While many traditional marketing practices (such as pop-up ads) remained in the past, content marketing, without leaving behind its philosophy of providing valuable content for Internet users, devised a new strategy to incorporate advertising and promotional features. of offers and/or services in blog posts or web pages, but this time, paid. By this, we refer to native advertising, also known as native advertising, which has had a high prominence among the content techniques most used for advertising purposes in virtual newspapers, websites and social networks.
What is native advertising?
Native advertising is a type of advertising that is strategically integrated and contextualized within the web design of a media outlet. It is about offering content from other brands within your platforms, without it altering or distracting the attention of your readers. The word “native” refers to the place where that content is born or originates, so the objective will always be to give prominence to the company that created it.
If you want a blog to generate native advertising for your products and/or services, it is most likely that the way it is done will consist of an informative article that also connects with the interest of website visitors, but that, unlike the others, explicitly indicates that this content was created by you. Of course, those platforms where you want to promote your native advertising must have a relationship and be highly visited by your target audience, otherwise, the content you generate will not attract the correct visitors to your brand.
Below we can see how Toyota Corolla and TurboTax chose the BuzzFeed portal to generate their native advertising. At first glance, we can see that these are web articles with titles very similar to those we can find around, with the difference that these are presented by the brands already mentioned.
Native advertising is basically advertising that is generated on a site to offer or promote third-party content, with the aim of also highlighting the efforts of these companies to provide useful and relevant content for people. Instead of traditional display advertising formats, animated banners or windows with ads, native advertising is displayed through a design similar to that of the rest of the content published in the media.
Nowadays there are many ways to block ads, therefore, companies have realized the little relevance of using this practice both in YouTube videos and on web pages. Visually, this reflects an interruption to the attention of the reader who wishes to exclusively read/view the selected content.
In this way, native advertising became a more subtle way of promoting content under the representative figure of a company without drastically altering the visual synergy of readers; on the contrary, it continues to add value to their investigative process. Among the main platforms to place native advertising are:
What is not native advertising: Differences with classic content marketing
Although native advertising does not leave behind the importance of building useful content for audiences, on the contrary, it represents its basic principle, many digital marketing specialists have made an effort to differentiate some features in terms of the ways to access that content. regards. Among those that stand out the most are:
No effort to create content does without a prior investment; companies that carry out native advertising must add to their budget the amount that the media willing to accept them wish to charge for this service. In this sense, where content marketing is based on “owned” media, native advertising is based on paying for space in other people’s media.
Based on this, it is difficult for many people to find big differences between native advertising and paid ads, but there really are. In this type of advertising you are not paying for a banner-type space, but for integrating your content on equal terms with the rest of the articles, videos or other types of content published by the site.
The objective of content marketing is to help companies build their own audience through the correct creation and distribution of content, directly on their own platforms. On the other hand, in native advertising, you pay to access the audience of another specific medium, site or platform to direct those readers to the pages of the companies that created that content.
In relation to this condition of “paid vs free,” we can see that native advertising has many things in common with SEM and that content marketing has many of the same characteristics as SEO. In general, Native advertising and SEM are paid strategies and are hired by campaigns to achieve short-term results, while content marketing and SEO are channels for the medium/long term and unless it involves hiring an inbound marketing agency, it does not require a direct payment to an external entity.
Native Advertising vs SEM
However, SEM and native advertising also differ from each other. By hiring a native advertising campaign in major media outlets, your content can reach enormous coverage. On the other hand, with SEM you will always depend on the searches that are made based on your list of keywords related to your content. Another thing that differentiates these two channels is the control.
With SEM you can control the content of the ad, but with native advertising, it is very likely that the same medium will want you to comply with some guidelines regarding content and design. Remember that your content must be congruent with that of the publication medium, so choose very well what your advertising platform will be.
As we have been able to specify in this reading, native advertising is nothing more than an effort to continue adding value to the educational and research process that users carry out on the Internet when accessing different media, but within platforms that they have already visited. a long way in attracting a loyal audience that is comfortable with the published content. There are many consensuses that you can reach in your process of implementing native advertising, whether within your page or on others. The important thing is to always adapt your content or ensure that other companies do so, based on the needs of the audience you want to attract for your conversion and monetization processes.
