Content marketing can help. The problem is you need to play the SEO game to get eyes on your content. If your site doesn’t show up in search, how will you get people to read your blog?

And sure, SEO is 100% worth it, but it can take a long time to pay off. Ads, on the other hand, can provide an almost instant boost but can be expensive.

Native content solves these issues by pulling the best aspects of both together. It’s a form of paid advertising, but instead of a naked sales pitch, it’s genuinely high-quality content on platforms with an established readership.

In this article, we’ll explain native content and its benefits before offering you some tips on creating native content that works.

What is Native Content?

Native content, also called branded content or sponsored content, is a form of advertising that looks like a piece of high-quality organic content on a website.

These can be articles, case studies, videos, and many other forms of content. The important thing is that they look like content and are genuinely helpful.

That said, it’s important not to deceive the customer. Therefore, there are a few ways people can distinguish native content from truly organic content:

• It might say “branded content” or “sponsored content” somewhere on the piece.
• It may say “recommended” or “suggested.”
• It may contain small icons users can hover over to see it’s an ad and to close the ad.

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Since native content looks like regular content, it blends in and can increase clicks.

Brands are increasingly seeing the benefits of this style of marketing. In 2021, native advertising spend jumped 37%. Total native advertising spend is forecasted to reach almost $100 billion by 2023.

It’s easy to see why. As ad blocker usage increases, marketers need a way to get in front of their customers without annoying them.

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Native content done right is genuinely informative and engaging. The reader is less likely to care that it’s technically a sales piece, even if they notice.

Native content vs. native advertising: Is there a difference?

Native content and native advertising are used interchangeably, and they’re fairly similar in that they both are paid marketing strategies designed to sell.

However, native ads look more explicitly like ads that are part of a website. They link to a landing page on your site, and you pay per click or impression.

Native content is meant to look like an organic blog post, video, case study, or another piece of content. So it is a piece of content that fits right into the publication it’s on. It uses storytelling, research, and other common content elements to attract the reader’s attention.

Also, to help make sure it matches the voice and needs of the readers, you often pay the publication’s own editorial team to create the piece, rather than write it in-house.

Benefits of Native Content

Native content can be a great tool for marketers because it looks and acts like a real piece of content.

Here are some ways it helps brands and marketers:

Helps fight ad fatigue

We’ve all heard stats about how many ads people see and how they’re sick of them.

Well, native content can help. Not only does it look like real content… but it provides the same type of value that a true piece of high-quality content would.

It’s true that many customers will know it’s an ad. Stanford found in 2018 that native content doesn’t “fool” consumers.

That was several years ago, so you would think native content would be less effective, especially as even more people recognize it’s an ad.

So why is it still growing rapidly, with advertisers spending billions of dollars on native content each year? Well, it works.

Even if you know it’s an ad, the format means that you can create an ad that readers genuinely relate to, rather than a quick “buy our product” pitch.

Builds trust

Good native content is informative and helpful, not overly salesy. That plays a big part in why readers don’t treat native content like standard ads.

The reader doesn’t feel like you’re just pushing an ad on them. They feel as if you care about helping them solve their problems.

Plus, the reader may learn something from you. You get to demonstrate your expertise and authority, keeping you top of mind. Even if they don’t buy now, you stay in their brains, often landing you the sale at a later time.

Native content also lets you show customers that your organization shares their values. For instance, if your organization is passionate about a social issue — as you’ll see in our examples later — you can write a native content piece about it.

Can fill funnel gaps

One of the best roles for native content is filling gaps in the customer journey and in your marketing funnels.

Imagine a potential customer knows they have a problem they want to fix, but they aren’t aware that a solution exists. We can say they’re “problem-aware.”

Here’s where your native content comes in. You can call out their problem in the title of your piece, then elaborate on that problem and show them how to solve it. They’re now “solution-aware.”

Now that they know such a solution exists, you could simply use implicit CTAs to drive them to your website or the next stage of the funnel. They may click out of curiosity, stumbling upon your brand.

Alternatively, you can directly state that your brand provides the solution they need. Since they’re on your content, and they want their problem solved, they’re likely to click through instead of looking at your competitors.

As you can see, this could offer a high ROI if you do it right.

How to Make Native Content That Works

Creating native content that does its job well requires a fair bit of time. You have to know your customers’ problems and address them — clickbait articles or videos lacking helpful content won’t do.

