What is native advertising?

Unlike more traditional advertising, native advertising focuses on the content of the ad versus the fact that it is an advertisement. It must be clearly labeled in order to maintain the integrity of the surrounding content and avoid conflict. it also has two adhere to the overall message of its home page.

Why does native advertising work?

Native advertising works because people don't realize that they are viewing ads. When people realize that they are viewing ads, the best native advertising continues to add value and assures people that even though the content is an advertisement, they will still receive valuable information from it.

Since native advertising is generally higher quality content as opposed to flashing, clickbait ad types, people are more willing to give your advertising a chance to add value to their lives and product consumption.

Who can use native advertising?

Almost every company can use native advertising in some shape or form. It's not tied to a specific demographic, medium, or strategy. Instead, it's dependent on the subject that you are covering and the location in which your native advertising is placed.

This makes native advertising both flexible and rigid at the same time. It's flexible because you can use it in a lot of different strategies in a lot of different ways. It's rigid because each ad needs to be specifically customized to fit with the flow of the entire webpage, social media feed, or other location that it's quietly blending into.

While the message, wording, graphics, or format may not change individually, the ad as a whole must change, depending on its final posting place. If it doesn't, instead of an even flow of information in which your ad is strategically placed, the effect will be jarring, disruptive, and overall unpleasant.

How can you leverage native advertising?

Using native advertising is not difficult. The general guidelines and best practices are the same across the board for all industries and almost all companies. Let's take a look.

General guidelines

We've discussed making your advertisements fit the pages, social media feeds or other environments that they're going to be placed in. The best way to do that is to take it on a page by page basis and talk to influencers directly.

In order to go about this, consider this three-step process.

1. Find the right platform for you and your customers’ needs.
2. Talk to the right people and ask to be on their platform.
3. Discover the right content and post your ads.

For example, if you are going to be placing an advertisement about a new hair coloring solution, it may be a good idea to reach out to hairdresser blogs and social media groups and ask about a small advertising deal.

Here's a longer example of how a company might go about native advertising.

A longer example

Let’s say that a company is advertising a new type of labeling system designed for small companies. These labels are easily scanned into a database, can be printed out on any common printer, and come in an assortment of customizable options. Because it's a niche product, companies may not be willing to invest in it, but crafters are, according to your data.

In this example, some of the platforms you made explore include Facebook, Etsy, small indie blogs, and other influencers who have large amounts of crafting supplies but lack a great way to organize them. one way to use native advertising is to reach out to these influencers and ask them if you can set up an ad deal with them.

Once you do that, you've got a great foundation in place to start creating and using native advertising. From here on out, it's going to depend a lot on the kind of content that the influencer using and the kind of content you want your ad to be in.

If you pair with a YouTube influencer, you're going to want some kind of video or visual content as your native ad as opposed to say a blog post. If you pair with a small company or individual who writes blogs on crafting, you're probably going to want a blog blurb.

Whatever kind of advertisement you create, make sure that it flows gently and smoothly into the surrounding content and that it is clearly marked as an advertisement in some way, shape or form.

If nothing else, this will make sure that some people will see your advertising and that you are not going to get in trouble for disguising your advertisement too much.

The importance of native advertising today

In today's aggressive marketing and sales world, native advertising has a lot of potential to bring your company's ads in front of the right people. Because this type of advertising offers real value, people are more likely to want to engage with it, even when they realize it is an ad.

This puts you ahead of your competition and enables you to spend your marketing dollars in more informed ways.

And that’s what we all want to do.