Native Advertising: A Guide On How To Integrate It Into Your Sales Funnel

The Foundation

Native advertising has been around for a long time, and essentially one might consider something like Facebook or Twitter Ads native to their platforms as well – because the advertisement is placed among the organic content in the users feed – and thus native to the platform.

However, in Online Marketing Lingo we refer to Native Advertisement as, for instance, an “recommended for you” post at the bottom of a news article. Unlike display or banner ads – native ads don’t really look like ads, but rather like articles that are part of the editorial flow. This part is crucial for understanding the strategy behind running native ads. The key to a successful native advertisement is that it must be non-disruptive to what the user is trying to do on the platform, i.e consume high-quality content.

Understanding The Mindset of The User

Nobody goes to MSN or CNN to get bombarded with ads from a million different companies promoting their latest sale. Rather, they are looking to read and engage with interesting and value-adding articles

Therefore, that is exactly what you want to provide them with.

The Native Advertising Funnel

It comes without saying that after the user clicks on your advertisement, you will have to redirect them to an advertorial of yours – and NOT your brand page. Again, the users of these platforms are not interested in seeing your fancy branded landing page.

Now that we have cleared that, let’s move on to touch upon the strategies you can use on your advertorial.

Endorsements & Reviews

Every brand can scream and shout loudly about how great their brand and product is. However, in the mind of the consumer – everybody (without a strong brand) looks approximately the same, because they shout more or less the same things.

Therefore, instead of screaming about how great your product is, let others do the talking instead through endorsements and testimonials. This will enable the user, i.e your ideal customers, to trust your brand more – because other people have given it good reviews and endorsed it. For customer testimonials, you can showcase your reviews and score from review sites such as Trustpilot, Feefo, or Yotpo.

Calling Out The Problems and Needs of Your Audience

If your product or service solves a specific problem for your customers – be sure to call it out, both in the advertorial but also in the headline of your native ad if possible.

An example of this can be seen in the image beneath. The problem which Santander solves for their audience here is finding the money for home improvement projects – and the way they do it is to guide and teach their audience how they can get the best financing options.

Compare Your Product to Other Products in The Same Category, and Show Your Weaknesses

Showing where your product features fall short compared to the competition is not necessarily a bad thing to do in an advertorial. Instead, it will increase the trustworthiness of the advertorial (and publisher) as it shows that the advertorial is not biased and is trying to give a real and fair comparison to the user.

Likewise, you may include a section called “What our editorial team thinks about these products” as a way to give “expert-testimonials” about different products and where their respective strength and weaknesses are.

It goes without saying that both expert testimonials and rankings in product comparisons must stem from actual organic articles and real expert testimonials.

The Important Aspects of The Native Ad Itself

Before you twist, turn, and tweak your advertorial, you must first consider what the best approach is for getting users to actually visit the advertorial in the first place.

Here, you must have a strong focus on the copywriting in your ad and make sure that both the headline and the caption is “newsworthy”. Otherwise, what will end up happening, is that close to nobody will visit your advertorial in the first place.
Therefore, just as journalists spend a lot of time trying to come up with the best possible headline to capture eyeballs and get people to click, so shall you when making your ad.

Likewise, as there exists no such thing as a silver bullet in marketing – one shall keep testing different variations of creatives, headlines, descriptions, etc – until the best possible combination have been found. Luckily the advertising platforms provide A/B testing tools to help you in this process.

Remember, once again, that the placement of your ad is together with countless other articles and news, and thus your ad must blend in with the content of the platform.

For an overview of other types of marketing channels, I recommend that you visit the following page.

Best Platforms to Use for Native Advertising: Taboola, Outbrain and More

As Native Advertising has been on the rise, more and more companies are turning to it as a means of marketing their products. Native advertising is seen by many to be a less intrusive way of reaching out to potential customers without getting in the way or being too salesy. It’s also less likely for people to block ads from appearing on their screen.

Native Ads are usually placed in areas where content is already being consumed. The Native advertising platform’s on the market allow you to have your ads easily accessible when people want to view or read a certain article, post or even video. It also lets advertisers control what type of ad they would like their potential customer to see making it incredibly useful for brands that have a range of products they want to promote.

Native ads are also seen as being less intrusive and more appealing for the viewer as it’s not too salesy or in your face which is why Taboola has been so successful. The company works with some major brands that you may know such as NBC, Conde Nast Publications and even

What platforms should you use if you want your Native Ads campaign? Read this blog post for some of the best ones!

Taboola, Outbrain, and others

Taboola is one of the most renowned Native Ad platforms out there with over 300 million monthly unique users across 187 countries. The company has had a huge success since it was founded in 2007 so their track record speaks for itself.

Through exclusive partnerships with many of the world’s top publishers, Taboola serve 360 billion content recommendations to over one billion people across the web each month. Those recommendations might show up on sites like Bild, Bloomberg, NBC News, The Independent, MSN and The Weather Channel.

They provides native advertising that has high-scale, access to unique content consumption data, and world-class AI technology. Consumers are open to discovery, and they see your content or product when in discovery mode. Taboola is effective across the buyer journey––from raising awareness to also driving online purchases.

Outbrain is another Native Advertising platform that has been around since 2006 with over 120 million monthly unique users. The company works by matching advertisers to the content on their site, for example if you have an article relating to fashion then there will be a dress advertisement next to it when someone views your article.

Taboola and Outbrain are two of the most popular Native Advertising platforms but there are many others such as Taboola Japan, Kinja and Nuzzel. Native Ads has also been seen to work well on social media platforms such as LinkedIn with Native InLinkedIn and Native Twitter campaigns.