Tips For Brands To Join Native Ad Trend

Native advertising is one of the biggest buzzwords this year in digital media, with many brands moving toward a new paradigm of creating sponsored content and in-stream ads that are more integrated with the user’s experience consuming digital content.

Below are some tips to help brands to capitalize on the trend to go native — and to help their marketing messages make the transition:

#1 – Embrace mobile: Native advertising is a natural fit for mobile marketing. Consumers are demanding access to content on any device, in “native format,” and advertisers need to find a way to fit their marketing messages into cross-device campaigns without having to plan separately for PC and mobile marketing. When a consumer is viewing content via a mobile device, it is imperative that the advertising be incorporated in the content aspect of the viewing screen.

#2 – Go social: Along with the rise of mobile, more people are now using social media sites, like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and other sites as their primary means of accessing information and engaging with brands. According to an Oct. 2013 report from BI Intelligence, mobile accounts for nearly 40% of the total time spent on social media, and Pinterest gets 75% of its traffic from mobile apps. Brands must invest more resources into ads that appear in “native format” within the content stream of the social media sites.

Native advertising presents ads in a way that makes users more receptive to viewing them. For example, when native ads appear within the Facebook News Feed along with everyone’s Facebook friends’ updates, brands get better results for their marketing dollar. A study from AdRoll, which analyzed the Facebook marketing campaigns of 547 advertisers running over 1 billion impressions, found that native ads within the Facebook News Feed had a click-through-rate) that was 49 times higher than “right-hand-side” ads (which appear in the righthand column of the Facebook screen, away from the main News Feed) and ? the cost per click.

#3 – Target specific verticals using the Social Graph: More than ever before, it pays to specialize and target your approach to reach highly interested groups of consumers. Native advertising, executed in social platforms such as Facebook, enables marketers to leverage the Social Graph of Facebook for surgical targeting of their audience.  Adopting a native advertising strategy with surgical targeting could result in a significantly larger reach and engagement from the targeted audience.  It could be the difference between a 0.05% reach (with traditional low-impact online banner ads) or a 100% reach and up to 7x higher than the category average engagement rates of users.

by L. Jasmine Kim
L. Jasmine Kim is CEO of MobSoc, an interest-based publishing network optimized for the mobile and social world.
Courtesy of MediaPost