By Kathryn Woods, Native Marketing Lead
The digital marketing landscape is increasingly competitive, but our B2C EMEA native marketing team is defying the odds with an impressive 68% YoY growth driven by strong client ROI and low CPAs. This cements native advertising as a vital part of our B2C channel mix, playing a key role alongside Search and Social channels.
The key factors contributing to success? Platform expertise, creative testing, and a sharp focus on client quality.
Platform expertise
Our native team boasts expertise across platforms like Taboola, Outbrain, MediaGo, and Microsoft Ads. These platforms each have access to different ad placements across the worlds largest news websites such as CNN, Fox News and MSN. This enables us to reach a huge audience of engaged users, wherever they get their news.
Through continuous testing, in depth analysis, and strong partnerships with platform account managers, we’ve established industry-leading best practices that evolve alongside the ever-changing platforms. Our breadth of knowledge allows us to be agile and move budgets to whichever platform is working best for our clients.
Creative testing
In native advertising, creative is key. We need to create ads that not only capture attention in a crowded native ad space but also deliver results for our clients. Each month, we test thousands of ads to uncover the next big creative win.
AI has significantly enhanced our efforts, by boosting our testing velocity and creating more innovative ads. With AI we can generate images which are challenging to create in reality, and localise ads to wherever our users are in the world. Think solar panels piled up in the middle of a Czech high street, a heat pump attached to a bake off style tent, or someone showing off their hearing aid outside an Italian train station.
Once we’ve captured the user’s attention with the image, we use the headline to ensure that the right people click on the ad. This is important as targeting capabilities on native platforms are less advanced than search and social. Key elements of a strong native headline include: calling out the target audience, sparking curiosity, guiding users to the landing page CTA, and ensuring readability at a glance.
Client quality
Native advertising historically has a bad rep due to site proliferation, many of which are low-quality and drive poor ROI. On top of this, native platforms regularly attract advertisers focused on driving clicks through sensationalist content, which deters reputable brands.
But at MVF, we’re redefining the narrative, demonstrating that native advertising can be highly effective with the right setup and optimisations. In fact, Native channels frequently outperform search and social for our B2C clients. This is especially true in the senior and healthcare sectors, as native audiences tend to be older.
We have a launch strategy for each sector which we know will drive client results based on years of running native ad campaigns. This includes: the sort of ads we should run, the publishers we want to appear on, the content on our article page, the devices and operating systems we want to target and more. Once up and running, by receiving regular quality data from our clients, we continuously optimise towards the ads, publishers, platforms, and landing pages which drive the best results for them.
