The success of your advertising campaigns depends on multiple factors, such as ad placements, targeting settings, creatives, etc. To make people pay attention to your ad, you need to test multiple combinations of images and headlines and develop really enticing messaging. But there is one more factor that determines whether your campaign clickers will take any further actions – it’s a page they land on.
Native ads differ from traditional advertising formats. Along with being used to promote ‘typical’ product or service pages, native ads prove effective for the distribution of top and mid-funnel content. It means that you can leverage native advertising for almost any marketing goal you set. Here come a few questions:
- How do you pick the right content for brand awareness, lead generation, and sales-oriented campaigns?
- When is it a good idea to promote blog posts or other informative content with native ads?
What’s your goal?
As has already been mentioned, you can set different goals for your native advertising campaigns. Whether you aim at building brand awareness or strengthening customer loyalty, you’ll achieve your objectives fast with a quality campaign.
Moreover, depending on your goals, you’ll be targeting different audience segments. With this in mind, let’s move on to identifying what your landing page should include when you target either of the following objectives:
- Build brand awareness;
- Generate leads;
- Drive sales;
- Nurture your customers.
Build brand awareness
What do campaigns aimed at building brand awareness include and why actually run them?
Native ads are often displayed next to editorial articles on publishers’ websites, and readers are more likely to click on them when these ads offer useful information, news, or entertaining content. Distributing these types of content by doing native advertising, you reach the widest possible audience that may later become your leads and customers.
It’s also worth noting that attracting lots of visitors isn’t enough for a brand awareness campaign. While trying to maximize your reach, you should remember that your message needs to be relevant to your product or service.
So what are the most effective landing pages types for boosting your brand awareness?
Stories
Storytelling is a powerful approach that can increase both brand awareness and authority.
By sharing stories that evoke emotions, you can build positive brand perception. Tell your customers’ stories, take your audience behind the scenes, share employee success stories – these types of content form a personal connection between your prospecting customers and your brand.
‘How-to’ guides
Use your native ad campaigns to educate your audience.
Do you sell kitchenware? Create and distribute homemade recipes. Does your company offer a fitness app? Share 10 best exercises to do at home. Even if your campaign clickers don’t need a dinner set or a personal training program, they’ll think about your company first when they do need it.
Statistics
Readers love numbers and statistics.
The topic ‘8 Out of 10 businesses fail within the first 18 months. Here’s why’ is similar to simple ‘How to avoid business failure,’ but these two will cause different reactions. The first title denotes you have insights into the subject, while the second one is just another vague guide from a little-known company.
If you have studies you conducted for marketing purposes, include them in your native advertising campaigns.
Quizzes and gamification
Anything that encourages users to interact with your brand will work.
Personality quizzes, knowledge tests, shopping quizzes – whatever type you choose, you can be sure it will drive better engagement than a typical blog post would do.
Seasonal content
Are holidays coming up soon? Use this to your advantage.
Content themed around a particular season or event is extremely effective for capturing your buyers’ attention. Even if your products don’t fall under the category of holiday shopping, try to find ways your offering can be relevant to the topic.
Lists
Lots of native advertising examples include list posts. People love them. These articles provide them with a pile of ideas rather than educational content. Seeing a post called ‘30+ Hometown vacation ideas,’ readers understand they can get quite a few great ideas by quickly scanning it.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of content types that might work for your brand awareness campaigns, but it’s a great place to start. Regardless of what your campaign content offers, remember that it should encourage readers to keep navigating your website. So, before launching your next brand awareness campaign, make sure your landing page has a clear structure and includes elements that make your visitors stay on your site as long as possible.
Lead Generation
Lead generation campaigns have a key purpose: to capture users’ contact information so that you can send them your marketing and sales materials. To get leads online, you need a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer to your potential customers in exchange for their contact details.
What types of lead magnets can you choose for your lead generation native advertising campaign?
Free services
Offer free consultation or product trial for any user who fills in the form on your landing page and leaves their contact.
Cheat sheets and checklists
Who doesn’t like easy-to-implement action plans? Just like list posts, cheat sheets and checklists are popular due to their simplicity and functionality.
Ebooks
Ebooks are one of the best content types for collecting lead information. Visitors can see what’s inside only after they provide their contact information.
Moreover, your ebook is a way to establish yourself as an industry expert. Develop an insightful guide, you showcase your expertise and have greater chances to turn these leads into your customers.
Giveaways
Getting leads from a giveaway is an effective tactic, but remember that you want to reach the widest possible number of prospective customers, not just participants. Keep this in mind when coming up with the idea of your giveaway and defining targeting options.
Discounts
Personalized coupons, first-time shopper offers – these are lead magnets that can work well when you retarget your website visitors. Landing pages that offer discounts allow you to both push your potential customers to purchase decisions and capture their contacts for further marketing.
Sales
If your campaign is aimed at driving sales, your landing page should convey this clearly.
Unlike brand awareness or lead generation campaigns where you can promote various types of landing pages, here you have one option – promote a page that tells about your product or service. That’s why instead of listing different content ideas, we’ll highlight critical elements that distinguish high-converting landing pages from less effective ones.
Social proof
The first and most important factor that affects your landing page effectiveness is detailed testimonials. You might omit product descriptions, FAQ sections, chatbots, but if you have lots of detailed testimonials that prove the quality of what you’re offering, your page is already persuasive enough.
Clear offer
Make sure that your offer is clear from looking at your headline. Denote benefits and key features in your subheadings – people usually scan pages and rarely pay attention to long-form texts before they decide they’re worth attention.
Easy to take action
Nothing should distract your campaign clickers from taking an action. Resolve all the possible issues before your visitors even think about them and make them focus on your offer.
On the page below, we see a typical e-commerce product page: visitors can see product description, select its color and form, and buy it, without scrolling the page and looking for more details or a CTA.
Nurture customers
If you want to keep your customers coming back, don’t forget to nurture them after they make a purchase.
Re-engage with your customers by staying in front of them, providing relevant and timely content, and offering them exceptional benefits for being loyal to your brand. A well-crafted retargeting campaign makes this possible. All you need is compelling content (and obviously, a proper tracking setup).
Many content types that work for brand awareness or lead generation campaigns can be effectively used for your post-purchase campaigns as well. Mind that we say ‘content types’ and not ‘content itself,’ meaning that the ebook you created for capturing leads might not be applicable to people that have already made a purchase. But you can develop a more advanced ebook to further educate and nurture your customers.
Here are a few more ideas you might want to consider for your customer retention campaigns:
Related products
Now when you know the categories your customers are interested in, you can retarget them with more relevant offers. Use the insights you’ve got to create a list of product suggestions based on their past shopping activity.
New product releases
New product releases are a great way to retain customers.
In order to keep customers returning, give them a reason to do that. Promote new product releases or even offer the most loyal customers the chance to get a discount on new arrivals.
Subscriptions
Can you lock your customers with a subscription-based business model?
Give shoppers the chance to pay for a recurring product delivery that occurs regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, or whenever you choose) and promote your offer with a retargeting campaign.
Summing up
Your native advertising campaign setup, such as audience segmenting and bidding strategy, determines whether you reach the right people and how much it costs to you. But it all won’t matter without quality landing pages.