Effectiveness of Sponsored Articles in the Brand Development Process

Sponsored content is text that is placed on a specific website and is paid for by the advertisers themselves. The writing of this article is managed by the publisher. Thanks to this, it becomes well-written, engaging, and looks excellent against the background of other content on the publisher’s site. If you are developing a marketing campaign to promote your business, you definitely need to pay attention to such a tool as sponsored articles. They can help improve your business’s positioning in the market and also attract attention to new products.

Today, we will talk in detail about sponsored articles – their advantages and how they can assist a brand in launching new products.

Attracting Readers

Branding companies are working on how to get more people to know about your brand. With the help of this tool, you can inform the public about any new product or a previously existing service. In general, using such articles allows you to simply communicate general information about yourself to the readers.

Research has been conducted on this topic. It turned out that visitors to the specified publisher’s site with a similar interest read both editorial content and sponsored articles. Because of this, they are more likely to be informed about your brand and may not even notice that it is presented in a completely different content format. For example, Sharethrough and IPG Media Labs provided results from their research, indicating that sponsored articles are viewed even more often than editorial content. And visitors spend the same amount of time on pages with these two types of materials.

Targeted at Readers Interested in a Specific Topic

A major drawback of traditional advertising is that it distracts a person, diverts their attention, and prevents them from engaging with the content of the site. Usually, this happens like this – the user is scanning the content of a web resource, and practically across the entire screen, an advertisement in the form of a video or banner appears. Captivating a person in such a way and getting them to click on the link is hardly achievable. Rather, it will turn them off, and they will immediately close that ad.

What to do with sponsored articles? They do not impose on readers but give them the opportunity to make their own choice. People themselves go through the link to read similar articles. No one forces them to read specific information, and they do not feel that it has been imposed on them. They read because it is genuinely interesting.

Content marketing research showed that 70% of internet users prefer to get acquainted with various products and services with the help of sponsored content. Therefore, it is advisable to use this important marketing tool actively, avoiding banner advertising.

Make Your Brand More Popular

Your brand can position itself as reliable, advanced, and offering quality services, but all this will be useless if people simply do not know about you. To tell about yourself to a wider audience, you can turn to a popular publisher for assistance and place information about yourself on their web resource. This way, you can achieve much greater success than if you were trying to create your own articles.

According to research by Nielsen, people are more likely to use brand services once they start trusting it. During the research, the success from sponsored content was compared with proprietary content from the company’s owner. In the case of sponsored articles, brand growth was marked at 50% more.

When you showcase your brand to users – telling its creation story and presenting products and services, you only generate interest. However, for people to start purchasing from you or ordering your services, it is necessary for them to trust you. If you place a sponsored article on the site of an authoritative publisher that they trust, they will automatically look at you from another perspective.

Not Perceived by Users as Advertising

Advertising is an obligatory way to disseminate information about any brand, but not every brand wants to launch traditional advertising. Moreover, in most cases, banners fall into the field of vision of those people who do not perceive them at all. They are more likely to buy the product if it hasn’t been imposed in such a way, but has been presented not in the form of explicit advertising.

With the help of Contently research, it was revealed that a larger percentage of readers do not notice the difference between native and editorial content on sites. But you should not mislead users. It is enough to let them understand that the article will be useful and interesting to them, rather than have the appearance of conventional and tiresome advertising.

To cover several development ways at once, you can use both traditional advertising and sponsored articles. The latter marketing tool requires special attention, as it attracts those clients who obviously do not like banner advertising.

Conclusions

Today, sponsored articles have become a much more effective way to develop a brand. With their help, you can cover a larger audience of users, make the brand more recognizable, and also increase revenue from sales. Therefore, do not forget about this method of promotion and use it alongside traditional advertising.