Branded Short URL: What is It and How to Use it to Grow Your Business   

You need to use a branded short URL generator if you intend to use your links for marketing purposes.

Generic URLs contain the name of the URL shortening tool you use and thus, they dilute your brand image and confuse the reader. 

That’s why today, we’ll take a look at branded URL shorteners and how URL shortening helps brands achieve wider success.

What is a Branded Short URL? 

This can be a powerful tool as brands often use branded or vanity URLs to advertise their brand on social media, through email newsletters, and more.

For example, the shortened link version of Youtube is youtu.be; For Pepsi, it’s pep.si; For Facebook, it’s fb.me. 

What you can see from these examples is that branded links take out all of the fluff and only leave what’s necessary for brand promotion and identification. 

This does wonders when it comes to increasing brand recognition and awareness. When people are met with shortened branded links, they immediately are able to tell what company it’s from and in some cases, what the link is about. 

Brands use the latter part of the link for the page description. 

The latter part of the section is utilized to explain to the reader what the shortened link is about and where it will lead them once they click on it. 

How Do Branded Links Work? 

Branded links work in essentially the same way that regular, generic, shortened URLs do. They are essentially redirect links that lead to the original web page that the original URL points to. 

The only difference is that branded links are first connected to a custom domain. This custom domain is something that you must set up beforehand to ensure that it works properly for your brand. 

Naturally, this custom domain will represent your brand by having its name or some other abbreviation of it. 

Once you have the custom domain, you can connect it to a URL shortener service and then it’ll be able to generate custom URLs for you. 

The first half of the link is always your custom domain. 

It represents your brand and helps build brand consistency and increase consumer trust. The latter part is something that you can customize as you generate the branded link. As we mentioned earlier, this part represents whatever the web page is about. 

Should I Use Branded URLs? 

The short answer is yes. If you are someone that wants to promote yourself, a product, a service, your brand or anything similar, it’s essential to use branded URLs. Generic URLs do not work nearly as well when you’re including them in promotional or marketing content. 

There are a number of reasons for using branded links in your marketing strategy that we can discuss in detail: 

Generic Links Dilute Your Brand Image 

The first and most obvious reason that you should use branded URLs is due to the fact that generic shortened URLs tend to dilute your brand image. This is because generic URLs have the name or some version of the name of the URL shortener tool on them. 

This can cause confusion in the reader and it also just looks out of place in the middle of all the content that is about your brand. 

Since all the content is about your brand, why shouldn’t the shortened link be too? 

That’s why it’s important that the shortened links you generate also represent your brand identity in some way. This leads to a stronger brand cohesion and leads to much more impact on the target audience. It leads to much better brand engagement.

They are more likely to remember your brand when they come across content that contains branded links rather than generic shortened links. 

Branded Links Increase Trust 

Another reason why branded links are more preferable to generic links is due to the fact that they increase consumer trust. They’re a crucial tool to solidifying your branding.

A generic shortened link looks just the same as any other link. There are really no characteristics to set it apart from other regularly shortened links. Thus, a reader has no way to know what it’s about or where it will lead to. 

Branded links fix this problem. 

The way you construct branded links makes it abundantly clear who the page is from and what it contains. This is why it’s a great choice for influencer marketing.

This instills a sense of trust in the reader and they are much more likely to click on your branded link rather than your generically shortened link. 

Since more people click on branded links, you’ll see more customers visiting your brand website and interacting with your content. 

Needless to say that when more people trust your links, more people click on them. This results in…

Increased Click-Through Rate

Branded links increase the click-through rate by 34%.

Thus, if you want to increase traffic, introduce your brand to more individuals, and thus, increase sales, you better get that custom domain. That’s because you’ll need it to generate all those branded links for your marketing campaigns. 

Trust us when we say that once you start utilizing branded links within your promotional campaigns, you won’t ever go back to using generic shortened links.

How to Construct a Branded Link?

There are a number of ideas that you can implement to create a branded link that works well for whatever your purposes are. 

First of all, you must define what that purpose or purposes are. 

• What is the link about? A product? A service? An offer? 
• Is it a limited-time offer? Can you highlight how long it’ll be up in the shortened link? 
• Is it only available in a certain geographic location? 

These are all questions you can ask yourself to determine what type of branded link you want to create. 

The custom domain will obviously be the first part of the shortened link and it should be something that accurately represents your brand. 

Once you’ve come up with an effective name for your custom domain, you can get it set up so that it can be used to construct branded URLs.

When it comes to the latter part, you can consider many different characteristics and traits that can be utilized to fill it up. Examples of such traits include: 

• Content type
• Geographical location 
• Product type 
• Service type 

And more. 

Conclusion 

Branded short URLs are incredibly useful, and it’s important to conduct the appropriate research to figure out how to use them effectively for your brand. 

In the end, you must identify how you can make consumers trust your brand so you have a better chance of them interacting with you. Branded URLs help out in this immensely and, thus, are an effective tool for increasing brand awareness and recognition. 

What branded URL shortener service do you use? Let us know in the comments section below.