Here’s how to make content that works:

Understand and answer a pressing customer problem

As mentioned, start by researching and noting your customers’ most pressing problems. Surveys are a good start, but customers may not be entirely truthful — through no fault of their own.

So besides surveys, look online in forums or Facebook groups where your target market hangs out. They tend to be more honest about their problems there.

Also, check out related searches and “people also ask” questions on Google to find common questions in your niche.

Once you see a pattern in customer problems, pick one that you can answer with content.

Know your customer’s stage of awareness

The stage of awareness reflects how much they know about their problem, potential solutions, and your brand.

There are five:

• Stage 1 — Unaware: They aren’t aware they have a problem at all.
• Stage 2 — Pain Aware: They know they have a problem but don’t know solutions exist.
• Stage 3 — Solution Aware: They know solutions exist but don’t know about your brand.
• Stage 4 — Product Aware: They know of your brand’s solutions but don’t know if it’s right for them vs. other solutions.
• Stage 5 — Most Aware: They’re almost ready to buy, but need a final nudge.

Native content generally targets the first three stages and aims to get customers to the solution-aware stage at the very least.

Your content will differ depending on the customer’s awareness stage. For example, if you’re targeting a problem-aware customer, you’ll call out that problem and start to give possible solutions to that problem.

On the other hand, maybe they’re solution aware. You’ll need to persuade them of your product’s benefit — a case study could work here.

If they’re unaware, you’ll need to make them aware that they have a problem.

For example, say you’re a marketing agency targeting small businesses that don’t know much about marketing and don’t realize they can grow faster with online marketing campaigns.

You could simply create a piece on the #1 thing business owners fail to do that causes them to stagnate. That “thing” would be digital marketing.

You’ve now made them problem aware, so you can continue moving them up the funnel from there.

Don’t be too “salesy”

The main marketing goal of this piece is to move the customer to the next step of the funnel and deliver value — so avoid any hard selling language aside from a CTA button at the end.

Instead, use soft CTAs. Depending on your customer’s stage of awareness at the end of the piece, you could sprinkle in your brand name with links to the next piece of your funnel or even just the solution you offer as the anchor text.

For example, a financial advisor could link the phrase “saving for retirement” to their page if their piece educates the reader about types of retirement accounts.

Add visual elements

If you’re writing a native article, make sure to add visuals and other creative design elements. These attract attention and make the piece more appealing to read.

Depending on the type of problem you’re solving, how you’re doing so, and the platform you’re posting the native content on, full-blown videos may work better. Some things can be explained much better via video than text.

Target the right websites

Amazing native content won’t work if it doesn’t get in front of your target audience. So figure out which websites and blogs they visit, and get your content on those.

Not only will more of your ideal customers see the article, but it will blend in better and be more relevant to what all readers are reading about or looking for at that moment.

For example, a financial advisor would want to get their native content on a personal finance blog, not a fitness blog.

It doesn’t just have to be your niche, though. It could be adjacent or even fairly irrelevant sites your customers visit (as long as you have data to back it up).

For instance, say a financial advisor firm wanted to target a younger audience moving up in the workforce and earning more. They may advertise on a news website targeted toward millennials.

To find creative targets like this (backed by data), look at other pages your audience likes using Facebook’s Audience Insights.

3 Awesome Native Content Examples to Help You Get Started

Let’s look at a few examples of high-quality native content:

1. New York Times and Allbirds

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Allbirds is a shoe company passionate about environmental sustainability. Instead of hard-selling that, they created a native article diving deep into how birds help the planet.

This is an interesting angle, as many aren’t aware that various species of birds significantly impact the environment. It also appeals particularly to the New York Times’s environmentally-conscious audience.

The article itself is a listicle covering different bird species and their impacts. Each section describes a different bird and offers stats detailing its importance to the earth.

The standout element here, though, is the attractive visuals. There’s a lot of color, and you can interact with the images by hovering your cursor over them.

The overall article ties back to Allbirds’ values. Thus, the CTA urges readers to learn more about Allbirds sustainable business practices. Readers land on the brand’s website to learn more about its values… then can go shop for shoes.

Notice that it says “Paid Post” at the top — readers can see that, but many won’t care because the article is visually attractive and has interesting content.

2. New York Times and Adobe

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Here’s another awesome native article from the NYT. This time, Adobe is covering a broad trend in its target market of retailers — how technology is changing the consumer experience.

Adobe covers a few specific trends within the retail tech revolution. It uses a mix of storytelling, explanation, stats, and quotes from industry leaders to create a compelling narrative. Images and color are sprinkled throughout the post to break up text and draw the eye towards points of emphasis.

