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You’ve decided to include native content as part of your offering. Fantastic. But first, take a while to figure out the best way of selling your native content. We’ve put together some essential steps that will help you develop your product proposition.
Understand your product
Before you start selling native content campaigns, you need to make sure that your offering is clear. If you’re a tech site that has high engagement on short form snack-able content, engagement (sharing) will be one of your key selling points. If you’re a news site with high attention minutes spent on reading articles, than focus on that metric to win business. Take the time to review different styles of content on your site and pull those insights into a report.
Competitors
Have a look at the native content that your competitors are offering, where have they succeeded, where have they failed. Take these learnings on so that you can craft your own product and learn from theirs.
Don’t forget your audience.
An important part of native content is understanding it’s just that; content. This isn’t a banner ad, content which sits on a site and just does the advertisers job, without taking into consideration the views of the publication, the audience’s interests and the style of the site – does become just a banner ad. Your audience is smart, don’t treat them otherwise.
Make sure you and the advertiser understand the success metrics
It’s really important that once you have figured out your product and how you co collaborate with brands that you agree up front on how you’ll prove the ROI of the campaign. Whether it’s high engagement by shares, a high virality rate or strong attention shown to the content – having these decided up front will allow for repeat business and excellent case studies to continue pushing your your native product.
Reports
One thing we continually hear from agencies and advertisers is that on some of their first native content campaigns the publishers provided them with a spreadsheet report highlighting; uniques, impressions and time on page and a couple of lines sent in an email. Funnily enough, they weren’t impressed. Don’t make the mistake of treating this like a media report, content is more complex and you need to be able to report accurately and insightfully to prove success.
Sales Team
At the end of the day, the reason that you’re expanding your media offering is to increase your sales. It’s important that your sales team understand this product, make sure they’re across all the above steps and that you take the time each quarter to educate them on learnings and case studies so that you can arm them with the best data, insights and benchmarks for increased sales.
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Mentioned in the above article are a few metrics and thoughts that you can read more about here:
Engagement & Attention. You need both.
If you have any questions on this post please either place them in the comments below or email them through to [email protected]
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