While content marketing is not new anymore, many advertisers still have no idea what this marketing tactic really is about.
To me, content marketing lies right between branding and direct marketing. Well executed, such strategy can provide best of both worlds : brand engagement and ROI. And at scale.
For years, brands and e-commerce sites have been creating lots of content pages with one main purpose : improving their google organic rankings. The problem is that these pages were often designed and written for google bots, not for humans. It means these potentially great content pages have never been thought and used as potential landing pages.
In addition to facebook being so massive over the past 3–4 years, making advertisers spend huge budgets on native advertising placements, third party content recommendation platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain have become mainstream. Nowadays, billions of native ads impressions are available daily, clearly making “native” a proper digital channel, that could even be bigger than search for many companies.
Content marketing fits perfectly with Native Advertising. Promoting editorial content performs way better than traditional promotional content, allowing much lower CPCs thanks to high CTR%, and potentially great ROI.
Many marketeers still think it is impossible to convert a visitor who lands on a blog post, adding another step before the conversion rather than landing straight on a registration form. Well, this is not true, but making it successful needs a great execution on the content strategy to attract and engage the right audience, and on the site design to make sure they browse other pages for further action.
Based on highly successful results we’ve seen for advertisers at Powerspace, both in term of volume and profitability, I truly believe native advertising will soon be part of all advertisers channel mix, making it a great alternative to other channels and companies such as Google, facebook or Criteo.
Exemple of Native Ads
