Native advertising is something we’ve been focusing a lot on recently, and it isn’t for no reason. Here at Neil Walker Digital, we have the talent to sense when something big is going to take over the market, and with native advertising, it’s definitely something that’s going to explode.
Don’t just take our word for it, the proof is easy to see on the majority of websites. Recently, websites such as Twitter, Facebook and even Buzzfeed have been showcasing promoted content. Here’s the thing though, other than the words ‘promoted content’, you would have no idea that the content is someone elses.
It isn’t that native advertising has just appeared out of nowhere. You’d go onto a website and be confronted with a banner ad which showcased a product. At one time this form of advertising was acceptable, and people would actually click on them. The market has now changed, and people no longer want to be faced with advertisements that scream ‘BUY BUY BUY’.
Another thing that’s a massive drawback with banner ads is how your intended audience views them. You would have to identify the correct website that your audience would go on and you would then pay to take up that space on the website. If a person isn’t interested in your brand, your banner ad will simply be ignored.
This is where native advertising comes into the picture:
Advertising that isn’t quite advertising
This is one of the reasons that so many companies are starting to embrace native advertising. Being able to sell your brand to a person without them even realising it’s happening is an effective technique. That’s what native advertising is about.
If you don’t know what BuzzFeed is, it’s a website that showcases interesting articles that are relevant. It’s the company that made lists such as ‘top 15’ a well recieved topic. Check out this article without looking at who wrote it. It reads like any other article you’d find on BuzzFeed. If you then look at the top and bottom of the page you’ll notice it says that the Post Office has written and paid for it to be on the website.
Without it being shoved into your face, you have just read an article that has a purpose to entertain the reader, effectively enticing them to visit their full website. It’s easy to see how this is possible, especially if you read all the way through the article.
If you were to see this article on the homepage of BuzzFeed, you would instantly think that it’s simply another article created by them. It follows the same format and humour like every other article on the website, allowing it to viewed by as many viewers as possible.
It’s truly a great way to create a relationship between your brand and the potential consumer. When they see that you have created a quality piece of content they find interesting or relate to, it’s more likely that your website will be something they visit on a regular basis.
This is just one of the reasons that native advertising will be one of the biggest things to take over marketing. If some of the biggest social media companies are already embracing native advertising then what’s to stop everybody else?
Precision targeting
As we mentioned previously, banner ads are notoriously tough to target your audience. Sure, if you manage to get on the right website you can do well, but there are much better ways of getting to your audience.
When you produce a piece of promoted content, the majority of social media websites allow you to target your ideal audience to the finest of details. Whether it be interest, gender, geography, or even keywords, whatever you choose can mean that users can view the content you’ve produced.
It’s easy to see why this is just so popular. Never before has there been a way to target your audience without investing a lot of time, effort and money in research. Sure, you still need to work out who it is you want to target, but you don’t have to do the hard work of actually sharing your content.
Superb shareability
Speak to anyone that produces content on a regular basis. When you ask them what the most satisfying part of their job is, I guarantee that someone will explain that when a piece of their content shares well, it means a lot.
It isn’t just satisfaction that’s created when a piece of content gets shared a lot. Your brand recognition is drastically increased, which is something that every business should strive to achieve.
I recently wrote an article that was shared incredibly quickly. Over the next few days it still racked up the shares steadily until it eventually died down. Why was this? Someone was that impressed with the article that they featured it on their website, which a lot of people visited on a regular basis.
Every piece of native advertising you create should try its best to do this. It’s honestly the most shareable form of content you can create, so as long as you spend the time and effort in ensuring it’s good quality and relevant, you should have no problem in creating a trending article.
With all of this, coupled with the fact that you can directly target the ideal audience that would be interested with what your content says, if it doesn’t get shared a lot then it hasn’t had the time and effort it requires.
Access the mobile audience
Something that a lot of businesses have struggled with is meeting their mobile audience as well as their computer audience. Of course, banner ads were a popular choice to advertise their brand, but they simply wouldn’t always translate on to a mobile device.
