Native Advertising: The Interruption Model 2.0

Are you one of the 72 percent of marketers who have asked your content marketing partner about native advertising?

If so, you’re probably aware of the immense amount of money and energy being funneled into this next big breakout from the interrupt advertising model. Many companies have jumped on board in search of reaching relevant audiences and finding new revenue streams by means of big-name publishers. And why not? Placing content in front of the hundreds of thousands of BuzzFeed, Time, and National Geographic readers sounds ideal.

But this doesn’t help shed any light on how to choose if and when native is right for you. A recent study by Moz highlights the differences between the native ad model and content marketing.

The Major Differences

Let’s define the two models by how they are typically executed.

Content Marketing: Typical content marketing agencies work on a retainer and will execute various campaigns or monthly publication goals, which are hosted by the client or pushed to multiple top-tier publications. This lends itself well to organic search ranking because of links and social media engagement with the brand, all while driving traffic to the brand’s site.

Native Advertising: A brand partners with a single publication that guarantees premium placement of sponsored content. This ensures that the brand is making impressions of the millions of visitors to the publication’s site and generating much higher click-through rates than traditional banner ads. Although, these articles are passed over by search engines and do not improve SEO as significantly as content marketing.

Fractl broke out its major distinctions between the two models for a recent article in HBR as seen below:

The Results

What’s a more important metric than ROI for native ads results? Fractl broke down two campaigns, one for each model, and calculated an estimated ROI based on traffic, social shares, links, and major placements.

From the content marketing camp, it looked at its own most successful infographic to date and ran it through Niel Patel’s ROI estimation calculator. The company estimated that its client received between 1,551 percent and 2,942 percent ROI.

By contrast, Fractl ran the numbers for the most successful BuzzFeed native ad campaign, “15 Things We Did At School That Future Students Will Never Understand,” which earned 109,020 social shares and one backlink generated from BuzzFeed itself. Without access to the direct traffic generated by the article, Fractl made some estimates based on the average top-20 article view counts from the site, which fell just bellow 1 million views. Keep in mind that the cost for a spot on BuzzFeed is $100,000 for three pieces, so this individual article was $33,333. The ROI calculated by Fractl was only 720 percent. That’s the highest-performing article on one of the largest native ad platforms on the market.

These numbers may not tell the whole story, however. Fractl didn’t mention its lowest article ROI or look at the lowest-performing native ad campaign on BuzzFeed. When looking at percentages based on initial investment like ROI, smaller investments require smaller returns in order to push huge ROI percentages. The real cost of investment is not the cost to create a single infographic, but also the cost to set up systems, create a strategy, and the opportunity cost of not doing something else. Native by contrast, the costs are very obvious but don’t offer the huge upside possibility of going viral.

So Which Is Right for You?

As with any marketing decision, start by identifying the problem you’re trying to solve. Are you concerned with generating quality leads and measuring ROI, growing your presence in search, or building community with the right audience? Once you’ve defined your strategic goals and pain points, you may discover that you’ll benefit from a combination of content marketing and native advertising. There is no silver bullet to digital marketing success.

Native is able to offer guaranteed visibility within a niche market by tapping into a publisher’s robust community. But more likely than not, you can earn the same level of trust and respect from your desired audience by putting the time into creating truly standout content and publishing it on your own domain.

That is something that a traditional content marketing strategy can address in a way that doesn’t alert an audience’s BS meter. With an effective native campaign that forces audiences to notice you and plant the seed, eventually that seed can grow into an idea that content can nurture into a qualified relationship.

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