Boosting Your Content Marketing With Native Advertising

Why we’re all in on performance branding – and how it can transform your growth.

Boosting Your Content Marketing With Native Advertising

Bryan Karas

August 29, 2018

You don’t need me to tell you that tons of content is being created and published everyday. But how do you get that content in front of the people you’re targeting?

Content promotion is the backbone to any content marketing strategy. Without the right promotion that awesome video that took you 10 hours to create isn’t even going to be seen – and that’s soul crushing.

You could build and nurture relationships with influencers and people in your space to help share and promote your content to their network or you could cold email people and request that links to your content are added to their email newsletters or…

There are an endless amounts of ways to “organically” promote your content – and you should do all those things as you plan for the long term.

In the meantime, native advertising comes into play as the optimal paid content promotion channel and incorporating native ads into your overall content marketing strategy is one way marketers are able to break through the digital clutter.

Content is King; Native is Winning

Simply put, native ads work – with stats to prove it. General Electric – yes, that General Electric, ran a native ad campaign that resulted in a 8 percent click-thru rate. Typical display advertising CTR is 0.19% – that’s a pretty big margin in favor of native advertising.

And native isn’t going away anytime soon…

According to the Native Advertising Institute – this sounds official – “Native advertising is becoming the most important marketing trend globally. Research estimates that native advertising revenues are going to reach almost three-quarters of the U.S. ad market by 2021.”

‘Til death do us part

Back in the day we’d throw up some content on Outbrain and generate five cent clicks – it was amazing…

Today, native platforms have grown and ads have become more expensive. But powering your content through native advertising helps elude millions of ad blockers and casts a wider net on targeted websites than any other ad format.

Here is a list of ways you can marry native advertising and content marketing:

High Quality Only: You should be as proud of your native ads as you are about that 3 minute branded founder story video you just edited.
Target Specific Sites: Both your content and your native ads should be created for specific target audiences. Should it be published to CNN or Reddit?
Be Authentic: You wouldn’t create branded content that deceives your customers would you? Same thing goes for native ads…
Test, Test and Test: Use the data from native ad testing – headlines, A/B tests etc – to hone in on upcoming content ideation.

9 Amazing Native Advertising Examples You’ll Actually Want to Read

Whether you go with Outbrain, Taboola or some other native advertising platform, you’ll need to check out this blog post from Hubspot. It discusses native advertising campaigns using video, influencers and cause marketing – all hosted on sites like CNN, Forbes and Business Insider.