Everything You Need to Know About Native Advertising (19 Examples)

Everything You Need to Know About Native Advertising (19 Examples) What’s a marketer’s dream? (Besides unlimited budgets  and seamless collaboration†¦) To â€Å"sell† to people without them feeling sold to. In a perfect world, we marketers could expose our target audiences to valuable content that genuinely interests them AND raises awareness for the products we’re promoting. This is exactly what native advertising  aims to solve. Problem is†¦ Native advertising can leave your audience feeling a little duped and/or betrayed. Here they are reading what they thought  was an innocent how-to blog post, only to find that they’re being fed advertising. That bad taste left in their mouth can backfire, leaving marketers worse off than if they had left well enough alone. That said, however, when done right, native advertising can have incredible ROI. If you’re looking to start dabbling in native advertising, this post is for you. From top-to-bottom, this post covers everything you need to know – from tools to examples and everything in between. Everything you need to know about #nativeadvertising wrapped up into one post.Download This Best Practice Native Advertising Guide Before jumping into native advertising head first, download this best practice guide. It covers all the things you need to do before you launch a native ad campaign. Download it here, then read on to figure how native can help your business grow. Types of Native Ads In-feed Advertisements In-feed Social Ads Paid Search Advertisements Recommended Content Promoted Listings Custom Content Types Sponsored or Branded Content (a.k.a advertorial) Product Placement What is Native Advertising? Native Advertising is a little nebulous to define†¦ It’s one of those things that you know it when you see it. Different experts have different opinions about how native advertising is defined. For instance, Neil Patel  describes native advertising as, â€Å"advertising that is so tightly interwoven within the site that customers can’t tell that it’s advertising.† Social platforms like LinkedIn  and  Facebook  make the claim that in-stream social ads constitute native advertising. The Native Advertising Institute  disagrees stating, â€Å"native advertising needs to be valuable content of a non-interruptive nature – which is typically not the case with in-stream advertising.† They define native advertising as, â€Å"paid advertising where the ad matches the form, feel and function of the content of the media on which it appears.† It’s clear there’s a little disagreement surrounding what actually constitutes a native ad. This post takes an inclusive approach†¦ The more examples the better, amirite? What actually constitutes native advertising? It’s not as simple as you might think†¦Content Marketing vs Native Advertising You might be thinking that native advertising sounds a lot like content marketing†¦ And you’d be right†¦ it does. BUT there are some important differences. Native advertising typically: Is a way of distributing content. Is present on a domain other than your own. Will have a label stating â€Å"ad† or â€Å"sponsored†. Appears to provide the reader value, but is secondary to selling the product. Is Pay to Play. The content is only valuable if the product is purchased. Example:  ASOS  paid content on Refinery29 Content marketing typically: Provides valuable knowledge to raise brand awareness. Is a long-term strategy that nurtures leads as them move down the sales funnel. Includes assets like white papers, blogs, webinars and videos. Is hosted on owned media channels. The content is valuable in and of itself. Example:  ASOS Content Marketing Native Advertising vs. Content Marketing Should You Invest in Content Marketing or Native Advertising? The answer is†¦ It depends on your goals, timeframe, and budget. Content marketing tends to be a long-term strategy that has lower monetary costs, but a higher time investment on the part of your marketing team. Success also takes longer with content marketing as it requires a consistent publishing cadence†¦ BUT... †¦ it’s more beneficial to the company in the long-term since the content assets are owned and built on the company’s own site.