Writing exclusively for MediaBrief.com, Pankaj Sharma, Country Head, MGID India, shares how brands can leverage native advertising for effective marketing, how its structure incorporates salient aspects of both performance and brand marketing, and how native ads can be optimised for relevance and bringing hyper-personalization into play.
He also outlines how advertisers can attain desired results with greater ease, potency, and cost-effectiveness by merging branding and performance standards. Read on.
Pankaj has been a part of the Media Industry for over a decade across verticals like Digital, Radio and Print Advertising. His key areas of expertise and interest are Digital Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Media, Programmatic, Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, and Native Advertising.
Digital advertisers often struggle with choosing between branding and performance marketing strategies. The debate around which approach elicits better results is still ongoing. But most advertisers and marketers can agree that both are required to get ahead in modern-day digital environments.
Brand marketing aims at forging long-lasting relationships with customers, building trust, and formulating a brand image that keeps them coming back for more. Everything from TV advertising, celebrity endorsements, corporate social outreach, and captions are utilized to project an image that would endear the brand to customers.
However, it can be difficult to measure customer trust or perception towards a brand. Impressions, reads, and views can be used to make rough evaluations. But the lack of concrete, number-based results makes it hard to justify spending high amounts for this approach alone.
Performance marketing focuses on achieving short-term goals connected to revenue. It nudges customers to undertake specific actions such as clicks, registrations, or actual purchases. Common strategies to meet this end include SEO optimization, affiliate marketing, and digital ad placement – aimed at procuring results such as sales, clicks, customer leads, and acquisitions.
It is easier to measure the impact of performance marketing with more numbers-driven metrics. With the myriad data tracking tools in existence, campaign effectiveness can be accurately gauged.
However, the emphasis on numbers eventually led to a proliferation of digital ads that turned customers off. With uninteresting, pointless, and disruptive ads accosting them with every click, internet users have succumbed to banner blindness and rampant use of ad blockers.
Clearly, neither approach stands adequately on its own. However, with changing times and increasingly stringent competition (not to mention, shortening attention spans), organizations are starting to recognize that optimal campaign efficacy can be achieved by incorporating the best instincts from both tactics.
Native Advertising: The Best of Both Worlds
Native advertising talks about a brand by mimicking the format and context in which the ad appears. They often appear in social media feeds or as recommended articles or videos. The reason they stand apart is that they don’t actually look like ads, but as part of the page’s a natural flow. In other words, it is non-disruptive and doesn’t bother individuals scrolling through their feeds.
The efficacy of native advertising has been established beyond doubt. A study by Sparkler revealed that the native format generates more positive subconscious reactions with corresponding upticks in favourable brand associations.
Additionally, native ad structures incorporate salient aspects of performance and brand marketing.
Technically, it is a performance marketing mechanism – marketers only pay when customers actually engage with the ad. Additionally, native ad performance is measured through traditional performance marketing markers – CTR, bounce rate, pages per session, average session duration, conversions, video views, and completion rates, etc.
The real-time data measurement parameters enable marketers to target different demographics, including niche audiences. This enables them to modify ads for relevance and bring hyper-personalization into play.
The point is to find out what customers care about and legitimately give them more of that. With transparency and clear value offerings, native advertising can project positive, responsible brand perceptions, fortify meaningful relationships, and foster engagement that leads to actionable results.
Native’s emphasis on storytelling and building emotional connections with readers and watchers draws from brand marketing goals. Content must be creative, engaging and communicate a story that customers remember and positively associate with the brand.
Since native ads adapt effortlessly into the context in which they appear, they don’t bother the user with in-your-face sales pitches. This prevents ad fatigue and blocking instincts on part of the reader. Native ads perform especially well on mobile devices because few things are as intolerable as screen-enveloping ads that cover up the actual content a user wants.
Additionally, native ads match the content of the page in question, thus ensuring contextual relevance and offering users actual value as opposed to asking them to just buy something. Utilizing native ads drives a brand image that is respectful of users’ time and preferences. A study by Time Inc, covering millennials, Gen Z and Gen X found that two in three consumers trust branded content more than traditional advertising.
Advertisers may be tempted by short-term performance marketing goals, but truly effective results are driven by a balance between branding and performance campaigns. The former generates positive buzz for the brand, while the latter actively nudge interested individuals to become customers.
Some integrated approaches available in the market, like brandformance, helps advertisers maximize ROI through allocating budgets towards the most profitable strategies. Guided by analytics, they can make necessary optimizations to content, KPIs, or other parameters to achieve targets. By merging branding and performance standards, we believe that advertisers can attain desired results with greater ease, potency, and cost-effectiveness.