changing them when it makes sense for the marketing program.
Using UTM Campaign Parameters for Tracking
Using URL redirection is a great way to reinforce your brand while also tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. A key way to accomplish this is to append UTM tags to your target URLs. This allows you to know where the traffic came from and calculate the ROI of your marketing investments. It’s easy to generate UTM parameters. Google has built a fantastic tool to make the job simpler. Just visit the Campaign URL Builder, enter the requested values, and copy/paste the URL it builds into the Target URL field in EasyRedir. You’ll see the UTM tags in your browser location bar after the redirect happens, and the visit will be registered with your analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics). The catchy URLs that Eurostar uses on their offline marketing materials will point to a target site that has a UTM tag attached to it, and that tag will send their analytics tools information about which domain the visit was redirected from, providing valuable insight into the performance of each campaign.
QR Codes, URL Redirection and Tracking Performance
Generating QR codes with EasyRedir is dead simple. In the same way described above, you can use UTM tags on your target URLs to help calculate the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Since QR codes are impossible to change once printed - without reprinting everything - it’s critical to plan ahead and use URL redirection to be sure you can change where they take visitors.
Measuring the performance of your offline marketing campaigns is an important part of your business strategy. Sign up for a free EasyRedir trial today and see how you can benefit from using URL redirection to measure the performance of your next campaign.