Overall, it’s helpful content for retailers and positions Adobe as an authority in technology for retailers. Of course, they put a CTA at the end to direct readers to their website, but it doesn’t hard-sell anything. Just the fact that they write about the tech in such detail implies Adobe offers the solutions retailers may need.

3. NowThis and Blackrock

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Native content doesn’t have to be written articles. Video is a powerful medium, and is also a great option for native content. That’s why BlackRock partnered with social media-focused news organization NowThis to create the Invest in Yourself video series.

These are personal finance videos revolving around investing money and time into gaining new skills, advancing your career, improving your finances, and similar topics.

Videos are grouped into three categories:

• Advice
• Q&A
• Full-length features

Plus, the pages use NowThis’s attractive colors and visuals to please the eyes.

BlackRock’s goal here seems to be drawing in a younger crowd — millennial professionals who are advancing in their careers and earning healthy incomes and need professional assistance managing and growing their assets. They also want someone who truly understands them and is invested in their financial success.

Advertising on NowThis was a good choice since it has a younger target audience.

These helpful personal finance videos build BlackRock’s brand awareness and perceived expertise, and can potentially attract a significant amount of young professionals to start using BlackRock’s wealth management services (if not now, then in the future).

Combine the Best of Paid Ads and Content Marketing

Native content can help you lower the consumer’s guard when it comes to ads. But not just that, it can build trust and secure customer loyalty if you create content that’s genuinely helpful and enjoyable to read.

Follow the tips laid out in this article and study the examples to get some inspiration.

That said, if you need help creating engaging, high-converting sponsored content, our team is happy to help.

Schedule a call with us today to learn how our experts can create native content that builds authority and grows your brand.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Native Content appeared first on The HOTH.

Right now, the majority of people are working from home and staying inside. As a business owner, you must tweak and adjust to meet these new consumer demands.

In this article, I am going to show you some creative ways to change your offer to retain, attract, and help your business survive if not thrive!

Understanding Your Audience & Their Needs

Before I go into examples of offers, I want to break down a way of thinking about who your audience is and how to find their needs.

Audience Building

When we build PPC campaigns for clients, we spend a lot of time understanding the audience and the competitive landscape before constructing an offer.

Understanding your audience is EVERYTHING!

It will determine how you speak to them, the content you create, the copy you write, the design you make, the types of offers, the price points…. everything!

These are questions that you should be asking yourself as well:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What do they care about?
• What is their current situation?
• What is the motivating event that happens before they come to you?
• What type of goals are they looking to achieve?

Truly understanding your audience is the first step.

Understand What People Want Right Now

With this current situation, the same messages that were important just a few weeks or months ago will not land the same way:

• “10X Your Business” – People aren’t thinking about growth, they are focused on surviving
• “Travel The World!” – The whole world is in lockdown.
• “Join 10,000 people at this conference” – We want to stay AWAY from people.

These messages just aren’t going to work right now, because the situation is totally different. Everyone is at home and they don’t care about that anymore.

Instead, the world is shifting and people want:

• Safety – How can you ensure that your products are safe?
• Security – How can you give people security?
• Free or Low-Cost Alternatives – How can you help people save money or eliminate costs?
• Diversity – Can you help your customers diversify?
• Education – People are at home and want to learn, can you give them free or paid training?
• Do-it-yourself or at home – How can people re-create what you do at home?
• Delivery – Can you send things to their houses vs having them come in?
• Distraction – Can you give them something entertaining to distract them from this?

How can you incorporate & emphasize these themes in your offers and advertising?

Remember, you have to communicate these things!

If you’re open – TELL ‘EM
If you’re delivering – TELL ‘EM
If you’re focusing on cleaning & safety – Show them what you’re doing

Let’s talk about tweaking our offers to fit these current circumstances

Tweaking Your Offers For Your Audience

In this next section, I put together a list of typical offers and how you can get creative with them during a time like now.

These examples only touch a tiny fraction of the market, but hopefully gives some examples to get your creative juices flowing. There is always a way to be creative for your particular business.

Creating Something Totally Different

You may find yourself in a situation where “tweaking” your offer simply won’t work.

In that case, you might be able to shift your entire product to something different or more relevant.

For example – Elon Musk of Tesla offered to manufacture ventilators even if they couldn’t manufacture their cars.

This cosmetics company shifted their offering to start producing hand sanitizer.

