How to make a native/advertorial video campaign

Native content, aka advertorials aka sponsored content is a a subgroup of the wider “content marketing”. Basically if your content is on your own website it is content marketing but if it is on others websites it is called native.

Native has been a buzz the past year or so. Thomas Barregren wrote a good piece about it and illustrated it with a Google trends picture for the search phrase Native advertising

How to do it

Recently  Sprinkle delivered their first native video campaign and got some experience in what works and what doesn´t.

– What is your goal (objectives) for the campaign (do you want awareness (like, share, get to know) or action (buy, try, want)

– Based on the above decide how the campaign should look like.

– Always go with multichannel distribution. For every campaign on earth it is about getting reach for the target desired group. In this fragmented media world one thing is for sure, you need to consider new channels in order to get the reach you want

– Depending on your objectives buy on CPM (brand buidling, awareness) or CPC (sell)

– Having people watching your material is more important than having them sharing. It is simple, if they lite it then they will share it.

– Set your measurement points straight! Always ask for the following when planning your campaign.

• Number of uniques visitors seeing your message and percentage starting the video
• Keep the frequency low and instead run it for a longer time period.
• Time spent, measure how much consumtion that has actually taken place
• Get reports of where your campaign has been displayed. Always make sure before the campaign starts where your material will be displayed. It really hurts your brand if your material ends up on obscure sites
• Avoid YouTube. Well, Youtube is great but it is an uncontrollable black hole of content with comment functions you can´t control. Also, always remember, just because Youtube has enormous reach doesn´t mean that your content gets any!
• The more premium the publisher the better impact of your campaign.
• Use third party tracking for your campaign. Simple way to doublecheck numbers
• Make the content easy to share to different social media platforms. Measure it
• It is always a good idea to supplement your native campaign with traditional brand advertisement. Because it strengthen your brand and you as a source.
• Always tell when it is an ad. People hate getting tricked

 

I will add additional posts on the topic shortly

 

Posted in: Native, Syndication