The term native advertising has grown in popularity quite recently. One of the main reasons for such increased attention is that native ads aren’t your typical paid media (like banner ads or pop-ups for example). They are more like a smarter, advanced medium that connects a specific group of consumers with relevant, useful content.
However, there is a whole world of difference between content marketing and native advertising. During the past years there has been a lot of confusion concerning the topic with many people using the two terms interchangeably, thus creating an illusion of similarity between them. To settle things once and for all, let’s define the difference between native ads and content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a part of the overall marketing strategy that is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and targeted content to a specific group of consumers, with the goal of attracting, acquiring and retaining them, while driving purchasing action by influencing consumer behavior in one way or another.
To put it simply, content marketing is a technique that allows companies and brands to influence consumer behavior and encourage more purchase actions. It’s an ongoing process and fits into a brand’s overall marketing strategy as an important piece.
With content marketing, brands don’t pay any kind of media to distribute and share their content. They technically own the media in this case, it’s their asset.
What is native advertising?
Native advertising is a form of adaptive paid media (important distinctive feature!) that doesn’t disrupt natural user experience and offers useful, interesting and valuable content to a specific group of users, without directly promoting a company’s product or service.
This is where all the confusion comes from. Both terms offer informational, useful and insightful content to users, but the real difference is that no matter how you define native advertising, it’s still a form of paid media.
Simply put, native ads are one of the many ways that content marketers can choose to distribute their content. You pay some cash from your ad budget a third party website to run native ads for your business. Simple as that.
Let’s look at an example.
If I write a blog post called “Social Media Trends of 2016”, publish it on my website and share it on social media, its content marketing.
I think about my audience, the type of content they want to read, figure out the best social media channels to promote it, acquire website visitors that eventually become customers. This is an insanely simplified version of the whole process.
Now if I write the same blog post with the same title and pay a third party site (like Taboola or Outbrain) to distribute my content with the help of native ads, that is basically native advertising.
See the difference? I will still acquire website visitors that will eventually turn into customers: only that will involve paying somebody for an additional service (distributing my content via native ads). That being said, acquiring customers with the help of native advertising could actually be a part of my content marketing strategy.
Companies want native ads to look the same (or at least as close as you can get) as the content on the website that they run their ads on. This creates the illusion that the ad isn’t in fact an ad and many customers don’t feel the difference until they click on the ad and get redirected to another domain.
On a final note I want to say that there is nothing wrong with using native ads in your online marketing strategy. They are smart, don’t annoy users, don’t disrupt their natural flow and (if the ads are really good) offer valuable and relevant information to them. The important thing is to understand that native ads can be an effective part of your content marketing strategy, but absolutely not the same thing or the other way around.
