Native Advertising
This form of advertising can help your content be amplified to audiences that are looking at websites such as CNN, Forbes, Wired, etc. A form of native advertising, called sponsored content, helps your content makers distribute their resources on the web. This helps boost awareness for your business and brand. This digital channel is somewhat new, and I believe it has a great potential for putting users on top of the funnel of your marketing strategy.
Native advertising amplifiers such as Taboola, Outbrain, and Skyword, are delivering useful and relevant content to users that are navigating through websites mentioned in the first paragraph to acquire and convert leads. This is a digital channel that can help businesses, in a cost-efficient manner, get known and distribute their resources to their relevant audience. How? Native advertising amplifiers have created an algorithm such as Outbrain’s and Taboola’s, help allocate impressions to users based on:
- Personal: The reader’s personal preferences
- Behavioral: Readers which share near-identical preferences
- Contextual: Content related to the environment in which it is recommended
- Popularity: Content which is trending across our network for click-through rate
These algorithms help your resources be distributed where your target audience is based on the points mentioned above. If this algorithm works, this means that you are getting users that are relevant to the resources you are sharing. And in turn, acquiring interest from your audience and a potential sales qualified lead.
Always check your return on investment and test which native advertising platform has better engagement. You can test multiple resources such as white papers, surveys, webinars, articles, landing pages, and product pages. This will help you know what content resonates with your audience. I believe that experimenting with your high quality content to know what does your target audience likes to consume.
If you need more information and history about native advertising, I strongly recommend this book: The Native Advertising Advantage. A book that shares common knowledge, history, and compliance on what to share and what is not recommended to share. I think that by being transparent with your audience that you are distributing resources to other websites in order to influence them into doing business with you, should be outlined in a clear manner.
although this new form of advertising helps readers to not be interrupted by disruptive ads, it helps your sponsored content blend in into the website where your reader is consuming information. Looking at psychological behavior, the user doesn’t feel that your native ad is in a way intrusive, and it naturally flows with the user’s interaction with the website if they click on your content. Always provide disclosure of your content and be as (again) transparent as possible.