How can relevant content drive successful native advertising campaigns and how can paid, owned and earned media play together? We asked Karsten Krämer, Managing Director at C3 when he attended the 2016 Native Advertising DAYS as a speaker. Read more about this year's amazing conference.
Below are highlights from the interview which have been slightly edited for clarity.
Understand your target group
"The core [to good native advertising] is a clear understanding of the target group's interests. If you know these, it is much easier to define the right content, the channels, the formats you need for a successful campaign. But it's really having the data, having the insights, knowing what's relevant to the target group, which makes the difference.
We use market research, data which the brand sometimes has itself, then we use social listening tools, Google Analytics and other tools to find out what is relevant for this specific audience."
It's always difficult if you have too many silos be it on the client-side or on the agency-side.
How paid, owned and earned media can support each other
"How can paid, owned and earned media support each other? Well, of course, the content for us as content marketers is a very important thing -- it is core -- but content alone doesn't work. It needs the distribution efforts through earned and paid media to be successful. For that probably the most important thing is to have an integrated process in planning and executing such a campaign.
It's always difficult if you have too many silos be it on the client-side or on the agency-side. Either you have one integrated agency delivering everything from strategy, planning, execution of the content, media and the channel distribution or you have a setup of various agencies who closely work together.
We believe it's good to have an integrated set of skills, of talents, of people sitting together in the same room.
It's really a matter of integrated working together to make it successful otherwise you will fail. For us, as an agency, we believe it's good to have an integrated set of skills, of talents, of people even sitting together in the same room. For example, we're doing a large project for Deutsche Telekom 'Electronic Beats' where you have the editors, the designers, but also the performance marketers who do the media planning and booking sitting at one desk.
If they see that one piece of content takes off organically -- many views on Facebook for example -- they put some more media money behind it to accelerate it further. So this process of working together is key."
How to find the right stories
"How do I find the right content? It's simple. We don't look at the organisation; which content they have, we look at the target group and what they're interested in. Once you know that, once you've defined that you try to match it with the organisation's and brand's needs the KPIs, goals and interests they have.
Our editor will be sitting together with the comms people and try to hunt down the right stories.
You need a match between the content and the KPIs because content marketing and native advertising aren't just telling nice stories to nice people. We often find the stories within the organisation and what we feel is that brands and marketers are getting better and better at seeing and finding stories that are hidden in their organisation.
It's about talking to the right people who have an eye for identifying stories in the organisation and what we quite often do is sending in our editors. The editor will be sitting together with the comms people and try to hunt down the right stories."
Content marketing and native advertising will converge
"One big trend is going to be that there won't be a distinction between content marketing and native advertising in the sense we had it before. The on-going always-on content marketing will more and more converge with native advertising as a means of distributing content, so hopefully, we'll have an integrated marketing process where content marketing and native campaigns work together."
Interview by: Stine Andersen
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