Best Practices for Hosted Files & Redirect Links

A common challenge marketers face is justifying marketing spend without a clear understanding of their return on investment.

If you are investing thousands of dollars in paid search, sponsored posts, and you want to know which channels are driving the most traffic to your site. If your team is investing resources to create content and collateral that they are using to convert Visitors to Prospects, you want to know how it's performing, and take action when someone engages with it.

Using Hosted Files to share content and engage Prospects

If you often send out white papers, ebooks, blog posts or any other content meant to target and convert Prospects to Leads, it's important to know how successfully they're performing. Hosting files on Insightly Marketing makes it simple to store your most up-to-date content in the cloud and measure Prospect engagement.

Even if you're new to content marketing, here are some simple steps and best practices for getting started developing, managing, sharing, and measure your success.

  1. Develop a broad range of content in multiple forms – written, audio, video – that best represents your business in a way your customers want to consume. This content should also be a mix of pieces that map to the stages of the buyer’s journey, as well as evergreen content - or content that never goes out of date. Check out this blog post on using Projects for content management.
  2. Load your content to Insightly Marketing and set Finish Actions to adjust the Prospect Score when someone downloads your content. Content that maps to later stages of your buyers’ journey should have a higher score (+20), whereas evergreen content or content that would appeal to Prospects earlier in the buyers’ journey should be scored less (+5).
  3. Create landing pages on your website for your high-value content like ebooks, webinar registrations, or white pages. Gate your content with a Form or Form Handler that converts Visitors to Prospects and either redirect them to another page where they can download the content, or use Form Handler Finish Actions to send the content to the Prospect via email. 
  4. Promote your content through emails, social media posts, and ads on your or third-party websites that drives visitors to your landing pages. Use Redirect Links (best practices below!) to track which channels are driving the most traffic to your site. 
  5. Monitor and analyze all interactions so that you can understand what content is actually being consumed, and at what rate. Listening, learning, improving and trying again is the key to acquiring potential customers and retaining existing ones.

Using Redirect Links to drive traffic to your site

The internet is full of links. Links to websites, links to landing pages, links to content we want to view. Part of measuring your marketing ROI is knowing which channels you're investing in that are driving the most traffic back to your website or to your content. 

Redirect Links are customized links can be used anywhere outside of your website to promote your videos, landing pages, events, and content. 

Once you’ve shared these links, Insightly can track the number of clicks they get to show how people are engaging with your marketing messages across all of your promotional channels.

For example: When we host a webinar, we need a certain number of registrants to justify the investment in time and energy. To reach this goal, each team promotes the webinar to their contacts by sharing a link the registration page. We want to reward the team that drives the most traffic, so we create redirect links for each team that all point to the same registration page, and we can then track how many clicks each link gets. 

Another example: We want to promote the same ebook across three different channels - social media, an email journey, and paid ads. We want to know which channel drives the most traffic so we can invest more in that channel in the future and invest less in the channels that are not as effective. We would create redirect links for each channel that all point to the same landing page where a Prospect could download the ebook. 

Here are some other best practices for using Redirect Links to measure and drive traffic to your site and content across all your marketing channels: 

  1. Ads on third-party sites - you may want to track a banner or ad to see how many prospects clicked and came to your site or downloaded your content.
  2. Social sharing - you may share a link on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and want to see how it performs.
  3. Links to files that you do not host - your website may link to a file on a third-party site. Custom redirects can point to them and show you how many visitors access the file.
  4. Calls to action in emails - if you design an email with multiple link placements to one call to action (buttons and hyperlinked text directing the reader to "download this ebook", for example), use Redirect Links to track how each individual link placement performs. These analytics will come in handy when designing future emails.

Hopefully now you have some ideas for how Redirect Links and Hosted Files can be leveraged to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. 

If you have a Support & Service Plan, your Customer Success Manager can help implement these solutions. If you do not have a Support and Service plan and are interested in additional support, contact sales@insightly.com

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