Native advertising can serve to reach various marketing objectives, including driving brand awareness, acquiring leads, increasing sales, driving app downloads, and more. Depending on the goal you set, you’ll need to pick different messaging and campaign content.
In this post, we’ll talk about native ads for lead generation. It’s both tricky and interesting to work on these ones. Advertisers need to balance between increasing traction and getting the right attention, which is never an easy task.
Before moving on to campaign examples, we’d like to remind you what differentiates a native ad campaign for lead generation.
What’s a lead generation native ad campaign?
A lead generation campaign aims at convincing your target audience to share their contact details with you in exchange for assets that they might want or need, such as exclusive content, ebooks, discount coupons, etc. The final goal of the lead generation process is to convert potential prospects into buying customers.
Being displayed across news outlets and online magazines, a native ad campaign with a lead generation objective should deliver targeted messaging while still arousing interest around the offer among wide audiences.
These ads sit neatly in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. However, it doesn’t mean they aren’t useful at the top of the funnel. Lead generation ads can be effective for both top- and mid-funnel. The key to success is to separate these campaigns and create dedicated assets for cold and warm audiences.
As for the best performing lead magnets on native, they’re quite similar to the assets that you might want to promote with paid social campaigns. Ebooks, discounts, special offers, and giveaways are widely used by native advertising professionals.
But there’s one lead magnet that performs particularly well as part of native ad campaigns – it’s a questionnaire. The idea is to promise a visitor to provide them with a quote, project estimations, free recommendation, or any other personalized solution after they answer a few simple questions on the topic. You capture a lead once this person leaves their email address or phone number for you to get back to them with the response.
6 Clever lead generation native ad campaigns
Let’s take a look at the most compelling native ad campaigns for lead generation.
Babbel for Business
Babbel for Business offers language learning programs for teams. You must have already seen Babbel’s ads distributed across Taboola and Outbrain publisher networks.
In addition to their typical campaigns that mainly aim at driving traffic to the Babbel website, the company has recently launched native ads to promote their B2B solution.
The main peculiarity of these new campaigns is their objective – this time, Babbel is generating leads. By offering an informative booklet for businesses, the company attracts managers that are potentially interested in their services. The educational lead magnet is a great way to generate interest around your brand as well as to drive your prospects further down the funnel.
It’s also worth highlighting that advertisers have done a great job when creating the headline. Instead of going after a more catchy option, they opt for a more descriptive approach, which allows them to filter out irrelevant audiences.
MIT Sloan Executive Education
The campaign introduces a non-technical data analytics program designed for business leaders.
This is a typical example of an educational lead gen campaign. A user gets interested in the MIT’s Business Analytics program, but it’s not likely that they will convert immediately after seeing the course description for the first time (there are always some reasons that make you bounce). To reach this person with a follow-up email chain and drive them right to the conversion stage, the company needs their email address. The brochure allows them to capture contact information and qualify potential buyers.
Blue Buffalo
The pet food manufacturer promotes a coupon code with their native ad campaign. All the visitor needs to do is to fill out the form with their contact details and additional information about their pet. The latter will help the Blue Buffalo marketing team to understand how they could improve their strategies.
Giving away coupons is maybe the most effective lead generation strategy. A targeted coupon issuance campaign will not only bring you lots of leads but also result in sales growth. Otherwise, why would people like to receive a coupon if they’re not going to make a purchase?
Zoovu
Zoovu is the AI-driven platform helping SaaS brands to increase sales by implementing a conversational search strategy.
Zoovu decided to jump into holiday advertising with a digital holiday playbook. The ebook provides guidelines for creating a holiday marketing plan that leads to increased conversions, sales, and revenue. As Zoovu’s target audience includes marketers, salespeople, and brand owners, it’s no doubt that the guide will hit the target.
Health Insurance Comparison helps people to cut their monthly expenses on health insurance, finding the most affordable covers in Australia.
The campaign includes an attention-grabbing creative and an article as a landing page. To catch people’s attention and entice them to click on the ad, advertisers used a sharp question.
There are a few questionnaires distributed across the page that play a part of lead magnets. Visitors are offered to quickly compare costs from multiple health funds by answering simple questions.
Edward Jones
Edward Jones is an investment company providing guidance for retirement, wealth management, insurance, etc.
The campaign is run through Dianomi, a native ad platform that focuses on financial and business publishers. This way Edward Jones ensures their native ads are shown only to the most relevant audience segments.
The company invites people to join a 45-minute webinar where they’ll share reasons and tips for revisiting financial strategies in times of crisis.
You see that the webinar topic is closely related to services that Edward Jones offers – this is a very important aspect for every lead-gen campaign. It’s not enough to just develop engaging content for wide audiences and expect these people will convert into customers. You need to be specific with lead magnets to capture qualified leads.
Now, it’s your turn to nail it
There’s no single formula for success, but these inspiring campaign examples should help you to come up with a tailored strategy that will meet your own business goals.
And remember – you can drive tons of leads, but your efforts make no sense if these people hardly ever convert. A good ROAS comes with the healthy balance between driving as many leads as possible and ensuring these leads have a great potential to become your customers.