If you can’t sell what you normally do, how can you use your resources to create a new, more relevant offer?

Alternative: Using This Time To Help

Right now there is also a massive opportunity to simply HELP people.

Everyone is online right now looking for help and opportunities – so now is a great time to shift to this if you are in a position to.

Focus on giving away things for free. Create tons of content. Open up what used to cost money, and use this time to build an audience that loves you, even if they aren’t buying… (yet!).

The market will come back and people will remember what you did.

Deploying Your New Offer

To deploy the new offer, we need to hit our audience in any way we can to make sure we’re gaining market share.

Step #1 – Landing Page

Use a landing page to deploy your new offer.

On your landing page, you will want to showcase the offer, the benefits, and an opt-in form, and a way for them to call you.

Here is a great example of a landing page we built for a client locally. We’re helping them get more business through take-out.

Step #2 – Connect With Your Audience

In a time like this, we need to focus on areas where we will be able to get the quickest traction possible but also have a solid chance of reaching our audience we outlined above.

Solution A: Your Organic Following

If you have a responsive social media following that would be the “I can deploy this today” method.

I would not recommend just doing a social media post though. Your audience’s news feed is currently smothered in news, new offers, and kittens.

It will be very hard to break past the noise.

To almost get a guaranteed set of new eyes on your offer you need to put some fuel in the tank.

Solution B: Paid Advertising

If you want people to see your offer ASAP then you need to advertise.

And right now is a great time, because advertising is temporarily cheaper than normal. There are more people online, which means more ad inventory!

With Google Ads, you can reach thousands in your area looking for your offer.

You bid on keywords or terms for your ads to be shown for, or you can even geo-target users specific areas.

Want to reach past visitors? You can do that too through retargeting!

When it comes to paid advertising, you’re not hoping that someone will like, comment, or share your post.

You’re literally injecting your business and offer with new views every day.

Once again, the demand is there for these offers and your business is now supplying this demand.

When someone types in the search term “discount delivery food” you will see some of the major brands are already adjusting their offers to meet demand.

Conclusion

In times like this for your business to survive you need to adjust your strategy quickly.

Identify your audience and understand what they need right now. Then create a new relevant offer and execute it as soon as possible!

If you’re looking to have a team to help you with adjusting your offer and getting in front of thousands of customers local or nationwide, reach out to The HOTH PPC team today.

We’re currently helping our clients alter their message, adjust to new demands, and helping businesses survive during this time.

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What are you doing to tweak your offers? What have you seen working? We’d love to know in the comments!

The post How To Pivot Your Advertising & Offers For Coronavirus (10+ Examples) appeared first on The HOTH.

Want to see how we did it?

In this article, I’m going to break down the strategies that helped us turn this campaign around… AND show you how to apply these strategies to your Google Ads PPC Campaigns!

Let’s dive in!

Background

This client sells high-end specialty home goods that have prices starting at ~$5k+, so this is a lucrative market.

The website is set up as sort of an e-commerce store, with all types of products listed. Because this is such a high-end market, most people don’t just buy online, they always speak with someone to match them up with the perfect product.

They came to us for some help in reducing their lead cost, as well as delivering them a higher volume of leads while maintaining lead quality.

The Audit – Huge Opportunities Uncovered

Google Ads is sort of a land mine.

It is by far the most powerful ad platform in the world, but also has grown to be one of the most complex.

Make no mistakes about it – Google’s #1 goal is to get as much money from you as possible, seemingly without any incentive for you getting ROI.

…But that’s where we come in.

The first thing we always do is an audit of the account.

We’re looking for:

1. Current data to gain insights from (what’s working, what’s not).
2. Mistakes in the account or setup that lead to poor conversions.

100% of the time, no exaggeration, we find opportunities that can be improved.

To set the baseline, here’s what the account looked like when it was handed to us, before any work was done:

Cost: $2,020
Conversion Rate: 0.34%
Conversions: 5
Cost Per Conversion: $403

Right off the bat, we notice that the conversion rate is only .34% which is pretty low, and the cost per conversion is high for what’s expected.

Here are a few things we did right away to get this campaign restarted:

Know Exactly Where Every Cent Is Going With Proper Tracking

Tracking and data is the backbone of a properly setup campaign.

Without it, you can’t find out what campaigns are actually working, so you’ll never be able to make decisions about what to keep, cut, or scale!

The problem is that unless you’re an expert, it’s easy to set this up incorrectly (or not set it up at all!)

