In this day and age, you have to work harder to get your audience's attention. Native advertising can be a great part of your strategy – but only if you're doing it right.
Here are five common native advertising mistakes and tips on how to avoid them so you can ensure you're really getting the best bang for your buck.
Yes, you can absolutely be making the wrong kind of content without even realising it. Think about how your would-be customer would perceive your content when they're on the publisher's platform. In the best-case scenario, they'll find the content to be useful and informative, which will make them keep reading. If it isn't creating value for them, they're simply going to tune it out and all the work you put into your campaign will be for nought.
Remember that your content will be positioned next to the other content on the platform. It needs to fit in. If it doesn't match what's already there, audiences will tune it out in the same way they ignore traditional ads.
To avoid this, the key is to create content that's similar in style to what else is on the site and make it something that's valuable to your potential customer. Take a good look at what's already on the publisher’s platform and ensure that you're creating good quality content. That means creating headlines that actually reflect the body of the content, and offering ideas and guides that the customer will find valuable.
When creating any marketing campaign, you have to know just what you want to achieve from it. If you don't know that, it's going to be very difficult to create something that gives you what you're hoping for. That's the same when it comes to native ads too, but it's so easy to skip this step.
Without the right KPIs in place, you won't be able to measure whether your campaign succeeded or not. That's not going to help when you come to reconfigure the ad campaign or create a new one. You simply won't have the data you need to make smart decisions.
As such, ensure that you have very clear goals for any native ad campaign that you're creating. That way, you can start tracking the right KPIs. For example, if you're looking to increase user engagement, you'll be measuring the number of conversions or whitepaper downloads.
There are a lot of ways to create and use ads. Banner ads and native ads are highly popular ways of getting the word out about your business or product, but they're not the same. They actually use very different tactics. If you go about native ads in the same way you'd create banner ads, you're not going to get the same results.
Banner ads are, by their nature, quite in your face and intrusive. You want them to grab the attention of the customer. But over time, customers have learned to tune them out when they're browsing online.
A native ad should be created differently. When made well, it should blend into the publication's site seamlessly. Some marketers make the mistake of putting too much emphasis on grabbing attention but by designing a native ad that looks radically different from its surroundings, it ironically makes it more likely to be ignored.
The way to avoid this is to ensure that your ad blends in with what's already on the site. It's not about making a hard sell, it's about making content that customers will engage with.
Any good marketer knows about the customer journey and how it affects a marketing campaign. If your campaign isn't meeting your potential customers where they are, then they aren't going to pay attention to the campaign as a whole. For example, if your customer is at the top of the funnel, and your campaign is aimed at those at the middle or bottom, then it isn't going to make sense to them.
When creating native ad content, you want to ensure you're paying attention to where your customers are in the customer journey. When you're paying attention to this, it will shape your marketing and make it more relevant to those you hope to reach. That will ensure you get more clicks, sales, downloads, or whatever else you're aiming for. Have a plan for your native ads, and tailor them for the part of the customer journey that makes the most sense for your particular campaign.
You’re going to get better results if you concentrate on one stage of the buyer journey than you will with a campaign that tries to target everyone.
When you're creating your native campaigns, it’s important to not just count clicks but to pay attention to where those clicks are coming from. Are you seeing a huge amount of leads coming from a website that's irrelevant to the brand? If so, that's a cause for concern. If they're not coming from a source that makes sense, you're not going to see those leads ever convert.
If you do see this happening, you need to go back to your targeting options and make some changes. If you're not paying attention to this, you'll see that you're putting all that money into your campaign for minimal results. If you're on top of things though, that shouldn't happen.
These are some of the most common mistakes that you may be making with your native advertisements without even realising them.
When you start paying attention to these mistakes and correcting them, you'll soon see that your results will be much better, with much better overall engagement from your customers.
Story by Jenny Han
Jenny Han is a writer for Academized and Do My Assignment. She's an expert in marketing, especially in native advertising. She's also a writer for Ox Essays.
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