Boost your native ad revenue in 2019

Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

After celebrating the end of a year and starting a new one, it’s daunting to think about hitting higher revenue goals in the coming months. Let’s get the ideas flowing by reflecting on the success of the past and the opportunities ahead. Take a look at these three highlights from the Native Advertising Trends 2018 report, which surveyed 148 news media executives around the world. (Read the full report from the Native Advertising Institute here.)

Revenue

Native advertising made up 20 percent of ad revenue for news media publishers, up from 18 percent the previous year. That number will continue rising, with revenue from native advertising projected to reach a whopping 36 percent in the next three years.

Native advertising isn’t a silver bullet for declining revenue but, if your organization isn’t hitting that 20 percent mark, it’s worth buckling down and improving your product. NativeAdWorks can help you with online resources and expert consultations.

Challenges

The top 3 challenges news media have with native advertising are training a sales team, explaining native advertising to advertisers and producing engaging native content. Addressing these problems areas may help you increase revenue.

Training a sales team

There’s no quick fix for training (we’re all looking forward to when AI handles training, right?). It takes intentional effort to get sales reps ready if you want to reach — or surpass — that 20 percent of revenue mark. It starts with making sure the sales team understands what native advertising is and how to sell it. If your sales reps aren’t selling because they are under-trained, then they aren’t bringing in revenue — and that’s bad for business. The time you spend training will be well worth it, but it may feel overwhelming, so let NativeAdWorks help. Check out our other resources or contact us for a consultation on best training practices.

Explaining to advertisers

Most news publishers don’t have a dedicated team to sell native advertising, so sales reps pitch multiple products, and native might get pushed aside. The reps that are effective at selling native always lead with native. They don’t use slides or printouts to teach native, rather they know the benefits by heart and show passion in their pitch.

Producing engaging content

Almost one-third of news media publishers use editorial staff to write native advertising — and that’s a big mistake. The writing style and content strategy is different between editorial and native advertising, so let your editorial staff focus on what they’re good at, and outsource native advertising to the experts at NativeAdWorks.

Team organization

There are several ways to build a native advertising team, with these being the most common among news publishers:

Having a native ad studio is not feasible for all news publishers, so a dedicated native ad team is a must. Many NativeAdWorks clients have one or two people acting as the resident native advertising experts, vetting and submitting content requests for BrandForge to fulfill. This eliminates the need to create a full studio or to burden editorial staff.

This is the year, the quarter, the month, the day to improve your native advertising program and increase your revenue, and NativeAdWorks is here to help.