Native advertising is transforming the way consumers interact with ads. Instead of large displays pushing products on people, native advertisements blend in with content offering information, entertainment, and valuable solutions to people’s problems.
Use these ten tips to create a native advertising strategy that will delight and convert your audience in 2024.
What Makes Native Advertising Different?
Native advertising is an alternative to banner or display ads. With native advertising, your sponsored content meshes with the surrounding content for a seamless user experience. Native ads are less disruptive and provide a more positive customer experience.
Marketers are shifting to native advertising because it is more effective at reaching and converting your target audience.
Benefits of Using Native Advertising vs. Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertisements are losing their place in marketing as consumers grow tired of excessive banner and display ads. Native ads appeal more to marketers and consumers because they yield better results while leaving a positive impression.
Another benefit of native ads is that they are usually not hidden by ad blockers, which means you can reach more of your audience.
About 25% more consumers notice native ads than traditional ads. In addition, native ads create a more positive experience that increases brand affinity by 9%.
Because native ads act similarly to content marketing, your audience can share, comment, and engage with the ad, which boosts your visibility beyond the sponsored content’s location.
Native Advertising vs. Content Marketing
The main difference between native advertising and content marketing is that native ads are paid promotions, while content marketing is organic. However, native advertising can also be part of your content marketing strategy when you promote your content by paying for more visibility.
More than 82% of companies use content marketing, which means the internet is oversaturated with blog posts, videos, images, and other engaging content. For this reason, it can be difficult for marketers to cut through the noise and get their content in front of their target audience.
Since 90.63% of online pages don’t see organic traffic, marketers might invest in quality content that doesn’t yield any results because it is drowned out by other webpages.
Native advertising helps you move your content to the top of search results, social media feeds, and other websites, which means you can guarantee that you will get eyes on your content.
10 Ways to Build an Effective Native Advertising Strategy
These ten tips will help you develop engaging native advertising strategies with high conversion rates.
1. Create Specific Goals
Start your native advertising strategy by creating SMART goals. These are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals. These goals will give you direction for your native advertising strategy and provide benchmarks for success.
Some common content marketing goals that translate well for native advertising include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Attracting more traffic
- Generating more leads
- Increasing sales
- Improving customer loyalty
After deciding your overarching objective, use the SMART criteria to add a quantifiable target and timeframe for reaching that goal.
2. Understand Your Audience
To create an effective native advertising campaign, you need to first identify who you are trying to reach with your ads. To do so, use your SMART goals to determine which segment of your audience fits your objectives. You should identify where those consumers are in the marketing funnel, what their needs are, how much they know about your business, and how you can help them.
To find this information, collect first-party data through your website analytics, online research, and customer surveys. These resources all provide an inside look at the motivators behind your consumers’ behaviors.
When you create your native ads, use language that those buyers understand. Address potential buyers personally, and customize your content for their needs.
3. Establish Metrics
Your metrics tell you when you reach your goals. Without metrics, you will have no idea whether you are making smart advertising investments or achieving your target ROI. However, most marketers can’t rely on quantitative metrics alone for tracking their content’s success. Quantitative metrics are numbers, such as a dollar amount consumers spend, that you can insert into a formula to calculate a specific ROI.
It’s important to remember that the content marketing process is long, and a customer’s lifetime value is far greater than a single purchase. Therefore, a customer’s actual monetary value isn’t as easy to identify as tracking their purchases. It also includes positive feedback they leave, their touchpoints, and their loyalty, as all of these results can lead to more revenue over time. These are qualitative metrics and require different methods for tracking.
Some metrics you can use to monitor your qualitative native advertising results include:
- Engagement rate
- Net new leads
- Impressions
- Sales or conversions
4. Understand the Context
For your native ads to be effective, they must also be contextually relevant. For example, a native ad for yoga equipment will be most effective on a site that talks about yoga or sports. If you published your native ad about yoga on a financial news site, you wouldn’t connect with the audience on that site, even if the content was very high quality.
Understanding your context starts with finding a publisher that reaches your target audience. RevContent works with advertisers and publishers to ensure you find the right fit and have contextually relevant ads targeting your publishing site’s readers.
5. Create a Customer-Centric Strategy
Approximately 58% of businesses say that being customer-centric is the most important characteristic of digitally native culture. A customer-centric strategy has three parts: understanding your customer, personalizing your approach for your customers, and collecting feedback.
When you put these three pieces together, you have a framework for building a strategy that puts customers at the heart of your motives and actions. A customer-centric business increases customer satisfaction, engagement, and conversion.
6. Improve Your Browsing Experience
Approximately 25% of visitors will leave a page if it takes longer than four seconds to load. In addition, 46% won’t return to a website if it didn’t perform well. Therefore, every second your page takes to load also reduces your customer’s satisfaction rate.
To improve the customer experience with your native ads, use publishers, platforms, and content that loads quickly and efficiently. In addition, you will want all your content to be clear and optimized for different browsing experiences, whether your readers are on their smartphones or desktop. This means you want to minimize pop-ups, overlaying text, and difficult-to-read words.
7. Produce High-Quality Content
You will get out of your native advertising strategy what you invest in it. Advertisers that are willing to invest more into their advertising will be rewarded with more leads and positive feedback.
To see these positive results, create content that captures your readers’ attention, leads them to your call-to-action, and motivates them to accept your offer. This starts with quality content.
“Quality” is a subjective term and means something different for everyone. John Mueller from Google outlined some of the attributes of quality content, including:
- Layout and design
- Images and video
- Page load times
- Text quality
The more you invest in these areas, the more likely customers will be to respond to your offers.
8. Create Engaging Content
Approximately 80% of customers agree that a company’s brand experience is equally important as their products. Creating engaging content improves the brand experience.
You can enhance a customer’s experience through striking visuals, videos, quizzes, polls, and interesting content. Customers who have a positive experience are more likely to interact with the content through likes, shares, and comments. Tracking these interactions is another way to measure your engagement rate and assess the effectiveness of your native ad.
9. Capture the Reader’s Attention
Paying for your ad’s placement doesn’t guarantee clicks. If you want to turn those extra eyes on your content into quality leads, you can start with capturing their attention through headlines.
The most successful headlines are two to seven words long, although headlines between six and fifteen words also perform well on occasion. You should also keep them simple enough for readers to understand just by glancing at the text.
Some of the most popular types of headlines include:
- Listicles
- How-to articles
- Personal experiences
- Reader-centric titles
- Educational content
- Statement headlines
In addition to your headline, create snippets, subheadings, and images for the publisher’s site to attract readers before you wow them with your content.
10. Keep the Big Picture in Mind
All these strategies have one common thread: optimizing the customer experience. Your native advertising strategy isn’t about a single ad or making individual sales. Rather, your ads are part of a larger objective. Your ultimate goal is to cultivate a positive relationship with your audience so they continue purchasing from you, promoting your brand, and leaving with a positive impression.
To maximize the return from your native ads, focus on the larger strategy. You will see better results when you also invest in lead nurturing strategies and open channels for your readers to submit feedback so you can continually optimize your native advertising strategy.
Time to Optimize Your Native Advertising Strategy
Are you getting the best possible results from your native advertising? When you partner with RevContent, you have access to advertising experts who can help put your ads in front of your target audience in a seamless user experience.
Contact us to learn more about our native advertising services.
