Let’s be real: traditional forms of advertising aren’t as effective as they used to be. Most adults today have an ad-blocker on their browser, so it’s safe to say that your display ads aren’t reaching their full potential. Queue native advertising. In order to reach your target audience, it’s important to incorporate a successful native advertising strategy into your marketing plan.
Let’s continue to be real: native advertising works. When consumers see an ad that blends seamlessly with the content around it, they’re more likely to trust the ad and pay attention, thus yielding more clicks and sales.
Getting Started With A Native Advertising Strategy
With a market lead as one of the most effective lead-generation tools, surpassing traditional advertising, native ads were expected to reach $52 billion in spending in 2020.
When considering your strategy, it’s important to note:
- Who your audience is
- What you’re looking to achieve (leads, sales)
- What content will be most beneficial
- Which platforms to use
- How you’ll measure success
What It Takes For A Successful Native Advertising Strategy
Beginning a new strategy is scary, especially if you’ve nailed what you’re doing right now. Luckily, native ad campaigns are quite simple and don’t require a large upfront budget.
Let’s discuss what it takes to create a successful native advertising strategy:
Setting Campaign Goals
As anything in life, you need to set realistic goals. Be clear and specific on what you’re looking to achieve with your campaigns, such as:
- Generating leads
- Increasing sales
- Building an email list
- Reducing bounce rate
- Getting more website visitors
- Creating brand awareness
Once you’ve described your goals, make your campaign goals specific. Yes, you want more leads- but how many? This is the time to utilize SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Define Your Audience
Now that you’ve set your goals, you need to define who you’re going to be marketing to. You might have an idea of the consumers you’re looking to reach, but native ads are special in that they can show your content to people who have never heard of you before, but are open to learning more.
Our suggestion is to keep the targeting to a minimum to start. Going in with a clean slate will allow the ad to tell you who’s interested in your product, rather than you tell the ad. This opens to demographic a bit and will allow the data to show who’s responding to your efforts. As you begin to collect information, you can gear your targeting towards specific demographic, psychographics, and geographics.
Choosing The Right Publishers
Native advertising platforms often provide access to tons of publisher website that push native ad campaigns. When coming up with your strategy, you may steer towards news outlets. Whichever route you do go, ensure that they’re a good fit for your campaign. Take a look at the size of the audience you’re able to reach through the publisher, as well as the relevance to your brand. You want your ads to fit the content they’re surrounded by.
As always, pay attention to the stats and tweak as you go.
What’s Actually Working?
Content, content, content. The core of any strategy. Well, surprise! Not native advertising. We’re used to being in the mindset of the advertiser- but we need to make the shift to thinking like the consumer. What would appeal to you?
Aim for content that provides value, is relevant, and informative.
Creating Attractive Creatives
Create, creating, creative. Sorry, but it’s important! Now that you’ve identified what kind of content you’re going to create, it’s time to create the ad! This is where we introduce titles and thumbnails. These two elements are the most important part of your ad. Without a captivating title and thumbnail, you’re not going to grab the readers’ attention.
This is a great time to play with A/B testing, experimenting different combinations to find what really works.
Defining Your Budget
Let’s go over the basics here.
CPC: cost per click
- The amount you spend each time someone clicks on your campaign ad.
What’s your ideal CPC? Do you know? If you do, great! If not, identify what is ideal for your overall budget.
As a tip, we’d like to add that you can spend as low as $50 a day and yield great results. If you’re really looking to get the best results, our suggestion is to aim for a high CPC to begin. This will place your ad in front of more people and will provide you with more data to optimize.
Measure and Move Accordingly
To be totally blunt, native advertisements aren’t to be left alone. It’s required to continue monitoring your campaigns to ensure they’re achieving the goals you’ve set in place.
Be sure to look at your data daily. Come to conclusions and move forward accordingly. If things aren’t working out the way you’re expecting, switch it up. Circling back to what we’ve already said, utilize A/B testing. You can try different combinations of headlines, images, and copy. Keep working and tweaking to perfect the most effective combination for your campaigns.
With a native advertising strategy in place, you’re on the path towards success. Continue implementing these 7 tips to improve brand awareness, generating leads, and making sales!
