Native advertising is hot, and the temperature is rising. As a marketing tactic, native advertising will engage your customer more effectively than old-school banner ads or online advertising, because consumers view the targeted content much more favourably.

So What Is Native Advertising?

It’s paid content written with the intent to inform defined customer personas about a product or service, while also providing additional entertaining or informative content. Native advertising uses someone else’s content distribution platform, to piggyback on the reputation of an established brand. Forbes, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Facebook, and Tumblr all provide space for these niche ad buys. In order to effectively relay your brand messaging, native advertising must be well written, thoroughly researched, and interesting.

What Does Native Advertising Look Like?

Here’s an example created by Ogilvy. Their Guinness beer native ad informs oyster lovers how different varieties taste, where they come from, and finishes up with a cue to drink Guinness beer to help wash the bivalves down. An important point for native advertising success is providing real value to the reader, so that they more open to your message, while also retaining the publisher’s integrity.

Here’s another native ad hosted by BuzzFeed, published by Captain Morgan’s rum, which is often used as a case study example because of how effectively they reached their market. The content subtly invites the reader to learn more about Captain Morgan’s tales of adventure, while driving the customer to their branded YouTube channel.

The Effectiveness of Native Advertising

Native advertising is a triple win solution: publishers receive ad revenue, brands get reach and exposure, and the consumer gets content they can relate to and provides value. And this isn’t just rhetoric: the proof is shown in the stats:

• People have a greater intent to purchase with native ads. According to Dedicated Media, shoppers have a 53% higher intent to purchase when viewing native ads.
• Some of the most successful native advertising campaigns have very high click-through rates. GE, for instance, ran a campaign that earned a click-through rate higher than 8%.
• Advertisers that use Facebook News Feed ads on mobile, combined with precise targeting, testing and rigorous optimization, have seen up to 400% return on ad spend.
• 60% of people are inspired to seek a product after reading content about it
• Consumers looked at original editorial content and native ad for a similar amount of time.

As long as consumers are attracted to a good story and look to trusted publications to keep them informed, native advertising will be a hot tool in a brand’s marketing mix.