Native advertising is paid media designed to match the content of a media source. An example of mobile native advertising would be paid video content on the Youtube app. This media is designed to match the visual design and function of natural content, appearing in your feed of recommended videos.
When thinking about your native advertising strategy, consider:
- Who your audience is
- What you want to achieve, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or achieving sales
- What content will help you meet your goals (think interesting, valuable, and relevant, rather than hard sell)
- Which platforms you’ll run your native ad campaigns on (such as publisher sites or social media)
- What type of native ad campaigns you’ll run (content discovery, in-feed ads, recommendation widgets, video campaigns, paid search)
- How you will measure success
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Native Advertising Statistics
Before we look at some of the best native advertising examples (and a rogue’s gallery of some of the worst), let’s acquaint ourselves with the state of the native advertising landscape:
- Almost half of consumers have no idea what native advertising is
- Of those consumers who do, 51% are skeptical
- Three out of four publishers offer some form of native advertising on their sites
- 90% of publishers either have or plan to launch native advertising campaigns
- 41% of brands are currently using native advertising as part of wider promotional efforts
Types of Native Advertising
Although native ads appear to be part of the overall web content, there is still sufficient room for publishers to display their native ads in different forms. Here are some of the most popular ways to show native ads:
- Content Recommendations : These are native ads that appear as recommended content and articles. They usually appear below or in the middle of the article you are currently reading.
- In-Feed Advertisement : These are native ads that appear like usual social media posts when you are scrolling down your newsfeed. They are widely used by platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
- Search and Promoted Listings : These native ads appear right at the top of your search engine results when you are looking for a particular service or product. They may also appear in the sidebar.
This guide shows you how to get started with your native advertising strategy.
5 Steps to a Successful Native Advertising Strategy
Trying out a new marketing strategy is sometimes daunting, especially if you’ve established your current approach. But it’s easy to get started with native ad campaigns, and you won’t have to blow a hole in your budget to do so. Here are the steps you need to follow:
1. What are Your Goals ?
Start by defining your goals and objectives with your marketing and advertising activity. and like all marketing, building a native advertising strategy starts with goal setting. Be clear about what you want to achieve with your native ad campaigns.
Typical goals include:
- Generating leads
- Getting more sales
- Acquiring newsletter subscribers or site members
- Boosting website traffic
- Increasing brand visibility
Now that you know where you want to go, find out how much you can spend to get there.
2. Who Do you Want to Reach?
Just Ask yourself, Who is your ideal buyer ?
And then, the next step is to define the audience you want to target. You may have some idea of the people you want to reach, based on your buyer personas.
This is a good starting point, but native ads can also showcase content to people who’ve never heard of your brand, but who are open to reading helpful information involving it.
3. How Do you Want to Reach your Audience?
This is the big one. Plan the campaigns you want to run through the year. We’re talking big picture here, so you don’t have to get into specifics about messaging and content, but set the timelines and budgets for each campaign.
You also need to consider which platforms and formats to use for your native ads as well as the theme and goal for each campaign.
4. Select the Right Publishers
Platforms such as Taboola give you access to thousands of publisher websites that run native ad campaigns. As part of your native advertising strategy, you might choose to work with traditional or new-media publishers, or a mix of both. What’s important is that they’re a good fit for your native ad campaigns.
To establish this, look at reach: the size of the audience that could potentially view your content. Also look at relevance: whether the site’s content and audience demographics match the people you want to reach.
5 of the Best Native Advertising Platforms for Publishers :
- Outbrain : is one of the leading native advertising platforms used by some of the top publishers including BBC and The Guardian. The ad network allows publishers to access top DSPs through programmatic native ad demand.
- RevContent : According to the ad publisher’s website, among all native ad networks, RevContent offers 250 billion unique content recommendations per month and has partnered with a number of advertisers and publishers including Forbes and Wayfair. The advertising network provides marketers with a self-service feature, so they are well-positioned to display native advertising according to their business needs.
- Taboola : Apart from Outbrain, if you are searching for a reliable native ad platform, then you would have heard about Taboola. It can be a great option for bringing in traffic and page views. It is used by The Huffington Post, USA Today, and other top publishers. Eligibility criteria requires traffic of more than 1 million page views.
- Yahoo Gemini : is one of the top ad platforms in the United States, Yahoo Gemini serves native advertising for some of the top brands including Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, and Huff Post. You can choose between a wide range of native ad formats including image ads, app install ads, video ads, carousel ads, Yahoo Mail ads, and Moments ads.
- Nativo : Although you may not have heard of this platform, if you are an ad publisher for a media website then Nativo can be a great alternative. This particular ad network has served native advertising for Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Inc and doesn’t impose any traffic restrictions.
5.Track, and Test
Whether you’re running a native advertising agency, or going it alone, creating an effective native advertising strategy isn’t ‘set it and forget it.’ It’s essential to monitor your native ad campaigns to ensure they’re achieving your goals.
Check data daily, especially at the start, so you can experiment if things aren’t working out the way you want. You can A/B test headlines and images, for example, to get the most effective combination for each campaign.
Follow these five steps, and you’re set for a successful and effective native advertising strategy for improving brand awareness, attracting leads and making sales. Get started with Taboola’s native advertising.
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