Why native advertising beats traditional advertising
17.05.2018 | 11:22:00 | Tomas Forsbäck
Native advertising has good aspects not found in traditional advertising.
Digital marketing includes more and more alternative channels, targeting methods and tools to find the right potential customers. But what separates the good from the bad?
Here are five reasons why content-based advertising beats traditional advertising.
People consume content, not ads
When visitors visit a media website, they are looking for interesting and current content.
Even if a banner ad is targeted and even topical for the readers, they rarely want to stop reading and move to the advertiser’s website. But if you present your offering in a content format, such as in a useful blog post, visitors may well become excited about it.
Visitors close their eyes to banners
The majority of website visitors recognise ad placement locations and ignore them. This phenomenon is called “banner blindness”. For this reason, the attention value and effectiveness of traditional banner advertising has declined over the past five years.
At the same time, we have learned to consider the attention value of content-based advertising. According to a study conducted by Yahoo in 2016, up to 93% of visitors take notice of native advertising at least at title level.
Readers use ad blockers
An AdBlock is a browser extension that allows users to remove all traditional ads on a media site.
The use of ad blockers is becoming increasingly popular. This means fewer and fewer people are seeing banner ads.
Ad blockers do not filter native ads in the same way. The majority of native ads reach even the readers who use AdBlock extensions.
Content is worth a thousand pictures
The traditional saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is as wrong as can be. In advertising, the opposite is true.
Most benefits of the products, services or technologies of companies are difficult to highlight with a banner image alone. The offering must be established in words. The benefits need to be described so that the customer is left with an in-depth understanding and the information necessary for a purchase decision.
Through content, you can gain the interest of readers without them perceiving it as an advertisement.
You remember what you read
When potential customers familiarise themselves with a company’s offering through content, the company leaves a positive impression on the readers’ mind more easily than with traditional advertising.
The content can be tailored to benefit customers who are at a specific point on the consumer decision journey. Good content does not oversell, but helps the reader. It leaves a memory trace that will last for a long time.
At the latest when a need for a purchase arises, the readers will remember that they just read about the offering of a specific company. Useful content may be the first and most important step on the customer decision journey.
In a nutshell:
Good content in the right media that reaches the right readers at the right time is far more effective than an uninteresting banner ad that is ignored and not clicked on.