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At Think Profits, we help many hotels and schools delve into the world of online advertising. With our thorough PPC package offerings, we have helped them slowly integrate their marketing into the online world.

And it’s true, our hotel and school clients have seen fantastic results with paid advertising! Their increases from text search ads, graphic display ads, content blog marketing, and video ads have been instrumental in their marketing ROI.

Recently and into the future, we especially encourage these clients to move towards Native Ads.

But what is Native Advertising? 

It’s the new form of advertising predicted by experts to overtake the older forms of advertising in 2018. Native ads are all the rage in the advertising community with think pieces from popular sites like Sharethrough and Mediapost.

If you’ve ever felt annoyed by online ads or you’ve noticed a drop in your advertising campaigns, then Native Advertising is the new innovation you need.

There are 2 essential types of Native Advertising:

1.  Instream (in the newsfeed, not in the sidebar) Social Media Ads

2. Sponsored Posts on Blogs or by Social Media Influencers

Native Advertising is a style of advertising designed to blend into another website’s content.

This type of advertising is not so much a specific ad format but an overarching style and focus. And that style is on not “grabbing” your audience’s attention but providing them with interesting content. 

It’s a hybrid of paid advertising and content marketing.

Think Profits example of a Facebook Native Advertisement

This is a Facebook Native Ad

It might seem like a foreign concept but you have already come across Native Advertising in your own life. Many of the Facebook Ads you see in your newsfeed are Native Ads.

If you scroll through Facebook or Instagram, you will come across Ads so personalized to your interests you aren’t even sure they are Ads. These are Native Ads.

These ads have the appearance of a news update from someone you follow. They’re designed to integrate with the rest of your newsfeed. That’s a Native Ad.

Another example of Native Advertising is a sponsored blog post on a website your customer base visits frequently.

For example, a hotel could sponsor a blog post on a popular travel blog.

The goal of a sponsored blog post is to “buy” the traffic (your desired customers) from a website by requesting they post an article centred around your products with a link to your website. This method is highly effective because it hits multiple marketing goals all at once!

But what are the benefits of Native Advertising?

Think Profits Native Advertising Infographic 2

Native Advertising is a balance of all the best marketing practices.

Native Advertising is basically a hybrid of every type of marketing in current existence. It’s visual like graphic display ads, text based like search ads, and informative like content marketing.

It’s a fluid form of advertising, best summed up by a style based on the principles of informing and pleasing your prospective customers, rather than “interrupting” and “grabbing” their attention.

It means instead of annoying your customers with popups and aggressive advertisements, Native style Ads enrich a customer’s experience by providing them with content they already want.

Native Advertising was designed to solve the marketing problems of industries like Hotels & Schools.

Marketing objectives for hotels and schools are often reliant on branding, reputation, trust and gaining prestige. Many people will not elect to stay at a hotel if they’ve never heard of it before.

The hotel industry relies on the ability to grow a relationship with a customer before they need a room. Hotels need brand awareness to promote their quality and build trusting relationships with their customers.

Likewise, for the education industry, schools need to grow the prestige of their courses and diplomas to gain higher enrollment rates. Every student wants to beat their classmates by getting into a well-known school.

For both schools and hotels, building trust is important. So neither industry can participate in dishonest or annoying advertising practices.

Out of all the forms of paid ads, Native advertising is one of the best ways to enhance reputation because it’s a highly ethical form of marketing. It’s all about providing valuable content to the right people in the right place.

Native Advertising can easily build a relationship between a customer and a business.

Over the years advertising has developed the negative reputation of annoying viewers or just plain bombarding them with messages they are not interested in hearing.

Native advertising builds a positive brand reputation by doing more than just pushing a logo in a prospective customer’s face.  It provides a pure value proposition by combining advertising with information. It puts the right information in the right place so the right people will see it.

Think of it this way, if someone is already viewing a page on a website and you create an Ad that blends into that web page, then you are seamlessly targeting the right viewers while providing a message they already want to hear.

How can you gain traffic from Native Advertising right now? 

The easiest way to begin implementing Native Advertising practices is to start focusing on your paid social media ads. You must make sure your social media ads are complying with the Native Advertising philosophy.

A sponsored post by an influencer or a paid in-stream social media ad is one of the best ways to gain attention for your brand and company, especially for schools and hotels.

Contact Think Profits to begin your first steps towards adopting the most effective advertising practices!