native advertising Archives - Leverage Marketing

You’ve seen labels like ‘Promoted’ and ‘Sponsored Content’ floating over certain headlines on sites like Slate, Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Maybe you’ve checked out some of these native ads—which are structured to look and read like editorial content on the site—and wondered how well this approach works for the brands that use it, or how well it might work for your company.

To help you learn the ins and outs of native advertising (or even to just figure out a working definition for ‘native ad’), we’ve gathered up some of our favorite articles and infographics on the subject. Check out the links below.

What Is Native Advertising?

Time to Define Native Advertising

This post was written two years ago (an eon ago in internet years), but Josh Sternberg lays out examples for native advertising, sponsored content, and branded content that still hold up well today.

How Every Business—Including Small Local Players—Can Use Native Advertising

Although primarily aimed at small business owners, this is a good primer on native advertising for anyone.

The Shift to Native Advertising in Marketing (Infographic)

For those visual learners out there, here’s a pretty cool infographic that covers a lot of ground.

Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work (Native Advertising)

This is one of the most-frequently cited examples of native advertising done well. It fits with the format of The New York Times, it contains compelling research on the US prison system, and it clearly states the post is paid for by Netflix but does not overtly promote the video streaming company or its show, Orange Is the New Black.

What Does Your Audience Think of Native Advertising?

4 Things People Really Think about Native Advertising

You’ll hear plenty of praise for native advertising in marketing circles, but keep in mind it’s what your target audience thinks that matters. (Fortunately, not all the things people really think about native advertising are bad.)

What Millennials Want from Native Ad Content

It’s worth pointing out that this survey was conducted by a native ad platform company that has a stake in what people think about native advertising, but the trends it points to are still pretty interesting.

Best Practices

Success in Native Advertising Hinges on Preserving Best Practices

Let’s review some of these best practices so that we know how to preserve them.

7 Questions Marketers Should Ask About Native Content

There’s well-crafted, transparent native advertising, and then there’s the kind of nebulous, irrelevant native advertising that makes readers lose trust in a brand. Answering these 7 questions can help you steer clear of the latter category.

The Startup Marketer’s Guide to Sponsored Online Content

A basic roadmap for SMBs looking to jump into native advertising.

Despite What You Might Have Heard, Native Advertising Can Scale

A good read if you’ve launched your first native advertising campaign and are wondering what to do next.

Dell Shares Best Practices in Native Advertising

One of the best ways to learn more about a marketing strategy is to look at someone who is using that strategy successfully, and so far, Dell is doing native advertising well. Read an interview with Dell’s managing editor, Stephanie Losee.

Distribution Platforms/Channels

4 Tools and 5 Tips for Making the Most of Native Advertising

The 4 Tools section of this post nicely outlines the main distribution channels available for native content promotion.

Which Channels Are Best for Content Promotion? (Infographic)

A useful visual that breaks down owned, earned, and paid media channels.

6 Companies That Are Trying to Solve the Native Ad Scaling Issue

An overview of 6 companies that place native advertising content on publisher sites. The article was written in late 2013, and all 6 startups are still alive and well today (perhaps a testament to the demand for native ad placement).

The Complete Guide to LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

LinkedIn is turning into a powerful content distribution platform in its own right, and B2B owners might want to think about using it for their native advertising. Here writer Jeff Haden walks through the step-by-step process to start using LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.

7 Tips to Help Boost Your Content on LinkedIn

Learn how to get more eyes in front of your LinkedIn content, whether you spring for Sponsored Updates or not.

Measurement

Native Advertising is All Over the Map

This WSJ blog post points out the importance of coming up with standardized metrics for native advertising.

How Publishers and Brands Can Measure the Value of Native Advertising

If you’re not sure where to even begin with measuring the success of native advertising, start here. You’ll learn about attention minutes, social sharing, click-through rates, and conversions.

Eye-Tracking Study: Native Ads vs. Banners Ads

Ready to get a little more granular? This eye-tracking study shows how participants visually focused on native ads considerably more than banner ads.

Maximize ROI via Content Distribution Networks

This in-depth Moz post shows you how to use metrics to compare content distribution platforms so that you can stick with the one(s) that give you the best ROI.

The Reach, Engagement, and ROI of Content Marketing vs. Native Advertising

Here’s another very thorough Moz post, this time featuring original research on the ROI of content marketing compared to native advertising. It also includes a link to Fractl’s content ROI calculator to help you determine what’s best for your business.

Describing Leverage Marketing – and digital marketing as a whole – has proven to be met with mixed responses over time.

A few weeks back, for example, my wife and I were at a school function for one of my daughters when we were introduced to a fellow classmate’s mother through a mutual friend. After some small talk (our kids, sports, weather, smelly gymnasium), the mother inquired to my profession.

“Internet marketing? Is that where you sell ad space on the Internet?” she inquired.
“No,” I replied. “What we do is…”
“Are you the guys that put ads on Facebook?”
“Well,” I started, “We …”
“Do you know what I don’t like?” she interrupted, looking at my wife. “When I go on Facebook and I see ads there. I don’t go on Facebook to look for ads.”

Priss.

It’ll be probably to the chagrin of our mutual acquaintance, but promoted Facebook posts and other forms of native advertising are shaping up to be popular and valuable forms of digital advertising.

This year, it is expected that the spend on native advertising will increase by more than a third compared to last year, according to an article on adage.com, with big names such as General Electric, Ford Motor Co. and Hewlitt Packard expected to be major players in this form of advertising that is expected to surpass $4.3 billion in spend this calendar year. By 2018, that figure is projected to double.

For those uninitiated, native advertising is a form of digital advertising whose design matches that of the natural content of the web page. Another way of putting it is sponsored content. Native advertising can be utilized in the form of articles, videos, music and other media to match the type of content the consumer might be browsing at the moment.

Social Media sites aren’t the only ones jumping onto the native advertising wagon. Click onto CNN, still a go-to for up-to-the-minute news for many online, or Rollingstone, once the great arbiter of all things musically hip, and it won’t take long to find an ad in between the headlines.

While this is proving to be a hit with many companies and websites, there are some out there, like our mutual acquaintance, that are taking issue with native advertising.

Last summer, comedian John Oliver, on his HBO series “Last Week Tonight,” lambasted native advertising in regard to its growing appearance on news sites in a lengthy segment.

“Ads are baked into content like chocolate chips into a cookie. Except, it’s actually more like raisins into a cookie—because nobody … wants them there,” was one of his more memorable quotes. “I like to think of news and advertising as the separation of guacamole and Twizzlers. Separately they’re good. But if you mix them together, somehow you make both of them really gross” is another.

I, though, like to think all parties – the companies buying the ads, the sites providing the space, and the readers on the web pages – are much smarter than Oliver and other native advertising critics will lead you to believe.

Despite their blending in with the sites design, it only takes a small modicum of common sense for readers to distinguish between what is news/content and what is an advertisement. Like the many choices of content/articles that are a click away on a news site’s page, readers can click on the ad if they want more information or simply leave it be. Additionally, content that is paid to be circulated by a company is often just as valuable to the reader as any other content on the page, when it’s done right. Paid content is researched and developed with the intent of informing its audience. Whether or not that audience wants to go on to browse products or make a purchase is entirely up to them.

Describing Internet marketing in a sentence or two may be confounding to some, but dealing with native ads is quite simple, if you ask me.