What is Native Advertising, and Why Do you Need to Know About it?

Here's a startling statistic from a recent study from HubSpot. 84% of millennials don't trust traditional advertising at all.

The reality is that consumers are becoming more and more jaded by what seems to be traditional advertising. I'm referring to, banner ads and aggressive offer ads that are completely focused on getting you to make a transaction.

Millennials have grown up in an age where content marketing is the norm, and they expect content instead of advertising.

In fact, even when a millennial knows that a piece of content is an advertisement, they are happier and more likely to invest the time in consuming that content and purchasing that content than they are a traditional ad.

Millennials are 44% more likely to trust experts who happen to be strangers than advertisements and 247% more likely to be influenced by blogs or social networking sites. 83% of millennials believe that online content is very useful in helping them make purchasing decisions.

Only 9% of millennial respondents said they'd immediately ignore a post if they found out it was sponsored.

What is native advertising?

Native advertising is creating advertising that feels native to the environment that it's being consumed in.

If you're in Instagram viewing Instagram posts, a native ad would be inside of Instagram that seems just like a normal Instagram post, or a post inside of Facebook, or an article that you're reading on a website that. Again, feels just like a normal article. 

It may, in fact, be a piece of content that was created specifically as an advertisement and being paid to get visibility to it. But if the piece of content is useful and it feels native to the environment that it's in then today's consumers are much more likely to appreciate that content and to be willing to buy from it.

85% of millennials say, "Infeed native ads are the same or better than other content on the page."

If you're creating high-quality content, it doesn't matter if it's sponsored. What matters is that it has quality and value to the customer instead of just being a pitch.

In fact, 58% of millennials think publishers should only use native ads and not accept any other form of advertising.

All of this speaks to the need to consider a native advertising strategy at your business and to move away from traditional ads.

While you don't necessarily have to move completely away from traditional ads today, it is worth noting that as more millennial consumers come of age as buyers in the marketplace, their expectation will be quality content instead of traditional ads.

Look for ways to include native advertising in your strategy right away.