Native advertising is a powerful way to generate brand awareness, web traffic or sales, but if you're making the following mistakes, you won't be able to realise its full potential. ‍

The native advertising market is booming and everyone, including your competitors, is taking full advantage by scaling up their campaigns. Simply put, no business can't afford to miss out on the benefits of this advertising form.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar:

You do your research, make a plan, get approval from your boss and launch your first native advertising campaign. Then, nothing happens. You get plenty of impressions, but none of them translates into great number of clicks or visits to your landing page, or then you get clicks, but conversion rates are not satisfying

You think, okay, these things take time. So, you try a few more times. But each time, the only result you get is a familiar disappointment.

If you know this feeling, then Readpeak is here to help. 

We've gathered the five most common mistakes that people make with their native ad campaigns to help you get the most from your work.

1. You're Treating Banner Ads and Native Ads The Same‍

Banner advertising and native advertising can both be used as part of your marketing strategy, but it's important to note that these are different types of advertising. To maximise engagement with your target audience, you'll need to tailor your content to each format.

While banner ads can certainly be effective when done correctly, they are very sales-oriented and invasive. These ads tend to stand out from their surrounding content and make it clear to the user they are promoting something. Because of this, consumers have become very capable of tuning them out when they browse websites.

Native advertising, however, works to blend your advertisement more seamlessly into the content or publication. When this is done harmoniously, it achieves far greater attention and engagement from readers because they don't feel like they are being targeted for the hard-sell.

Instead of your content standing out and feeling incoherent, native advertising should, for example, sit in a news feed in a similar way to a general article. By telling a story that your audience can relate to, native ads can effectively drive unintrusive brand awareness by appearing harmoniously at times when they are already looking for information. 

Too many marketers forget to angle the content for a native ad differently than for traditional banners. For example, importing the same punchline from a display banner into a native ad won't work. Instead, create your ad  from a content engagement perspective to get the reader’s interest. 

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2. You're Using the Wrong KPI'

This is one of the most important and fundamental marketing principles that people forget about native advertising campaigns. When you start a new campaign, you have to define your goals. And native ads are no different. Without defining what you need to achieve from a campaign and which metrics best demonstrate this, you'll struggle to know if your campaign has been a success or not. for example, if your marketing campaign's goal is brand awareness, you'll need to monitor the viewing impressions, clicks, behaviour metrics, and click-through-rates.

If, however, your campaign goal is about increasing user engagement, your KPIs will be the number of conversions or specific actions like whitepaper downloads, signups, sales and so on.

But measuring your KPIs is about far more than just evaluating if your campaign was a success or not. It's also about using these results to optimise your current and future campaigns. Understanding your goals and feeding back the results into new ad variations or approaches is a great way to make more effective campaigns.

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3. You’re Failing to Produce The Right Kind of Content

The main concept of native advertising is to produce content that provides value to the reader and sits comfortably next to the other text or images on the publisher's platform.

If you fail to do this, the customer will easily tune out your content in the same way they do with banner ads and other advertisements. his reality should inform how you design your native content.

Familiarise yourself with the format of the content your native ads will sit beside. Look at the visuals and the text and aim for a similar tone or feel.

But of course, you want to drive engagement, so make sure to pack your ad with content that is useful, informative and authoritative. Write headlines that are clear, compelling and generate user interest without using trickery. Good quality content should be helpful and educational by demonstrating your solution to your consumer's problems.

Write headlines that are clear, compelling and generate user interest without using trickery. Good quality content should be helpful and educational by demonstrating your solution to your consumer's problems.

4. You're Ignoring the Customer Journey‍

A successful marketing campaign should be aware of its customer persona and understand the customer journey.

To make a native advertising campaign that works, you need to make sure it matches each stage of their journey. For example, for top-of-funnel goals like brand awareness, your native advertising needs to be pitched appropriately.

You need to point out the customers’ pain points, be informative, educational and compassionate.

This stage of the journey is not the time for the hard sell or demands to take action. It's best to use this point of the journey to introduce your brand and its product or service softly.

Native advertising is great for introducing customers to a brand and easing them into what your business can do for them. So, your content should reflect this. 

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5. You're Not Doing A/B Testing

A/B testing is essential in native advertising. Testing a wide range of ads and seeing which performs best is vital for optimising your campaign and helping you understand your target audience. 

By designing a few variations of your ads, you can tweak headlines, images and text or emphasise specific parts of your service. 

If you want to A/B test but you aren't sure where to start, Readpeak offers a straightforward way to figure out what content has the best performance. 

We recommend you try at least three different variations of an ad and test out various things like:‍

Headlines: Compare a catchy vs. soft-sell headline‍

Media news sites: Try your ad on different media platforms to see which gets the best response‍

Landing page: See if your landing page works better as text only or with more images.

And this is just the beginning. There are many other advertising adjustments you can make to optimise your cConclusion

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‍Conclusion:

If any of these native advertising mistakes are familiar to you, don't worry, you're in good company. Many advertisers and marketers find native advertising a little confusing when getting started.

That's why our Readpeak team is always available if you need any assistance analysing your campaigns or help getting past these mistakes.

After all, mistakes are just ways to help us all learn and improve!