Advertising has come a long way since it first started, as has almost everything. Over the years, the world came across various advertising techniques that were helpful at some point. Today, the advertising industry is adopting a better advertising style, native advertising.
If you are unaware of this term, you really need some catching up. I’ll try to help you get a basic idea through this article.
Native advertising is the process of displaying and utilizing paid advertisements with your products ensuring that they align with the overall theme of the product. The nature of these advertisements differs in different media formats.
The art of native advertising is extremely subtle for the common eye, yet identifiable for a marketer. Current social media platforms and search engines display native advertisements with a healthy frequency but blend them so well that it has a subtle feel to the overall user experience. These ads are significantly different as compared to the mainstream ads (banner, display).
The idea of native advertising is to explicitly display the content of advertising to the customer without the element of irritation. If you succeed .. job well done!
Let’s have a look at why the native ads are becoming marketers’ choice and check out some interesting native advertising examples.
Why is it the marketers’ choice?
As the marketing trends keep shifting, marketers are upping the game by opting for native ads as compared to the mainstream ad types as they have a better customer response.
A statistical study shows that 53% of the users are likely to notice and interact with the native ads as compared to the banner or display ads. Furthermore, a native ad is likely to persuade a customer to purchase a product by an increase of 18%.
Marketers love how native ads’ product quality is the same as the products in reality. This has been a huge issue in the advertising industry where the advertised content is almost always dissimilar to the provided product. However native advertising has shifted the advertising paradigm with an accurate display.
Types of Native Advertising
In-Feed Native Ads
Commonly known as the sponsored content, these types of native ads have the purpose of captivating the users’ attention in a vulnerable position. Imagine you’re in the middle of an interesting YouTube video and you come across an ad.
Since you were so into it, you are likely to pay attention to the advertisement and read it. Instead of becoming an interruption in your experience, it’ll actually work constructively.
Search & Promoted Listings
You must have noticed searching for something with the exact keywords yet the top results are not accurate. Well … is there something wrong with Google’s information retrieval algorithm? Nope!
It’s the sponsored search results, a commonly used type of native advertising. Promoted listings are generally used by e-commerce websites and websites selling some services.
Content Recommendation Widgets
To optimize the users’ experience, different websites are introducing specific sections as Recommended for You. The content present in these sections is indexed as sponsored content against your relevant searches.
Native Advertising Examples
As promised, let’s take a look at some of the widely used native advertising examples in the industry.
Native Ads: Social Media
Social Media users experience an intelligent blend of ads in their surfing which have a high rate of attracting new customers, regularly.
Native Ads: Search Engine
As I mentioned earlier, search engines tend to display sponsored content against your relevant searches as they are paid advertisements.
Native Ads: Video Ads
Brand logos appear in videos signalling that the brand is paying for advertising itself as a piece of content of the video.
In case it’s still confusing, let me straighten things out a little. Advertising has evolved to a great degree. The efficiency of banner and display ads are diminishing at a rapid pace. Why? Because native advertising is taking over. Why is it taking over? It is taking over because customers know that ads are a reality, they are not going to go away. However, they are acceptable to be subtle in nature to avoid the user from receiving and irritable experience and ending up enjoying the content.
Please let me know what do you think about native advertising and how effective it is as compared to other advertising options.
