A lot of common people, agencies, and organizations have a different definition of what Native Advertising means. To us, native ad is like a chameleon, it will adjust its looks and try to match the environment where it is located.
The last couple of years we have been seeing a new era of digital advertising. The rise of mobile ads has given birth to native advertising. Native advertising changes the whole industry ecosystem. We have seen the decline in the industry and media owners or publishers are facing a lot of challenges and started losing their revenues. In order to survive, they have to adapt to new technology, new transformation, and even new ad formats.
Yes, Native Ad spend is growing. Native’s share will dominate global spend up to 63% of mobile display ad revenue by 2020. More and more publishers focusing more on native ads than traditional banner ads.
Doesn’t matter what kind of results you want to see, you always have to define first your goal. If awareness is the main objective then you might want to distribute the campaign regardless of audience categories. Some brands are looking for engagement with their audience, you might want to make sure your CTR is optimized. If you want to drive sales, then don’t expect high CTR and focus on the UX of your landing page and CVR generated.
Secondly, decide your strategies. we all know that creative is the main trigger to native ads. For a banner ad, image plays a high role. But in Native ads, Headline or Ads Title play the biggest role and attracting user’s attention. Now, the question is, are we doing Native Ad right? What are the challenges that marketers are facing with native advertising?
A misfit
Big media owner preferred to satisfy their audience with a great UX of their site and has left behind those pop-ups annoying banners. Good media will choose their audience over revenue. Native advertising fails when it doesn’t match the tone and environment of where it’s being placed.
Poor Writing Style
The audience of a publisher, especially the loyal ones have sort of ownership of the content, so somewhat they expect to read content in such a tone they understand. In Native Advertising, choice of words plays the biggest role and image comes as a second. Brands pay more responsibilities to make their content fair, accurate, trustworthy and valuable. But at the same time, the content of native advertising has to be as good as editorial and match with publisher’s language.
Native is not banner
The look of native ads and banner ads are totally different. Hence, the image that brands use for banner ads cannot be used for native ads. In native advertising standard of an image, less text on image resulted higher CTR:
One campaign’s failure that we often see is that they’re using a banner ad image to be used in native ads image. Native ads have their own space for text, so don’t confuse users by adding more text on native ads image.
Lack of Reach
Maximizing your reach can be a challenge when you start your sponsored post. While big social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram have produced their own Native Ad, leveraging brand discovery using an Adnetwork that specialized in Native Ad like FreakOut Native can be an effective way to expose your brand, increase engagement, and drive visitors to your site. With a big range of premium publishers, a variety of media categories, and different kind of audience, brands can easily be exposed in such a manner where their product information is naturally distributed and not forced.
In short, if you want to win your user’s attention with native ads, don’t simply run a campaign but you better drive it in an angle where you don’t force a product on them but rather smoothly distributed it in such manner.