Why Native Advertising and Branded Content Is Your Best Avenue as an Enterprise

Getting your voice heard in a crowded room isn’t about shouting louder than everyone else; it’s intrusive and ultimately turns people off. Successful digital marketing shares a very similar ethos, and learning how to build a rapport with your clients will leave you standing long after the competition has been kicked out for making too much noise.

By building an affinity for your brand, you are putting yourself and your business in a fantastic position to show your customers that you understand them, and that makes them want to listen.

This is where native advertising and branded content come in.

What is branded content?

Branded content allows you to connect with your audience by focusing on the brand itself rather than a specific product or service.

By creating content that isn’t fixated on any one particular item, it lets businesses interact with consumers on a different level. We’re talking emotions. By creating content that tells a story through the eyes of inspiring characters and demonstrating how a brand has been right there with its customers through some important and challenging times, you begin to build trust and loyalty that could never be achieved via a traditional sales conversion.

Take Red Bull’s production of the Felix Baumgartner supersonic freefall for example. When you saw that guy dropping from space into the unknown, did you think about buying a can of Red Bull? Doubtful, but that didn’t matter. Instead, your heart raced, your eyes welled up and suddenly you were right there in the control room with the rest of the team, holding your breath until Baumgartner landed safely back down on earth. You’ll never forget it, and now you’ve got an emotional connection with that brand for the rest of your life.

What is native advertising?

A Native advertising is to marketing what a good listener is to a conversation; they wait patiently for the right time to speak, and when they do, it’s relevant, unintrusive, and gently diverts an audience in the right direction.

This type of advert makes a point of blending in with its surroundings and takes on the format of any other content on that platform to suggest further things for your audience to read, relevant links resulting from a search query, or subtle ads that slot discreetly into a user’s news feed.

The reason that this understated approach to advertising works isn’t that you are tricking your readers into clicking on a link, in fact, they are completely aware that they are viewing sponsored content. What’s happening is that you’re offering them something useful to move onto that will complement their experience and eventually lead them to complete the desired CTA on the target page.

Native ads receive much higher reader engagement and purchase intent than overpowering display ads as consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated with banners and pop-ups that block content. The subtle approach is definitely proving to be the way forward.

There’s never been a more important time to evaluate how you are connecting with your audience and show them how your products and services make their lives better. By integrating these forms of marketing into your strategy, you will start to enjoy a relationship with your customers that you might not have considered possible before.