Links: The Foundation Of Everything Digital Marketing

Ajit Narayan Jul 04, 2022

The jury is out, and the verdict of Digital Marketing now is no longer a nice-to-have element in the media mix. It is a must-have. While the buzz around tools, tactics, channels, content, creativity and analytics is probably at an all-time, it is a good time to think about the foundational elements of a good digital presence. And mind you, this is not the messaging, creative, content or media. This is about how you are optimising your digital presence more effectively.

This article looks at the later, lesser talked about topic, as the former content is already making waves. What you share is only as good as how your share it.

If we remove all the hay from the stack and try to pin it down to the power of one idea. The source of how digital marketing is made to work. It all boils down to one innocuous element which many take for granted. The link. It is how all things digital are shared. Everything digital is collapsed into a link which then fetches, tracks, and attributes and works both ways. Leading the consumer to the content. And brand/marketeer to know what actions happened through it. Without the link. We would be in a zero digital presence where nothing is shareable.

So, there are two elements. One is the link itself. And second is the action of sharing. Here I would like to point out the four aspects that make what your better, more powerful, and multi-dimensional. It takes a bit of effort to organise yourself as a workflow, but once you get used it, you will never share it any other way.

Foundation one: This is about the presentation of the link. How it appears by default, whether you can customise the visualisation, customise the headers etc. And importantly, the link naming as well.

This is where you look at branding your link, creating a resolved link plus visual comes in. And this foundation applied to brand page shares dramatically improves the user experience of your shares.

Foundation two: Optimising third-party content links. Resorting to only self-created content signals boasting. Some go by the 4:1:1 rule as a guideline for a well-balanced content mix. Which says for every six posts on social media, four should aim to educate or entertain, one should be a soft sell and one a hard sell.

Rules aside. Well-managed brand pages have a mix of external and internal content. But external content or links, send traffic away from your own brand and content. And probably makes one think. Why am I giving traffic to others? Well, here’s where one should plan to smart link the shares to allow the consumer to come to your brand’s relevant content source from the external link.

Foundation three: Links need attribution. At any time, content is planned around some campaigns or topics and shared on multiple channels. The basic source attribution is obvious through Google Analytics. But then, that’s not all. How you organise your link, set up parameters (UTM and URI for the technically minded) organise and make attribution easy to understand and use. This is where social media marketers use tools to track the activity on links.

Foundation four: Links should be shareable from where they are accessed. Link sharing is a common behaviour. Whether it is to brand pages, communities or influencers… More often than not, one resorts to sharing via messages or email. This foundation is to help the users to see what’s shared and share directly from the place of sharing (email/messengers) Without losing the attribution. The ease of cross-over sharing makes the campaigns more reach as more people get prone to sharing.

Moral: It all boils down to the innocuous link and how we treat the link before we give it the wings to fly and amplify.

Whether we share links as is or load them up without overloading. It will be the most powerful element in digital marketing. As everything is in that link. Our choices are to make them work better and smarter for us as we attempt to gain more traction in our Organic Social Media Marketing.

*The author is Ajit Narayan, CMO, Socxly and Socxo