When you’re looking for opportunities to promote your product or brand, there’s a lot of options out there that you have sift through. Imagine how bad it is for a consumer – being constantly bombarded by these options everywhere, all the time. TV commercials, Spotify ads, billboards, mobile games ads, and more. It’s even exhausting thinking about all of them!

So why waste energy on these methods that don’t give you the results you want? You can try other digital advertising, but you won’t be getting the results you really want. Start with native advertising and watch your campaigns take off with the attention they deserve.

1. Native advertising fights ad fatigue

So you’ve decided to go digital, and what better way to start than with a display ad? With traditional banner ads, the average click through rate is .19% – definitely something you won’t write home about. Why? Because consumers fall prey to “banner blindness,” which is now a well-known phenomenon in the industry. This is when site visitors consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. With over 600 million devices armed with ad-blockers, this marketing strategy is also a dying breed.

Native advertising is a new technique that is leading the way, and it’s becoming an increasingly popular high-ROI strategy for brands and their digital marketing campaigns. Consumers look at native ads 53% more than banner ads, giving you a guaranteed advantage over your banner competitors.

2. Consumers Like Native Advertising

Consumers know that native ads are a form of advertising, but they don’t care!

One of the other biggest differences between native versus traditional advertising is that native is less invasive to a user’s experience than banner advertising. Where traditional banner advertising appears in obvious boxes and banners on a page, native content typically appears at the bottom or side of a page, in-feed, or in search results. Native ads are more subtle than display ads – though some people may consider this type of advertising misleading, there is value is in its subtlety. Because they don’t immediately read as ads, native ads are now better at attracting user attention than banner ads. Native works especially well as a means to motivate change in consumer opinion or behavior.

3. Click-through Rates Are Higher Than Other Advertising

Since consumers are more open to native advertising, this naturally leads to much higher CTRs than other types of display advertising. While the click-through rate on banner ads is a dwindling 0.19%, native advertising can scale it up to 8% with the right image and headline. With numbers like these, you’re able to maximize your spend into results you may not find anywhere else. With higher CTRs, your funnel starts with a much larger group of potential consumers, and if you’ve got good presells you can see your conversion rate climb.

4. Native Ads Have Great Success With Mobile Platforms

Native is also growing into the preferred format for mobile ads. Native is significantly less disruptive on mobile, and consumers — especially Gen Z consumers — are shifting to a mobile-first method of internet browsing. By 2020, Generation Z will make up 40 percent of consumers!

Native advertising works especially well in a mobile format because it appears as in-feed social, in-feed content, or as in-feed commerce. Between mobile and generational trends, native advertising sits at the center as a perhaps ideal solution to mobile advertising. Users are more likely to interact with these types of ads, especially since they favor a more personalized brand experience.

GlobalWebIndex reported in 2016 that 37% of mobile users blocked ads in the last month, leading to a reduction on the already weak performance of how banner ads work on mobile. That number is only growing higher every year. The choice is simple – if you want to target the massively growing mobile market, native is the way to go.

5. Content is King

There’s one major difference between content marketing and native advertising, and that difference is execution. Research shows more than 70% of people want to learn about a product through content. Viewers spend just as much time scanning past native ads as they do with editorial content – while editorial content takes 1.2 seconds to scan past, native ads take 1 second.

The benefit of native advertising is that it gives brands more space to connect with audiences. Something like a video or advertorial naturally gives advertisers more space to explore the benefits and features of their product. Consumers get a fuller picture of what the product is and why it could work for them, and can easily decide if they want to buy. The content is contextually relevant to what the audience is already reading, making it more engaging to interact with.

Native caters to other things that Generation Z values in its advertising, such as personalized messages and ads with story or humor. The ad-but-not-an-ad format is much more appealing to consumers at large; studies show that 86% of users favor native advertising, especially since they’re less invasive than traditional ads. Another benefit of native ads is that they can generate an increase in brand lift of up to 82 percent! Native ads make content more shareable, increasing the likelihood of your ad reaching others.

6. Reach Audiences Across the Most Trafficked Sites

Native advertising is taking over as the defacto form of advertising across all of the most popular places on the web today. Publishers recognize the power of native in increasing click-through rates, and work with native networks which have spaces where they serve ads on their sites. These high profile sites don’t want to disrupt the user experience and overwhelmingly favor native as their advertising mode of choice.

What does this mean for you?
You can reach audiences across sites like MSN, Business Insider, Yahoo, CNN, Fox News, Huffington Post, and more. And not just those main pages, but there are ad placements everywhere across these larger sites – target your campaign to sports properties of Yahoo to find the audience that works for you, or the finance section of Fox News to market your service to those who need it.

You can target individual sites with black lists, or run across many sites and find out what works for you after getting data. Your campaign could profit from running in places you may never have thought about before. With native networks, you can reach audiences across a wide variety of places and grow your consumer base with ease.

7. Native Advertising is Growing, and Fast

Business Insider reports that native advertising is set to account for 74 percent of all U.S. ad spend by 2021. The age old saying – the best time to start was years ago, the second best time is now – is really true with native advertising. By the end of 2019, eMarketer predicts that native spending will reach $41.1 billion, and the Global Marketing Alliance estimates from 2016 to 2020 native will have grown by 213%.

All of these numbers point to one thing – the future is native, and you can still strike while the iron is hot! Growing or shifting your business to use native is what the industry shows is how you succeed in 2020 and beyond.

The results are clear – native is definitely worth trying out, and if you’re already working with it, you should be scaling as much as you can. Take advantage of all native has to offer with Maximus.

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