3 questions you can ask yourself right now:
- What do you want to achieve? Do you want to increase your sales, generate more brand awareness or maybe you need to generate leads?
- Who is your audience?
- What kind of interesting, relevant content is going to get you where you need to be?

Step 1: Goal setting
Building an advertising strategy starts with being clear about which goals need to be set. What are you looking to achieve through your ad campaigns?
Goal examples:
- Generating leads
- Increasing sales
- New subscribers for a newsletter or website
- Increasing website traffic
- Raising brand visibility
The important thing here is not to be vague about what your goals is. Make your native ad campaign goals specific. Do you want more people to subscribe to your website? Have a figure in mind and make sure you set a deadline to work towards reaching that goal.
Step 2: Decide who your Target Audience is
Define the audience you want to reach. Contextual and native ads are actually able to direct content to people who have yet to hear about your brand but who would be happy to read information involving it.
The great thing about these types of ads is that you can target ads by age, gender, interests, location, device usage and more. This makes certain that the right people are being targeted with the right content, on the right devices, in the right places, at the right time.
Step 3: Build great content
Content is at the heart of any native advertising strategy. Our number one tip is that you need to think like a reader and not like an advertiser. What does your target audience want to see?
Aiming for informative content is always a winner!
Content to consider includes:
- Useful content to educate and inform people, and help them get to know your brand
- Informative content aimed at generating leads for particular products or services
- Content to drive sales
Start off by following these 3 starting points and you’re set for a successful and effective native advertising strategy for improving brand awareness, attracting leads and making sales. Get started with Vertis Media’s contextual and native advertising.