The majority of people use their smartphone on a regular basis. That much technology has been put into them that they’ve become portable computers that a person can hold in their hand. People use them for online banking, shopping, gaming, or simply browsing their favourite website.
As a piece of native advertising sits on a website with the intention of being perceived as a standard piece of content, it will be mobile compatible with the rest of the website. One of the main things to bear in mind is, with native advertisement, you should want to attract people to your website, which means that it needs to be mobile compatible.
More room for innovation
With banner ads, you were simply stuck with the dimensions of the website. It would typically consist of your website name and a drawing or image of some kind. You could create a fantastic design, but after a person is browsing the 15th website that has a banner ad, it isn’t likely to be noticed.
With native advertising, you can go as mad as you like. Whether it be interesting video content, a unique animation or a poem about what you did last summer, as long as it entertains and persuades people to visit your website, it’s a successful piece of native advertising.
Channel 4 has a great example. Utopia is a TV series shown on Channel 4. Following the release of the second season, a series of blogs were released that revolved around a game which ties into the series.
The flash game and the story have become so popular that even though the second series has already started, they have released new levels, and intend on releasing more. It’s a brilliant form of native advertising, and it has even been utilised so that even mobile devices can run it.
Of course, you don’t have to make anything as complicated as a flash game. As long as the content catches your audience’s eye instantly, then it has done the job it was intended for. Don’t worry about getting too creative, as more often than not that can work in your favour.
It can work on so many different platforms
When creating any form of advertising, not just native, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only advertising on a single platform. Banner ads work well on a website, but wouldn’t be well utilised on a broadsheet newspaper, especially when it costs a lot of money.
A popular form of native advertisement is to create a guide. Say your business focuses around food, then a guide to steak would be suitable. It could be an image with all the different ways you can cook steak, or with different meats you can use for steak. As an image, it’s incredibly adaptable, with it working on a physical paper as well as on an online format.
Although, through the use of websites, a business entices a person to invest in their brand, more often than not a person needs a good reason to go through the effort of actually going on your website. You can’t simply expect them to go with their own will, especially if you aren’t someone that they’re familiar with.
By creating something both unique and interesting, it’s more likely they’ll remember you. As long as your business’s name and website is somewhere on the page (without being in a viewer’s face), you’ll be sure to increase web traffic.
Turn potential visitors into regulars
Any good website should have either a blog or news section that’s updated on a regular basis. A person isn’t going to revisit your website if you have the same content all of the time, and it can be tough to ensure your onsite content is regularly updated.
When you create native advertising, it’s essential it leads the audience to your website somehow. Once they’re on your website, your content should be there to ensure that they become a repeat visitor. By building up your regular visitors, it’s more likely you’ll get more shares.
Try and bridge the gap that other websites aren’t so that people will definitely revisit. People visit BuzzFeed on a regular basis to kill time reading entertaining subjects, and people visit YouTube to be entertained by useful and interesting video content. When you see the content your website produces, what is it you can do that they don’t?
As soon as you figure that out, you’re destined for success. As your websites gets more and more visitors, you can reduce your native advertising as people will know you by name anyway. People will instantly share your content as they are loyal fans, meaning you save a lot of money.
This is much further down the line of course, and you need to make sure your business creates unique native advertising and interesting articles that can eventually result in this outcome.
Native advertising: It needs you and you need it!
It isn’t hard to express just how valuable native advertising can be for a business. Being able to reach an audience that would normally never be accessible for you is something that should never be ignored. Native advertising can be just the thing that brings your brand into the public’s eye, and isn’t that something that every business aims for?
Native advertising may only be a recent innovation, but it has already become a keyword that businesses are focusing around. Yet again, quality content is the king of advertising, and this is something we focus on here at Neil Walker Digital Group.
We have numerous articles about native advertising and quality content creation in our blog, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
What did you think of this blog? Do you think that native advertising will continue to grow and become even more popular? Are there any good examples of native advertising that you think are worth mentioning? Get involved with the conversation on Twitter – @theukseo, we’d love to hear you views on this subject.