It’s obvious that traditional forms of advertising are not as effective as they used to be. Statistics show that about 80 percent of the adults in the United States use at least one ad-blocking method. This means that you’re not getting their attention if you’re using standard display ads.
To reach your target audience, you’ll be required to integrate a native advertising campaign for better performance marketing. But what is native advertising? It’s a paid digital advertising that’s designed to imitate a publisher’s overall content. It doesn’t stand out as an ad, but instead fits “natively” with the form and function of the channel it appears.
Native advertising has left traditional forms of advertising biting the dust and risen to the top of advertising in the digital marketing environment. Its super power is its unique ability to camouflage its way into the customer’s mind and hearts. It does this without interfering with their digital experience.
How to Enhance Performance Marketing With Native Advertising?
People are used to seeing advertisements everywhere whether online or offline. Actually no, they’re not just used to them. They’re fed up, so much so that they have become somewhat blind to advertisements.
This can be attributed to the fact that ads are interruptive and unwanted. They get in the way of consumers engaging with the content that they’re interested in.
People tend to “tune out” all the normal ads. So how do you get their attention? You can’t just yell at them with brighter colors and greater discounts as it won’t work. You do it differently by showing up where potential clients don’t expect to find your ads. Do it in a way that focuses on a relevant subject, message, or an interesting narrative.
In this article, we focus on how you can enhance performance marketing with native advertising.
Set Campaign Goals
Like all types of marketing, it’s important that you start building a native advertising strategy with goal setting. You must be clear about what you want to achieve with your native advertising. Here are some of the typical campaign goals that you can set:
- Lead generation
- Boosting sales
- Improved web traffic
- Improved brand visibility
You can think of your brand’s goals as performance marketing goals that use content to drive conversions. You can also think of them as awareness goals that look at how many people view your content and how much time they spend doing so.
No matter how you describe them, you should make your native advertising campaign goals more specific. Note that it’s not enough to aim at getting more newsletter subscribers. You must also know how many subscribers you need and set a deadline for reaching that goal.
Define Your Target Audience
The next step should be for you to define your target audience for your products or services.
Based on your buyer personas, you must have an idea of the kind of people that you want to reach. Narrowing down your target audience is important if you’re to run an effective native advertising campaign.
Sometimes users ignore both display and native ads when they find them irrelevant. That’s because such an ad can be frustrating if it keeps following a target audience that has no use for it.
Let’s take an example of a dog food brand that keeps targeting its native ad campaign toward a non-dog owner. Such a strategy will not bring desired results. Thus, it’s important that you invest time and other resources in conducting regular market research and data analysis. Data-driven marketing will ensure that you understand your audience and refine your target demographics.
It’s also important that you start by targeting a small group of the target audience. This will help you to see who’s responding to your campaigns in marketing. As your advertising strategy progresses, you can start doing ads that target:
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Location
- Buyer intent
This will serve to ensure that you reach out to the right people with the right content and at the right time.
Choose the Right Channels
It’s important that you choose the right channel if you’re to enhance your performance marketing strategy. That’s what will make it easy to target your ideal clients.
Remember that you get to select your target audience through various channels or a single channel. This must be based on the kind of goals that you have set for your native advertising campaigns.
To get the right channel, think of the size of the audience that will potentially view your content. Then look at the relevance and whether your channel of marketing’s content and audience demographics match the audience that you want to reach.
Keep in mind that there’s filtering available for the channel to help you decide where you can display your native ads. You can target publishing channels by location, device, and a lot more. When your campaign starts running, be sure to pay attention to your statistics and track progress.
Content Creation
The main challenge with content creation for native advertising campaigns is that ads are curated for particular channels with a specific aim for the target audience. As a result, this content ceases to be editorial content.
Native advertisements are sales oriented. As such, you need to have expert copywriting skills that will convey a message that spurs viewers to take the necessary action. You must also be able to create content that aligns with the style and language of the editorial content of your preferred channel.
You must also remember to create content that camouflages itself within the normal content. In the same breath, your content marketing must be able to invoke a specific call to action within a consumer’s mind.
Manage Budgets and Track the Campaigns
You may think that the most difficult part is over, but it actually begins here. It’s not enough that you put your native advertisements out there. You must also monitor the campaigns to ensure that you’re achieving your goals.
Check your marketing report daily to confirm whether or not things are working out as they should. Trading desks are a great system to track your campaigns across multiple networks. They also produce more insights compared to regular key performance indicators like click through rates (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).
A trading desk enables you to analyze engagement metrics like insights and impressions. You also get to analyze customer data, campaign data, and third-party activity data to effectively perform end-to-end campaign management.
Conclusion
Native advertising is an exciting opportunity for brands to drive traffic and increase revenue. They get to do this through the strategic placement of native advertisements.
Brands can unlock a new advertising method with unbridled potential by leveraging native digital advertising. It enables you to give clients a smooth browsing experience. They can also view your ads not as an obstacle but as added and valuable information.
FAQ Questions
What are performance marketing strategies?
These are types of online marketing where a brand pays an affiliate for performance-based results. An affiliate gets paid for every lead, sale, and action that they take as a type of marketing.
Why do marketers choose native advertising?
It’s because native advertising has the ability to give brands the chance to tell their story. It also allows them to build a relationship with their clients. Apart from that, native ads are highly engaging and suited to mobile devices.
What are examples of performance marketing?
Performance marketing is made of various types of marketing. A brand can decide that only one type of marketing is appropriate for their business while others may use multiple types. Native advertising is one example. There’s also affiliate marketing, social media marketing, and sponsored content.
