Buyer’s Guide: Content Discovery and Native Advertising Tools

Buyer’s Guide: Content Discovery and Native Advertising Tools

We’ve been saying it for years now: What’s the point of creating great content if no one knows about it? If you aren’t going to promote it, your audiences will very likely never discover it — and you will have wasted the resources you used to create it.

While there are many ways to get the word out, new tools on the market help marketers get their content out to more places on the web — places where audiences are already interacting with like-minded brands — to generate engagement that will (hopefully) result in more buyers, supporters, community members, etc.

Specifically, there are two categories of tools the Content Marketing Institute has recently explored:

• Content discovery tools help publishers by presenting semantically related content to online viewers (e.g., “If you like this article, then you might like *this* article, as well.”) and create ways for marketers to get their content “discovered.”


• Native advertising tools provide opportunities to feature promoted (i.e., “sponsored”) posts in social media feeds or place long-form content contextually across a network of publishers’ websites.

From the marketer’s perspective, all of this is part of a promoted content strategy — and there is no doubt that it is one of the most disruptive areas of content marketing today.

To help make sense of this space — and the technologies that support it — we recently conducted hour-long briefings with seven key vendors in this space. The resulting guide, Content Discovery and Native Advertising Tools: An Analysis of 7 Solutions in a Disruptive Marketplace , is a detailed look at this space, as well as each of the vendors we spoke with:

• Movable Media


• Nativo


• nRelate


• OneSpot


• Outbrain


• Taboola


• Zemanta

We have undoubtedly missed a few players in this initial report, and we will add and remove companies in subsequent versions. But for now, those featured in this report are companies we’ve seen as being the most frequently discussed in the marketplace.

We have purposely not ranked any of the solutions as “better” than any other because we are not looking to “grade” them. Rather, our goal is to provide a clear sense of what each solution provides and assemble a coherent stratification of the market for purchasers, investors, and those generally interested in understanding this space.

Nothing in the profiles should be read as a tacit endorsement or particularly pointed critique of any particular solution. Our aim is to provide an unbiased examination of the tools without making any particular judgment as to their overall value.

For each profile, we cover an overview of the solution, the specific challenge that each attempts to solve, and its pricing structure. We also include details on the vendor’s approach to that challenge as it pertains to how a customer might utilize the solution. Lastly, we provide a brief history of the company, and contact information.

Here’s a taste of what you will find in the full report:

Content Discovery and Native Advertising tools – Technology Report from Content Marketing Institute

Checklist: Questions to ask when evaluating vendors

Of course, there is no one “magic” tool that will work for every organization, as goals and needs vary. However, as you make your purchasing decisions on tools and vendors, asking the following questions will help you learn more about the technologies available in this space, and how a particular solution might address your business needs:

• How will the content appear (e.g., as an ad unit; a story; a related link, etc.)?


• Will the content appear differently on a phone versus a tablet versus a laptop?


• How do you target my content to the right audience? Can I target the content against a specific aspect of the buyer’s journey?


• Do you have a self-service model, or would we work with an account manager?


• What kind of reporting tools do you offer? What analytics do you track?


• Do you offer A/B and multivariate testing, so I can see what content performs best and build on that?


• To what extent can I customize my content?


• What is the pricing for the solution? Is it based on CPC or something else?

Here are a few additional questions specific to content discovery tools:

• How is relevance determined?


• Can you add thumbnail images?


• Is your widget SEO-compatible?

Regardless of the options you choose to pursue as you begin to develop your content promotion plans, we advise content marketers to test and use these services much like you would a media buy. Experiment with numerous offerings to see where you get the best results. You may find, for example, that one solution will be best for developing your present audience, and that promoting longer-form content using a native advertising solutions provider might be a better strategy for another part of the funnel. Certainly, some providers that promote content across a network of sites will have stronger partners than others for your particular audience.

Download Content Discovery and Native Advertising Tools: An Analysis of 7 Solutions in a Disruptive Marketplace. This is the third report in CMI’s Content Marketing Technology Landscape series, which also includes:

• Content Collaboration Tools: An Analysis of 13 Technology Solutions in a Disruptive Marketplace


• Content Curation and Conversation: An Analysis of 12 Technology Solutions in a Disruptive Marketplace

We would love your thoughts: What questions do you have about content discovery and native advertising technologies? What has been your experience with these or other technologies?

from Content Marketing Institute to read more http://bit.ly/MqqbxM

shared by the Content Marketing team at Jeremiah Barrett Consultingto read more http://bit.ly/L77AVU

via Jeremiah Barrett Consulting