Five Tips For Great Native

Native Advertising is increasingly important for increasing your brand awareness and traffic to your site, especially on mobile, where it outperforms traditional display ads by orders of magnitude, achieving up to three times as many clickthroughs as traditional display ads.

Here are five tips from the greatest Native experts at Illuminate to help you run a great Native Campaign.

Use Programmatic Advertising

Using software to purchase advertising space automates part of your decision making process, while still allowing you to target your key geographic, demographic or behavioral markets if you use the right tools. Illuminate’s own Geode tool allows you to buy display, video, mobile and search ads tailored to the specific needs of your campaign, and update their content and display options in real time as your needs change.

Target A Specific Audience

Advertising is likely a big spend for your company. To ensure you get the maximum return on this investment it’s important to identify the audience most likely to be receptive to your ads and make sure you are optimising your campaign to reach them. As I mentioned under point one, it’s worth your while to use a tool that lets you target your campaigns down to a fine resolution of detail so you’re reaching the people who will turn an impression into a click into a sale.

Reward Participation

It’s important to respect your audience: if they feel an advert has wasted their time, or deceived them (for example by masquerading as editorial content), they will react in the opposite way to your aim, associating your brand with negative feelings and even actively avoiding it. Some of the most successful, attention catching adverts are those that respect the reader.

If someone clicks through on one of your ads, they should find a relevant, user friendly page that delivers what the ad promised with the minimum of friction. If your site is hard to navigate, or obfuscates the offer you were promoting behind more expensive products, this will translate directly to lost revenue.

Put People in Your Images

A simple one: people react extremely positively to ads featuring people. An advert with a picture of a person in it can perform up to twice as well as one without, from impressions, to clicks to sales.

Use Video: Be Brief

Browsers have a short attention span, particularly on mobile. Video can be a rewarding format for your marketing, but the best performing videos are short form – less than 15 seconds. Keep within this time, and you can use video to inform customers, and give a striking and creative offer for them to engage with your brand.