Up Close @ SMX East: Seven Steps To Success In Native Advertising

This week at SMX East in New York, Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter Group presented to a full house on how best to find success in the native advertising landscape. The advertising ecosystem is continuing to grow at rapid pace — and paid, owned and earned media channels are converging. This is where the native advertising opportunity […]

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This week at SMX East in New York, Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter Group presented to a full house on how best to find success in the native advertising landscape.

The advertising ecosystem is continuing to grow at rapid pace — and paid, owned and earned media channels are converging. This is where the native advertising opportunity exists. So what exactly is native advertising? Here is what Rebecca had to say.

Defining Native Advertising

For many, the practice of paid and sponsored content is nothing new. However, with brands, agencies, publishers, social media platforms and technology vendors all looking to take advantage of the “convergence opportunity,” a clear definition is needed.

According to Altimeter,

[blockquote cite=”Rebecca Lieb”]”Native advertising is a form of converged media that combines paid and owned media into a form of commercial messaging that is fully integrated into, and often unique to, a specific delivery platform.”[/blockquote]

In other words, native advertising is an intersection of paid and owned media, where “owned” media is content that the brand or advertiser controls, while “paid” media is advertising.

In the Mashable article below, you can see how native advertising looks and note how sponsored content is clearly labeled in every appearance

native advertising content on mashable

The same principle applies to Facebook, where sponsored posts are clearly labeled in the news feeds.

Facebook sponsored post

Understanding Native Advertising – Why Native Advertising?

It is important to have a clear understanding of native advertising so marketers can identify challenges and take advantage of the growth opportunities that exist.

The main challenges that native advertising helps solve revolve around:

  • Banner blindness
  • Skipped pre-roll ads
  • Eroding email engagement rates
  • Fragmented consumer attention
  • Increasing level of automation in programmatic digital advertising
  • Downward price pressure on classic display advertising

Native advertising brings opportunity to the entire ecosystem for publishers, social platforms, brands, agencies and technologies.

Using Facebook as an example of this growing opportunity: As reported by VentureBeat, a recent study by AdRoll found that 49x more clicks where generated by News Feed ads than traditional right-side ads, at 45% less cost.

Pros

native advertising pros

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Cons

native advertising cons

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Planning Your Native Advertising Campaign – Seven Steps To Success

Step 1 – Transparency & Disclosure

When planning your native advertising campaign, it is important that you disclose that the placement is commercial in nature and link to policies that govern such placement. This is critical to success.

Step 2 – Build Your Content Strategy

According to Lieb, “Content is the atomic particle of marketing,” and it is essential that you put in place a foundational content strategy prior to native executions. You can read more on the evolution of the content marketing ecosystem here.

Step 3 – Collaborate

Encourage internal collaboration and incentivize external collaboration.

Ensure teams are agile, able to learn quickly, and apply what they’ve learned to other campaigns and channels. 

Step 4 – Factor In Earned Media

Make sure that you factor in ways to share and amplify your message. This helps extend the campaign’s reach.

Step 5 – Track Your Content

Make sure that you track the content that most resonates in social channels. Build and regularly maintain libraries of content that break down into discrete units of text that can be deployed quickly in a variety of formats.

Step 6 – Scale

If you follow the steps above, success can be shown via scale. According to Lieb, native advertising campaigns are usually “exclusive” and cannot be reduplicated elsewhere. Many vendor solutions do scale and travel, but at the expense of being native in the strictest sense.

Step 7 – Measure

Finally, develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each native advertising campaign, and measure native advertising effectiveness against a converged media model.

Conclusion

Native advertising is a very effective and powerful way for brands to reach users and scale content. It capitalizes on the convergence of paid and owned media and allows you to inject campaign reach with the inclusion of owned media. It can be as simple or as complex as you wish; but either way, make sure that you really understand the concept of native advertising before you try to execute on campaigns.

Download the full Altimeter report on the Native Advertising Landscape here to learn how.

The full presentation from SMX East can also be viewed below:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/39700443


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Andy Betts
Contributor
Andy has over 15 years experience in formulating marketing, digital and content strategies for many of the world's leading brands, agencies and technology pioneers. Andy works closely with CEO and CMO thought leaders, executives and technology partners on strategic marketing, digital and content marketing strategies. He has also spends considerable time consulting, and travelling across the World, for many digital and content marketing technology startups -- working on research, event and publication projects. Andy has worked at the C-level with leading brands such as HP, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, HSBC, United Airlines, Adobe, Apple, American Express and Fidelity International. He has also consulted on digital marketing projects with many of the world’s leading agencies such as Publicis, Aegis, Starcom, Digitas, Zenith Optimedia, GroupM and WPP properties.

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