Looking to get more out of your native advertising efforts? Here are five native ad tips to manage your budget effectively.
Native advertising is set to gain prominence in 2019 as it proves to be the ideal alternative to other forms of advertising. Despite this, most organizations aren’t ready to go all in with this ad format. Looking to get the most out of your native advertising budget? Here are five native advertising tips to get you started.
1. Design Top-Notch Ad Creatives
Ad creatives are a crucial part of any ad campaign. They set the tone for the experiences a user will have with your brand. The first thing users notice in any visual ad is the image itself; shabby creatives will turn your audience away from your ads.
If you are running in-feed ads, recommendation widgets or any native ads that require visual elements, make sure that your creatives look aesthetically pleasing. We are not just talking about creativity here. For example, if you are advertising a physical product, get professional photography done; if you are using custom illustrations, make sure they don’t look pixelated when you run the ads. It is recommended to do extensive tests with your creatives before finalizing your campaign.
2. Target Your Audience on a Granular Level
It is often recommended to use the carpet-bombing technique (target ads at as many people as possible in a demographic group, by area or interests) when running brand awareness campaigns. However, carpet bombing when you’re on a stringent budget, will prove ineffectual.
A counter-intuitive approach would be to get as specific as you can with your target audience; your analytics data will help you figure out the ideal target audience. When you run native ads for the most granular section of your audience, you can be sure that the ad spend will yield the maximum results.
3. Do More of What Works
One thing you should avoid doing is experimenting too much with your ads. Extensive trail and error with your ads will require you to spend a massive chunk of the budget in activities that might not yield results.
Instead, be relentless with the way you’re managing your budget and campaigns. Evaluate the campaigns monthly; stop ads that are not bringing in any results and allocate their budget to the top performing ones.
If you are running native ads for the first time, do thorough research of different ad formats available and select the ones that are known for getting good results. For example, for a niche product, In-Ad with Native Element Units would be more effective than any other form of native ads. Be very wary with the ad spend.
4. Compartmentalize Your Ad Campaigns
One of the obstacles brands run into is, planning how to advertise their product or service to a broad audience with diverse preferences.
An effective solution to this is to adopt a modular approach. Your product might have different features that solve multiple problems throughout the varied segments of your audience.
With the help of buyer persona templates, you can ideate your native ad campaigns in such a way that each product or service feature is targeted towards its respective stratum of the target audience. Your ads will be most effective when the right message is delivered to the right audience.
Tip: If you are running in-feed ads, you can get creative by demonstrating the benefits of product features to utilize the carousel ad format optimally.
5. Stick to the Platform Guidelines
The most crucial point to remember when planning native ads — before you start, go through the guidelines of the ad platform or publisher thoroughly. Designing advertisements that are not under the guidelines can spell disaster in these two ways:
- If you are running in-feed units or paid search units, your ad campaigns may stop abruptly — if they don’t match the platform standards. So, whatever traction you would’ve gained during that period would be lost.
- If you’re running any other type of ads where you’re dealing with a publisher, your ad might not stop, but it might not get you results since the ad doesn’t fit well with the overall UI of the publisher.
Conclusion
Like any other advertising or marketing activity, you must plan your native advertising efforts wisely. Whether you have been using native advertising for years or are just getting started in 2019, follow these five tips to get the most out of your budget. Once you begin to see your activities yield results, you can try out other ideas within your existing campaigns.
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by Indrajeet Deshpande
source: MTA