This guide includes the three most important tips for getting your native studio started. This will allow you to get from 0-60 and get your sales team set up to start winning paid content campaigns.
1. Review your property
You understand your property and your readers. You know what works, what styles of content, what formats work best for beauty or auto content and what your audience engages with. But you need to make sure that this information is pulled together in detailed reports that allow you to create your approach to native.
Questions:
- Which content formats work best for each category?
- Which formats work best for attention and engagement metrics?
- What are the averages you’d expect to get for paid content within the categories? Use both engagement and attention metric averages
- What are your main selling points for paid content? e.g do you get strong engagement, high attention minutes, have a large social following, etc.
- Who is your audience and what are they interested in and engage with?
People expect more information than site-wide traffic numbers before investing in larger native content buys. Here’s a list and examples of the primarily paid content formats: /native-content-formats/
2. Competitors
Next up you need to get a lay of the land. Whether you’re a large news site or a small lifestyle site you can look to your direct competitors to see how they’re approaching native content.
Questions
- What formats are working for them?
- Which social platforms are they getting the most engagement from?
- Which categories are buying on their sites?
- Which brands are succeeding on their sites?
3. Sales Team Prepared
The above steps will arm you with the right information to give to your sales team. It will allow them to hit the ground running and make sure they’re getting on the right plans, for the right campaigns. It will also help with campaign success and repeat buys. Don’t stop this process, keep pulling these insights so that your sales team have the most up to date relevant information for increased sales.
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