Entrepreneur and founder of PurpleBlack, an international, award-winning native advertising agency.
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In the U.S. alone, projections show that more than 266 million people are shopping online this year. For the upcoming holiday season, opportunities for businesses to generate leads and sales are high. But at the same time, ad space is getting tight with more and more online companies emerging. Native advertising is an alternative ad option that brings many new possibilities, especially for the holiday season, with listicles—a type of native ad—as an authentic tool to market your product or service.
As the founder of a native advertising agency, I’d like to share some insights and knowledge on how to write your first listicle successfully. But first, let’s go over some of the basics.
What Is Native Advertising?
Native ads are ads that don’t look like ads. This form of content advertising has existed roughly since 2011 and has had a rise in popularity over the past few years.
Usually written in the form of an article, native ads can typically be found at the bottom of a news page. Native ads include a compelling headline and text, with the intention to add value to the reader’s experience by informing and entertaining them. The main elements include establishing a problem statement, positioning the product or service as the solution, and ending with a call to action (CTA).
When compared to regular ad platforms like Facebook or Google Ads, native doesn’t require ad space to be bought, nor is it dependent on algorithms. Instead, you need to work with native advertising platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain. These are platforms that serve as an intermediary between ad space providers and advertisers.
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Would Native Advertising Work For You?
Not every company should use native advertising. Native ads can do a lot for products that reach a wide array of people, such as house appliances, skin care products or insurance, for example. But if the product or service niche is too narrow, then it’s likely that not enough people can be reached and native advertising will not be effective.
Native advertising works best for businesses that want to:
• Find new customers.
• Retarget large audience pools.
• Strengthen interest and build awareness of their product or service.
• Generate sales or leads for their product or service.
Listicles For Conversions During The Holiday Season
Listicles are a type of native ad. As its name suggests, it is an article that includes a list of products or services. The main benefit of a listicle is its easy readability, where readers can skim the article quickly.
A typical listicle could be “10 Best Products for Gardening” or “Top 5 Wristbands for Your Apple Watch.” The listicle points include images and simple sentences explaining different products on a specific topic, and the winning product (your product) is placed at the end. Finally, a brief summary is given, including the link that you provide (the CTA) to your product page.
This brief, straightforward content makes listicles easily digestible. Convenient for readers, they can browse through your offers without having to commit at first—just like they do when window shopping.
Listicles are a great way to advertise for the upcoming holiday season when people are turned toward deals, gifts and spending in general. Between Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, people are looking to buy presents for all kinds of celebrations. Studies show that in Q4, consumers are more inclined to spend money instead of saving it, which makes it a great time to offer a place where they can browse, look at items and eventually leave your page as a buyer.
What A Native Advertising Funnel Looks Like For Listicles
The steps of a marketing funnel for your listicle are similar to typical ad platforms, like on Facebook Ads or Google Ads. They include:
• Researching your target audience and brand placement: Whether you’d like to expand your current reach or get to know your audience better, the first step is researching and making a situation analysis of your brand. For getting started with this research step, you could create a PESTLE analysis or an analysis of your current target audience. You can check your website traffic or create an overview of what kind of customers purchase your product the most—this could be, for example, women above 35 with kids. You can use this data to streamline your tone of voice in your listicle so that readers feel spoken to.
• Deciding on the purpose of your listicle: In many cases, the purpose of a listicle is to increase the number of conversions.
• Creating the ad: For this, you need to search for fitting images and titles that people click on to read the listicle. The selection of products you include in the listicle, which “compete” with your product, should be in the same category of products. They can be similar to your product but not too similar—yours should still stand out. For instance, if you sell super glue, you could highlight other glues’ characteristics yet yours turns out to be the best. There’s no need to ask for permission to use other brands since this is only editorial content.
• Designing a specific landing page: This is your offer page that the reader comes to after reading the listicle.
• Signing up on native ad platforms: You need platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain to start your campaign. You could do this also at the beginning of the campaign in order to work simultaneously on setting up your account.
• Testing and adapting: Listicles often need streamlining until you get your desired results.
Native advertising has great potential for businesses wanting to advertise independently from algorithms and ad space. For the last quarter of the year, most people enjoy browsing through product pages for gift offers. Listicles as a form of native advertising can be a great marketing tool to target these people and reach conversions.
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Author: Marcel Sattler, Forbes Councils Member
