Finding Great Leads with Native Advertising

MediaGo Staff | 02/02/2021

Thanks to its engaging format, native advertising presents a fantastic way to find promising new leads for your business. However, as any direct response advertiser will tell you, it’s not as simple as slapping together a creative and putting it out there for the world to see. If you want to connect with qualified leads in your specific product vertical, it’s best to do a bit of upfront legwork. Here’s our advice for making sure you put your best effort out there to ensure that your native ads reach the right folks.

1. Define your audience

Defining your audience is one of the most important steps to take as you develop your native campaign. For products and services that have a long marketing funnel, it’s essential to make sure that you’re making your initial touchpoints with the right demographic; otherwise, you may discover at a late stage that your campaigns aren’t converting — throwing away tons of ad dollars in the process.

When narrowing down your target audience, we recommend drilling down as much as possible into their age range, salary and all other relevant information. The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to leverage whatever targeting options are at your disposal on your chosen ad platform.

2. Choose a native advertising partner

Next, you’ll want to select a native ad platform that offers publishing channels that align with your target demographic. To start, reach out to the customer service rep for the platform you’re interested in and inquire about their publishing partners. From that discussion, you’ll likely be able to learn enough about their publishers to make an informed decision.

Another important aspect in choosing a native advertising partner is understanding their filtering options. You want your native partner’s filtering options to make it easy for you to reach your customer demographic, reducing the amount of guesswork needed when setting up targeting.

3. Plan your story

Native ads generally appear alongside news articles, and for that reason it’s important to devote some thought into the story you’re telling. Keep in mind that your story actually begins before the customer even clicks on your ad. The ad creative itself acts as the introduction to your product or service, and it alone should be able to pique the interest of your target audience. That’s why it’s important to carefully consider the images and copy you use on your advertisements.

4. Create great content, and a strong call to action

No matter how long or short your landing page is, make sure that the content is well-written and compelling with a clear, strong call to action. Leads who arrive on your landing page have already shown interest by clicking on your native ad. Now, your landing page needs to convince them to take the next step — be it signing up for an account or newsletter or purchasing a product. If your landing page isn’t up to par, you’ll see the negative results reflected in a high bounce rate.

It is also crucial to maintain a consistent tone of voice and visual identity across your entire website – including on your ads and landing page. This will help ensure that your leads don’t get a disjointed feeling when they visit your site, which could cause them to close the tab.

We hope you found this initial primer on native advertising lead-gen helpful. Check back in on the MediaGo blog for more native advertising advice.