Advertising can take on many forms. When you’re trying to gain traction for a blog or make sales, you may come across native advertising.
What is native advertising?
Let’s find out.
Define and Know Your Audience
The native advertising definition that is most common is: an ad that matches the media format of your page. The ads match the look and feel of the page similar to how Facebook melds advertisements on your page so that it looks just like a real post.
If you’re learning how to succeed in advertising, you need to define and know your audience.
When you’re able to keep a pulse on your audience, you’re able to sell to them better. The first step is your audience.
Sit down and do the following:
- Define your audience by creating buyer personas. These personas aim to mimic the consumer. You can determine the consumer’s age, income, profession and pain points. Learn your audience’s needs and wants. What challenges do they face? How does your product help improve the consumer’s life in some way?
- Find your audience by learning what channels they’re on most often. These channels may be social media, or they may be on popular industry blogs. When you know where your audience “spends time,” you can serve them much better.
You’ll use these online platforms where your audience spends time to start purchasing ads. Create landing pages that push the consumer to make a purchase, and implement multiple forms of ads using:
- PPC
- Retargeting
- Audience filters
- Data layers
Once you’ve spent time and have ads in place, it’s time to set goals for your campaign. It’s one thing to know how to succeed in advertising, but it’s another thing to put everything in practice to generate sales.
Set Goals for Your Campaigns
Native advertising can help you meet your goals, but you need to use each campaign to reach different goals. A few of the goals that you may have for your campaign are:
- Increase brand awareness and build trust
- Achieve a certain click through rate on your creatives
- Achieve a certain conversion rate on your landing page
- Reach a certain number of potential prospects per day
- Earn a certain revenue for each prospect that clicks on an ad
- Retarget the prospect in the future to drive sales
- Retain or regain former customers
Every campaign is different. You’ll want to meet with managers, marketing and sales teams to determine the goals and objectives for your campaign. The goals can and will change over time.
Once you know your goals, you need to track your success through your campaign. Tracking the results of your campaign allows you to make key changes to a campaign and find areas of the campaign where performance is below expectations.
Be prepared to revisit the goals of your campaign and be ready to make new goals in the future. No campaign will perform or be relevant forever.
Measure Your Results
Results are everything. You need to be realistic and understand that the majority of people that click on one of your ads will not make an immediate purchase. But you do need to measure your results, which include:
- Clicks on ads
- Number of ad views
- Clicks on different creatives
- Performance of different creatives
- Revenue for each dollar spent on advertising
You’ll also want to see what happens after a prospect lands on your landing page. Will the prospect:
- Click deeper into your funnel?
- Bounce, leaving the page?
- Make a purchase?
Ads may perform very well and drive traffic to an offer. The main problem is that traffic without sales means nothing. You need the people that click on ads to take some form of action, and if they’re not taking action, you need to look at the content that you create.
Perhaps the content doesn’t have a clear call to action, or maybe its missing high-converting copy and you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue.
Spend a lot of time measuring your results so that you can make key changes to reach your campaign’s goals.
Create Content That’s Engaging
Native advertising is one of the best ways to engage your audience. Advertising doesn’t always hinge on making a sale: you can advertise to build your brand. Awareness is one of the most powerful forms of advertising, even though it doesn’t generate direct sales all of the time.
Creating engaging content, and driving traffic to these pages, can make you an authority in your field.
When you’re an authority, people will trust you and your brand. Trust is what Elon Musk uses to make sales. Branding is a long-term form of advertising that has the potential to generate short- and long-term sales.
Your ads can also be considered content, and you should be using ads of various formats:
- Text
- Images
- Video
When you create ads that hit on the pain points of the viewer, there’s a higher chance that they’ll interact with the ads and your brand.
Ads are the first step in the marketing process, but what happens when the consumer clicks on the ad?
Will the person be brought into your sales funnel? Will the person land on:
- Well-written landing pages that drive direct sales?
- A page to download a free offer in exchange for an email signup?
- A social media page or video?
No matter where the traffic is funneled to, it must lead to something that is engaging and excites the prospect. If you fail to engage and use your advertising dollars to drive some form of action, you’ll be missing out on revenue and branding.
Conclusion
What is native advertising? It’s one of the most powerful forms of marketing to drive traffic to your site or buyers to your offer. You need to follow native advertising best practices to make sure that you’re promoting to the right audience.
Native advertising allows for a high click-through-rate, but if you don’t define your audience well, you may not generate sales.
Spend time on your campaign, set goals, optimize and you’ll find success with native advertising. It’s a powerful form of marketing that works well for every niche and industry.