Over the weekend, I suggested to a client that they purchase an additional URL for a promotion to go to a specific landing page of their site.
“We can have more than one?” she asked.
Yep.
As a small business, one of the cheapest investments you can make (approximately US$10 for a year) would be to purchase an evocative URL (the stuff between the ‘www’ and the ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ or ‘.whatnot’) and forward it toward the page you want folks to reach.
Another client, a restaurant, uses “a Regular place” in their marketing campaign, so in addition to the traditional www.[restaurantname].com, we purchased that tagline as a URL that points to our home page.
Additionally, we realized that when people called to ask us where we were located, we always found our employees telling folks, “at Forum and Nifong on the south side … behind Walgreen’s”
Always … the same … “behind Walgreen’s.”
Can you guess what our next twenty bucks purchased and what URL we put on the big coupon we include with those new resident ‘welcome to the community’ baskets?
Last week, when I spoke in Champaign-Urbana about practical applications of social media, I ended my talk with three slides worth of takeaways. I wanted to give them more, but I only had half an hour, so I directed them to the Social Media tagged posts on this site.
I didn’t say, “So, go to the daily blur dot com slash tag slash social dash media.”
I simply put the following up on screen:
Buy memorable URLs for different purposes – point your users where they want to go.
Follow up to make sure that once they arrive to your online portal that they can easily pick up the scent trail.
Make the landing page relevant to the URL or marketing materials.
It has always surprised me that companies purchase billboards on the side of the highway and put their long, boring, never-gonna-remember web address on it. If I am driving, I will have to wait to get home to look up the website and unless I write it down I won’t ever remember. Items like that only stay in our short term memory for a couple seconds unless they are transferred to long term.
Have you ever seen a billboard that has made you go to the website when you get home?
(Assuming you don’t whip out a cell phone and look it up on the spot, and having a mobile compatible website is an entirely different blog topic.)
I think it would have to be a short and memorable URL, but I can’t think of an instance where I was interested enough. And I love advertising…
Great idea Tim. I do this with about 12 URLs right now. It’s a great (and cheap) way to track and get people to the right place.
Great suggestions, Tim. Customers who remember a domain thingy (name) based on a particular promotion or coupon are looking for that exact coupon or piece of information when they land on that page. Why direct them to a page where they have to look for what you’re trying to sell them? Leading customers to a page that talks specifically about a promotion you’re advertising only pleases their sense of needing to know more.
Another thought for you. When you use separate domain names, you can measure how a particular ad/promotion/event/message is working for you… in other words if you use one domain name on a billboard and another domain name in a radio ad, you can measure which method is working better. Think I should write a little webby blog post about this? Hmm?
Keep the good stuff coming!