In this account, we found conversions like “All Page Views” and other settings like “Count Every Conversion” were setup and were leading to a lot of false data over the years.

For instance with the “Count Every Conversion” setting, if you click an ad once and opt in 3 times, it is counted all 3 leads when in reality we only have one lead. This is OK for purchase conversion campaigns, but not great for lead gen.

You see? There are landmines like this all over the place.

How we fix it:

We setup all new triggers and tags inside of Google Tag Manager which then sent the data back to Google Analytics and Google Ads.

We use Google Tag Manager in every account we touch so that all data is going to one place and then being properly sorted.

It is very easy to trace if there are any problems, and we only have to put one tracking code, Google Tag Manager, onto our pages.

Increasing CTR With Streamlined Ad Groups & Ad Copy

In Google ads, you have “ad groups” which include a set of keywords that your bidding on, and the ad copy that will be displayed when people use those keywords in their searches.

When users search for a certain keyword, they’re looking for something very specific and want the solution.

But when a generic ad pops up, it won’t necessarily match exactly what they are looking for, and that can increase your costs since your CTR (click through rate) is too low.

In this account, we found that a lot of the ad groups were using the same generic ad.

This is a big opportunity because 1 ad can’t show the differences in each product, highlight benefits, or characteristics of the specific product.

How we fixed it:

We created all new ads with headlines & descriptions that included the specific seed keyword in each one.

This is one of the most important steps to a high converting campaign because of how valuable the user experience is.

You don’t want someone searching for “oil changes near me” and an ad for “tire rotations” coming up.

It is completely irrelevant and won’t generate a lot of traffic.

Making this change not only increased the ad relevance score but also made the user experience seamless for what they’re searching for.

From these major optimization steps and our daily management, these are the results we saw by the end of June, 2019.

Cost: $1,690
Conversion Rate: 0.42%
Conversions: 7
Cost Per Conversion: $241

Just with these few strategies, you can see that the cost per conversion dropped over 40% since the beginning.

But we’re not done yet.

Increasing Conversions With Landing Pages

Running profitable campaigns takes a multi-faceted approach. It’s often not just what is set up in the account, but also what happens after the ad click.

A common problem that we see is that people often are driving traffic to their website, but that website isn’t as optimized as it can be for the conversion they want.

When you have a lead gen campaign going to your normal website, it’s often crowded by all sorts of distractions like navigation menus, content, and it’s not clear what you want them to do.

You see, when a visitor lands on a page, you have to make it extremely clear what you want them to do, and eliminate all other distractions.

That’s where landing pages come in.

A landing page is a page designed specifically to get conversions after an ad is clicked…

…and it can make an enormous difference in how a campaign performs!

A landing page has one primary CTA (Call To Action), the page copy is written around the customer avatar and exactly the keywords you’re bidding on, and there are no links to other destinations.

In this case, this account was sending traffic directly to their website, but there was a ton of room for conversion rate optimization.

We want people to take action now and that is what a landing page will do.

How We Fixed It

To kick this campaign up a few more notches we needed a dedicated landing page.

Over the last few years at The HOTH we have ran millions of dollars in ad spend and one thing is for sure – most people are BURNING money by not using high-converting landing pages.

So we started with one of our signature landing pages that encourage traffic to opt-in to view their current inventory and pricing.

We included a simple but to the point headline, a carefully crafted benefits section, and a clear Call-To-Action, all in a well designed, beautiful landing page.

The results?

Cost: $1,820
Conversion Rate: 1.19%
Conversions: 32
Cost Per Conversion: $56.90

Conclusion

By setting up proper tracking, optimizing the campaign with our specific process, and implementing a focused landing page, we were able to drop their CPL (Cost Per Lead) by over 85%!

If we generated the same amount of leads we did in July for the same price as April we would have spent $12,896, vs the $1,820 that we spent.

The great thing is we’re still not done.

Because we do daily management and ongoing optimization, we have a wealth of strategies to implement to take this campaign even farther as we get more data.

Additionally, as long as the client can handle the volume, we can work to scale it to the moon – all while maintaining a healthy CPL and lead quality.

This campaign is off to a great start, but you don’t have to just take our word for it, this is what the client had to say:

Want us to help you with your PPC lead gen campaigns? Check out HOTH PPC.

Any questions? Let us know in the comments!

The post PPC Case Study: How To Reduce Cost Per Lead By 85% appeared first on The HOTH.