Native advertising has been around for a long time but it is only now that it gets the attention it deserve, especially because of the digital environment. By next year it is expected that around $21 billion will be spent by marketers on native ads but unfortunately, most of the ads that will be created will not be effective. This is because of the various native advertising mistakes that are now really common. It is exactly what we are going to talk about in the following paragraphs.
Not Offering Value-Added Discovery
This is an experience that is really important for the audience. Marketers often use the traditional display experiences instead of focusing on a story and managing to relate to an audience. Engaging with the consumer is one of the really important parts of native advertising. The main reason why this form of advertising is effective for brand awareness spread is that messaging is non-intrusive. Whenever you create a campaign you have to focus on user experience instead of anything else. When the message does not offer a storytelling true narrative, goals are not going to be achieved.
Lack Of A Content Marketing Strategy
When the brand does not have buyer personas defined, content that is created will not be suitable for the stage that the buyer’s journey is at. Promotion does not actually end with social channels and search. Native ad campaigns will not be able to succeed on the long run without a proper content marketing strategy behind it.
Not Offering Valuable Content
The in-feed native ad is going to drive the user towards content that is highly valuable for them. When the brand did not learn about the persona of the buyer and associated challenges, content will not be crafted for the target audience. In native ads it is really important that destination pages will inspire predefined actions. If this does not happen, the native campaign is not going to deliver.
Contextual Relevancy Disregard
The native ad that is well executed is going to be 100% relevant to the placement’s editorial context. You want to always grab the attention of the customer as the related content is consumed. If this happens, the ad is going to be clicked. Conversions are going to be inspired as this happens.
Short Content
This is one of the most common pitfalls that the marketers fall into. If the content is way too short, nothing good is going to happen. Tracking the native content is a necessity and the content producers that have a huge experience fully understand the fact that the end user is the main part of the campaign. End users are going to browse the web and will click on articles that offer real value. The common approach in most of the marketing campaigns created is to focus on a specific number of words, like 400 or 500. This is often not enough when trying to fully explore a given topic. Getting the attention of the user is just half of the battle. The rest is to hold on to that attention after it is gained. You do that through high quality content, which is rarely short.
Lack Of Tone
In many situations we see native ads that simply appear as being tone deaf. Material so often lacks cohesion and we see a clear lack of approachable tone. In order to have content that does related to the reader, it needs to have the appropriate tone. This can vary from one client to the next in a highly drastic way. If you want to convert, it is normally better to work with the in-house content creators instead of having your own do the work because they know the end user better.