Merge Your Print And Online Marketing Campaigns Using URL Shorteners

The divide between online and print marketing is becoming more evident. Social media and SEO continue to provide businesses greater reach and insight to their market. This has cast doubt to the future of print products and whether or not they still have a place in your marketing strategy.

Despite their differences, both still serve a purpose in promoting your business. By focusing on online and offline (flyer distribution, direct mail, display marketing) strategies, you get to target more potential customers from different media.

However, instead of holding a separate campaign for both, you can use both at the same time with the help of URL shorteners!

What are URL shorteners?

These are online tools used to condense a website address into a customizable URL that’s easier to remember.

URL shorteners allow you to track the number of people who clicked through your link and the date they visited your page. The concept behind using URL shorteners as marketing tool is simple – the more people visiting your link, the more effective your campaign is!

As a marketing tactic, URL shorteners serve best when incorporated in your offline marketing. Touch base with your website more effectively using print products by indicating the shortened URL of your page or site.

Examples of URL shorteners are bit.ly, TinyURL, and Google URL Shortener, to name a few.

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Below are steps on how you can implement URL shorteners in your offline and online campaign.

• Set up a custom landing page on your website to your promotions. The page may contain a unique coupon code to be printed out by the visitor. 
• Use a URL shortener to minimize character length of your landing page. Aside from the convenience of typing out a shortened version of your page, you enable to track down any activity they made do with the link. If you set up tracking codes using URL Builder before shortening the site address, you can further do more study with the results of your campaign. Aside from page visits, you can also track transactions, multi-page views, and other data of interest. To access this, however, you must have aGoogle Analytics account.
• Include shortened URL on printed material. If possible, create unique shortened URLs for each group of marketing tools to be handed out. Segment relevant markets in your direct mail campaign and include a unique URL on the print material they will receive. This will help you determine which segment has the most visits to your landing page.
• Analyze data once the campaign is over. As mentioned, the purpose of URL shorteners is to track the number of visits from your print campaign. With this information, you could target the more engaged segments more often with your upcoming campaign to acquire more leads and sales.

Include the shortened URLs on different print materials such as posters, brochures, flyers, and even business cards for increased reach. It would be advisable to use the different URL shortening services to see which among the available sites help you draw more visitors or track more efficiently.

The Author: Christopher Jan Benitez

 

+Christopher Jan Benitez works as an Editorial QA for the PrintRunner Blog, has written a free e-book about direct mail marketing for download, and endorses print brochures as the tool to market your business. http://blog.printrunner.com/