Don’t Spend Another Penny On Native Advertising Until You Read This

Tech marketing leadership – this one is for you!
Being a co-founder of ChannelBridge, I talk with lots of partner and channel marketing leaders, and CMOs within the IT Channel. Given what ChannelBridge is built to do, we always talk about their content distribution channels and their rates of through-partner representation. Invariably, I see the same scenario play out time and time again:
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- Through-partner representation rates are very low. Point in fact, we just ran a partner website audit for a global cybersecurity vendor and found that only 20.6% of their partners mention them in any way.
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- Brand and product content on partner websites, when present, is typically out of date. For the same vendor referenced above, the average content publishing date on partner websites dated back to 2023.
Interestingly, during these same conversations many marketing leaders state that despite the conditions above they are spending money on native advertising to support content distribution…and the monthly budgets are typically big.
If this sounds like you, it’s time you know there’s a better way…let’s dig in!
What Is Native Advertising: For clarity, native advertising is simply a means through which you can pay for placements, aka ad inventory, within publishing environments. The creative used for native ad inventory mimics the look and feel of the actual editorial content. This is done to make native ads feel more organic, or native, to the publishing environment to increase the likelihood of audience engagement with the ads. Typically, advertisers use their own content as the basis for native creative because the inventory itself is meant to mimic editorial placements. From an audience targeting perspective, marketers can buy native inventory within contextually relevant publishers or they can layer in data-driven targeting elements, like intent data, to help increase their odds of exposing their ads to only people that are potential buyers. (Yes, you can layer contextual and data-driven targeting together, but this will typically diminish available scale to unusable levels.). Cost dynamics of native advertising are usually based on CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) or CPEs (cost per engagements, like clicks). Depending on factors like desired scale of reach, publisher CPMs and desired frequency of exposure, average monthly budgets specifically for native campaigns range from $5K to $25K or more.
At face value, native advertising is a great way to ensure distribution of that killer content your team just published.
However, if you have a network of partners, you already have your own native ad network at your fingertips that doesn’t require any audience data or media budgets to power! You just need to activate it. Here’s the how and why:
How: This is the easy part. Simply distribute your content to your partners for placement on their websites. Your content should live in their blogs, customer success stories, case studies and other resource sections. The reality is that your partners want this content. Your partners aren’t content marketers and you as a vendor have a more highly-skilled content team behind you, hence the reason why your partners haven’t updated their blogs since 2023. Give your partners great content to use and make it easy for them to use it and it’s mission accomplished!
Why:
- Increase Through-Partner Representation: Seems like this is stating the obvious, but you want consistent, accurate, timely representation on partner websites. End-buyers are visiting your partners’ websites to better understand available technology options and, in many instances, to purchase these solutions. If your brand and products are nowhere to be found or your products look out of date, you can forget about closing the deal.
- No Data Required: Cookie-powered audience targeting tools, like intent data, are sunsetting. I’ll argue that these tools were never that effective, but that’s a story for another day. These data tools are also expensive. For context, the average annual cost for B2B intent data from providers like 6Sense and Demandbase is $50K! On the flip side, people visiting your partners’ websites are inherently high-intent and you can reach them for almost no cost. These people are following their own self-directed search to visit the partners they work with and trust to better understand the technology options that may help them solve for the challenges they face. As such, when these end-buyers are on partner websites, you’re reaching them at a time when they are in a buying mindset (right time) in a contextually relevant environment that they trust to deliver the information they’re looking for (right place) with content that helps them down their path to purchase (right message). This is literally the holy grail for targeted content distribution!
- Enhanced Credibility and Trust: Most people don’t like or trust ads. However, people do trust the partners they work. Content distributed through reseller websites benefits from this inherent trust factor. Buyers view your reseller partners as credible sources of technology recommendations, making them more likely to engage with and act on content featured on those platforms. This credibility boost is difficult to achieve with traditional native advertising, where the connection between content and brand is often seen as purely transactional.
- Seamless Integration into the Buyer’s Journey: The IT buying cycle is complex, often involving multiple stakeholders and extensive research. Native advertising struggles to align with this journey, as it interrupts the experience rather than enhancing it. By contrast, distributing content on reseller websites allows you to provide valuable information at precisely the right stage of the decision-making process. This level of contextual relevance drives engagement and conversion more effectively than ads placed on third-party platforms.
- Quality Of Acquisition: The unfortunate reality of the digital advertising ecosystem is that it’s riddled with fraud. Bots click on ads to game the system and gobble up your budget. Need proof? Just look at your own analytics, specifically at engagement metrics by acquisition channel. Invariably, the lowest engagement and conversion rates come from paid advertising. Compare these metrics to those produced through organic acquisition channels, like distributed content, and you’ll see a night and day difference…high engagement and conversion rates. Why? The traffic is from actual human beings that used a self-directed journey to find your content.
- Impact On Broader Marketing Motions: Ads are just that, ads. They don’t impact other marketing channels. However, distributing content through your partners websites does. Here are a few specific examples:
- Improved SEO outcomes through scaling quality backlinks coming from relevant websites
- Increased content indexation improves your odds of being included in GenAi overview answers
- Niche audience reach – your partners often attract audiences that are hard to otherwise reach
- Improved UX and brand perception on partner websites
- Increased trust, authority and credibility in the market
- Sales Enablement: Your partners’ sales teams often look to their own websites to provide information that helps them navigate sales conversations with end-buyers. If the information they need to better position your products with end-buyers isn’t there or it’s out of date, those sales teams will move on to talk about other products with their customers. You have to make it easy for sellers to access content about your products. By distributing content to your partners’ websites, you help ensure that their sellers always have current, accurate information about your products to use in their sales conversations.
**Pro-Tip: Align your content with customer acquisition, feature adoption and renewal to help your partners market across the full customer life cycle.
- Cost Reduction: The actual media spends and data costs associated with native advertising are significant. Distributing content through your partners’ websites, however, is significantly less expensive as no data is required and no media spends are necessary. Yes, you still need to invest in quality content production. However, the function of distribution itself can be fully automated for a fraction of the cost compared to typical media budgets. So, not only are you relieving the need to spend money on data and advertising, but with automation in place you’re also saving on the costs associated with the distribution process itself (think payroll).
How ChannelBridge Fits In: We built ChannelBridge to be a plug-and-play, one-touch solution for through-partner content distribution. As a vendor, all you need to do is continue publishing great content to your website. ChannelBridge will automatically index and distribute your content to your partners’ websites 24x7x365. On the partner side, the process is also fully automated. Once they integrate ChannelBridge into their websites, they literally don’t have to do anything to keep their websites up to date. ChannelBridge makes distributing content through your partners’ websites effortless for both you and your partners.
What’s ChannelBridge Cost? The cost of using ChannelBridge varies based on the number of partners you want to include in your program. However, our average cost is around $20 per partner per month which is exponentially less than your typical native ad budget plus data costs. Factor in your savings on time, effort and payroll and this becomes a no-brainer!
Conclusion: If you have a partner network, you essentially have your own native ad network at your fingertips, but one that offers way more efficiency and effectiveness compared to paid ads. When using your partners’ websites to serve as your content distribution channel, you’ll target the right people at the right time and in the right place with your messaing, thereby increasing favorable marketing and revenue outcomes. Add automation technology like ChannelBridge to the equation and you’ll also make the process of content distribution effortless and way more cost effective than paid ads.
Ready to maximize your partner network? Reach out to us today and we’ll make it happen!