Ecommerce

Native Advertising: How to Get Started

By Tinuiti Team

It’s becoming more clear now that native advertising is the next big thing. Perhaps more accurately, it’s the current big thing going on in enterprise-level digital advertising.

Be sure to check out future installments to our native advertising series, including:

 

Getting Started with Native Advertising

If you’ve decided to leverage your existing content marketing strategy for native advertising, you’re progressively ahead of the curve.

Since native advertising is fairly new to the digital space, there is really no absolute handbook on how to build successful campaigns and maximize their efficiency. Think of it as any traditional marketing campaign:

In theory, it’s as simple as that. In practice, you’ll be a pioneer in a relatively untested advertising frontier.

Figure Out Your Goal & Determine Your Audience

First, as with any advertising campaign, you need to figure out your end goal is.  Of course, you want to maximize revenue in the end but what will you need to leverage to do that? Are you trying to promote your brand as a whole? Are you promoting a specific product or a new service? Or are you promoting an event? It’s important to understand specifically what result you want to achieve so that you can tailor your native advertising campaign appropriately.

Determining your audience may not be so clear cut. First, you’ll find that your business’s target market may not align with the audience of a lot of the publications that accept mainstream native ads. An obvious downfall of native advertising is that they’re not nearly as targeted as traditional PPC text ads, where the intent of potential customers is much more clear, and its “display network” has far less reach. But that’s also comparing 2 entirely different beasts.

For example, let’s say you sell enterprise-level CRM software. A native ad on Facebook (ex. sponsored post) will probably not have as much traction as a native ad on Forbes. Spoiler alert: the most successful advertising campaigns are those that are targeted and relevant.

Create Content

native-advertising-howOnce you’ve figured out your goal and your target audience, you’ll need to start the execution. Before you actually begin sponsoring content, you’ll need to have a content marketing team to create it (depending on the publication website). The type of content you need will also depend on what publisher you want to advertise on. Content can range vastly from a simple tweet to a complex infographic.

If you don’t have the creative skill to create content on your own, you always have the option of hiring a freelancer or an agency. Some native ad platforms will actually create the content for you.

However, there are many great content creation tools you can use to help you do it on your own (it’s not as complicated as it seems!). Here are a few:

Youtube – This may be too obvious but Youtube is probably your biggest resource. Aside from being able to host and share your content there, you can find a plethora of how-to tutorials for just about anything. If you’re trying to learn Photoshop or iMovie, Youtube is probably your best bet.

Keek Or Vine – 30 second videos are very powerful forms of content nowadays. Concise entertainment will go a long with way marketing messaging. Keek or Vine will help you create and transform everyday video clips into engaging content. Mountain Dew has gotten into Vine ad spots, but they’re pretty underwhelming.

Visual.ly – People respond better to pictures than words, which is why infographics can be so popular. Visual.ly has a great database of infographics to help you brainstorm ideas. It’ll also help you create your own simple infographics.

These are just a few and there are a host of other content creation resources out there on the internet.

Find a Native Advertising Platform

Once you have content, you’ll need to a find a platform. A platform will basically help you manage all your content across all publishers from start to finish. More specifically, an open platform will allow you to use the same piece of content across different publishers. Here are a just a few popular options:

Nativo is an end-to-end native advertising platform for publishers. Nativo allows you to start, deploy, and manage native advertisement across different publishers. It also works across all types of devices, such as tablet, mobile and desktop.

Sharethrough is another open native advertising platform that works with brands to deliver content to publishers, from Forbes to People. They also have a proprietary data system that can provide you with detailed analytics and insights.

Mediavoice by Polar is an interesting platform to use because they can automatically adapt ads to a site’s look and feel. They also have a content creator, which you can use to create native ads in a web-based CMS.

You can use Outbrain in one of two ways: to engage people more on your own site or to distribute your content onto other sites. It uses their technology to make better recommendations to the people on these sites, which ultimately makes them stay longer and more engaged.

There are many different platforms out there and you’ll have to find one that more specifically caters to your goals.

Build Relationships with Publishers

Now that you’ve thought about potential platforms, you’ll also have to think about potential publishers as well. Reaching out to relevant publishers is key. The most engaging forms of content tend to be blog posts and videos – content that is instructive and unique. Publishing on theses types of sites, like BuzzFeed, can tend to be costly but more efficient. It really depends on your brand and the message you want to promote.

Regardless of your brand, native advertising can  be beneficial not only for promotion for products and services through, but it can also be used as a way to reinforce your brand messaging. If part of a longer term strategy, native advertising can be a powerful too to increase your brand relevancy.

Be sure to check out future installments to our native advertising series, including:

 

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