Reasons Why Native Advertising Is a Natural Fit for Your Holiday Ad Campaign
Time and again, native advertising has proven its worth in executing branding and performance campaigns. It is an innovative medium that has brought back credibility to the digital ecosystem, in a time where online businesses are vying for the attention of savvy but distracted consumers.
Using native advertising, brands leverage the power to effectively reach today’s consumer, providing advertisers with a canvas to tell their story in the most cost-efficient and non-intrusive way possible. It’s a memorable way to spread the message, as the consumer experience has taken precedence among brands to get in front of the right audience.
With Father’s Day fast approaching, we want to remind you why native advertising is a natural fit for any holiday occasion, so that your brand can stay memorable for all the right reasons.
1) Creativity in Native Advertising Drives Accountable Results
Let’s begin by recognizing the potential and power that native advertising has compared to traditional mediums.
Traditional advertising methods no longer work on the modern consumer because its motivation is short-sighted. It is an outdated method that looks purely to make money rather than focus on the long-term motive of the mission. Traditional advertising is a hard core sales pitch about the product, creating interruption that has no value to a customer when there is little to no relevance.
Native advertising, on the other hand, is about creating a two-way dialogue with a customer based on relevance, thus shifting from interruption to engagement with content that adds value. As a result, native advertising forces marketers to be more creative with their ads by sharing the story behind the product to meet consumer needs. Take Mother’s Day as the most recent example, where the need was met by telling a story about the dedication and love for moms. Native helps achieve exactly that, because when an emotion is evoked through contextually relevant content, customers are then willing to learn more about the product. This offers a smart way for brands to hone in on what matters most – in this case, finding the best, meaningful way to say thank you to moms.
In telling your story, native advertising has proven to be a far more effective strategy, both in terms of relevance and convenience. The content piece is contextually relevant to the publication site it is promoted on, and conversely, the site is aligned to the product or service provided through a targeted audience. This dynamic allows brands to effectively promote their offerings for any special day, making their holiday campaign feel like a natural addition to the publication platform, and find relevant audiences that are ready to engage. There is no disruption to the user experience, making it more likely for it to be seen by consumers. Of course, the most important path to success is for a marketer to use creativity when telling their story, because the more they care about the message they want to convey, the more their audience will too.
2) Authentic Content Drives Revenue Growth
Consumers today respond best to brands they deem authentic. To put it simply, if consumers consider your brand to be authentic, they will reward you with their loyalty. Through a storytelling canvas, native advertising enables brands to generate consumer trust. Rather than simply try to make money, the story shows how the brand cares in providing a solution to a problem. Creativity plays a part, certainly, because the more compelling you are able to convey your message, the easier it will be to generate that brand affinity. In light of Father’s Day, it is about using user-generated and high-quality content to capture attention and engage with your audience, tapping into the emotional side of the holiday in order to resonate with them.
Taking Valentine’s Day as another example, personalized content is effective as it evokes action from a significant other who wants to honor their partner, when otherwise, they may not. This is why a story is more important than a product, because engaged consumers have a connection to the message that is conveyed. They see it as helpful, and this helpfulness inspires trust from prospective customers. Authenticity produces additional benefits such as word-of-mouth marketing, because if consumers trust you, they will want to spread word about the brand they love. And as a result, others will trust you too. Native advertising helps brands create experiences for consumers, and experiences worth talking about.
3) Native Ads Provide Flexibility and Control
One of the greatest benefits of native advertising is also the flexibility it offers, satisfying a number of needs. Native campaigns can run on desktop, tablet, or mobile; at article-end, in-feed, or recommendation box, among others. Native ad formats can allow brands to advertise multiple products that users would love, driving traffic to their site, engaging with customers, and increasing purchase intent. No matter the placement or device, native checks each box, and functions very well in each format to provide an uplift in engagement, brand awareness, or viewability.
Another way in which native advertising offers flexibility is in the way it matches the audience’s interest with the right content in real time. Along the stages of the buying funnel, native ads are effective in the way that it targets a customer’s readiness to buy, whether it is to generate awareness, brand affinity, purchase intent, or actual sales. Because of native advertising’s care for user engagement – providing meaningful connection and interaction between brand and client – this flexibility across the buying funnel is of great benefit, serving relevant ads only to users are who are likely to perform a certain action. For example, using keywords and semantic matching allows brands to be a natural part of the Valentine’s Day conversation on various online channels, enabling an audience to discover this content organically. Through keywords, search queries are matched to the ads that are most relevant to the target audience, optimizing ad selection and improving the user experience. Different tests of creatives can be conducted so that the brand’s campaign consists of more attractive content to engage the user and deliver strong performance results. Native advertising also offers retargeting capabilities, targeting customers who have viewed or purchased related products in the past.
Marketers using native advertising can hit Valentine’s Day shoppers with a timely message while delivering this content across different formats where audiences are paying attention. Special holidays are about creating memories, and shoppers want to trust those brands if they are going to be part of those lasting memories. Native not only evokes that connection that matters so much for consumers to engage with a brand, but it creates a relationship that, when done right, keeps them coming back.
Hone in on the Holiday Rush with Your Native Ad Campaign
The advertising landscape has shifted dramatically since the past decade, and only those that seize the opportunities in reaching the modern consumer will get that return on their advertising investment. Success just depends on staying ahead of the changes in consumer behavior in order to resonate best with them.
Advertising is meant to be meaningful, and of course, is also meant to sell. The difference when it comes to traditional methods and native advertising is that the latter does it more effectively by harnessing the power of a message rather than forcing a product in front of the audience. Brands want affinity and loyalty, but that can only be achieved if the brand reciprocates it. It requires being creative, authentic, and offering something that is of assistance to the consumer.
After all, isn’t that what holidays like Father’s Day are all about? Making memories that are unique, authentic, and personalized with a loved one? As a marketer, that should be the motive behind the mission to reach the right audience, and native advertising wins in every engagement metric that matters to make campaigns worth the investment.
