Native advertising is here to stay. That’s a fact. Numerous studies have shown that native ads are way more successful and competent in delivering results than display ads. There’s a significant tendency among online users to familiarize themselves with a product, service, or brand through content-related advertisements rather than through conventional ones.
Additionally, online consumers prefer viewing native ads almost 53% more than their display counterparts, which further translates into higher sales for offer owners as well as higher payouts for the affiliates. Now let’s recap on the key benefits of native advertising:
- Possibility of blending sponsored content into online spaces relevant to the consumer’s attention.
- Building up brand credibility by tying it to the most relevant content only.
- High click-rates.
- Non-disruptive nature of native ads.
Needless to say, native advertising sounds like an amazing deal, however deciding to dive into a deep pool of native dimensions requires a proven safety net. The possibilities are out there, but, it takes an efficient strategy to benefit from them, survive the struggle, and truly stand out in the crowd. Today, you will learn how. Let’s get to it then!
Know Your People, Show Some Empathy
The first step – and simultaneously the most crucial one – is understanding what your end product truly is. Ask yourself: what kind of audience do I wish to reach with my ads? What type of user could I convert?
As with the first stages of any other marketing content creation, native ads should have a clear objective set from the very beginning: either it’s signing up for a free trial, newsletter, downloading a software, buying a product, ordering a service, or paying for a subscription. Depending on the main purpose of your offer, different prep needs to be carried out.
For a positive and lucrative customer experience, you need to show some empathy as an advertiser too; you must remain customer-centric and try to get in the mind of a potential customer and keep focusing on that perspective.
Keep it Relevant
Once you have your audience all figured out, the time has come to create content for your native ads. Keeping it maximally relevant to whatever targeted audience you will pursue is the key to increased revenue and profitability.
Try to come up with the most engaging and exciting content possible to relate to users emotionally. Take on an educational approach or entertain through your creatives. You do not want to stand out too much though, always keep in mind the non-disruptive nature of native advertising – the bottom line here is to stimulate interest, not pose an interruption.
Then How Do I Amplify the Contents of My Ads with Native Advertising?
- Content is really important, but as an advertiser, you should never underestimate the power of solid, engaging advertising copy. Create compelling headlines, descriptions, and thoroughly search the web in order to find that one creative which will drive users to click through at a higher rate. Don’t spoil your content with an overly informative or revealing description though! Aim to draw in user attention with a catchy headline instead.
- Don’t take it too far – keep in mind that your native ads need to uphold the appearance of a classic ad, this is where you’re supposed to seek the potential.
- While testing, always base your performance analysis on whatever happens after the click. Such an approach will allow you to assess user engagement with the content you’re promoting after the visit, impression, or click to later adjust your scaling or retargeting strategy accordingly.
Keep it Fresh, Explore Your Options
Remember that online consumers are smart and if shown the same ads over and over again they will quickly realize that something’s amiss – and this is basically when you’re screwed. How do you prevent this from happening?
Focus on creating campaigns presenting different angles of the product or the service you’re promoting. Diversify your native campaigns both with the creatives and the advertorial copy to figure out what kind of content works best for your audience. What’s more, rotate your sources regularly so that your attempts seem fresh to the viewers.
Ad trackers offer broad reporting options for the advertisers to test different offers or lander angles. Voluum for instance, enables you to test them either manually or with machine learning algorithms. Test to find the most successful landing page and offer for a given audience
Follow the Steps and Measure Your Success
In order to draw conclusions from your testing efforts, you need to make sure you’re measuring your performance at all times. Not every platform that has traffic up for sale will provide you with decent reporting options and optimizing features. That’s why you need a dedicated tracker. Voluum will feel the gaps left by traffic sources’ poor reporting systems.
Additionally, make yourself a proud member of the top native advertising forums out there, seek guidance, sign up for demos, and learn from your fellow advertisers’ mistakes. Decide whether or not you’re willing to buy the traffic directly from an ad exchange or if you’d rather go for demand-side platforms that offer numerous ad exchange integrations, specialize in specific media types and provide extensive programmatic solutions for advertisers to benefit from.
Bet High on the Lander, Include CTA
Remember how I told you that what happens after the click is way more significant than the click itself? I still mean that. The success of your native campaign is 70% of what you’re showing to the user on the post-click level. Then again, appealing ad copy, eye-catching creatives, premium placements traffic, and optimization steps are all extremely important, but if you’re not able to hold on to a user landing on your pre-sell page you’ll probably going to see a negative ROI from the start.
That is also why the design of your landing page should be exquisite. As an advertiser, you have numerous options to explore out there – so again do your research and explore lander types to the fullest in order to find your initial testing base. Article lander to imitate a news article or scientific study? Sure, why not! Advertorial made to resemble news stories? Sounds great! Survey or quiz landing page to engage even more with the user? That’s a thought! VLS to force a sales message on a potential customer? Sign me up for it! As with your ad content before, make sure to keep the content and the type of your landing page relevant to the source on which you’re running.
Dazzling visuals you would run on Facebook may benefit from a different call to action and content than text-based search ads. And of course never dare to forget about a good, old-fashioned call-to-action implementation. You’ve come so far to elude the users up to this point, why lose them now? Remember, clicks can get expensive, so it’s worth to make them count and keep your paid ads profitable.
Consistency is the Key
We could also mention the patience as the key factor in making it with native advertising, but since we already recommended some board testing you’d probably figure the importance of it by now. Put your plans into motion, draw conclusions, make mistakes and learn from them!
It takes time to get to know your audience and your competitors. Aim at discovering which solutions work best for your native content, learn how to optimise and what to optimise with and how to successfully incorporate effective native as into different publisher’s or source’s designs, cultures, and audiences. A lot to do, right? Waste no time and get to work then, put your ideas into motion!
Summary
Welcome to the world of native! Done well, native advertising can be interesting, informative and sell a product or build a brand. Just remember that to make the most out of it, you need to consider its features, set clear goals, and be ready to do a lot of testing and optimization. The key to success is to fit your content seamlessly in the environment it appears in, without disrupting the user experience, and instead, adding value to it.
Now, it’s time to take our tips, twist them around, and develop unique native advertising strategies for your own business. And of course, measure everything with Voluum!
The times of intuition have passed, if they ever existed. Data-based approach is key. Everyone else is already using a tracker but you can grab the best one. Leapfrog your competition with reliable and feature-packed tracker! Get Voluum now!
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