As your brand gets deeper and deeper into content marketing, you’re likely to come across a variety of new-to-you, unfamiliar terms. Even worse, some of these terms seem interchangeable even though they mean different things. For example, native advertising and native content marketing are similar in concept but also completely different in practice.
Native content marketing is both a part of content marketing and a type of native advertising. Native content marketing often takes the form of a piece of content (whether it’s an article, blog post, or video) that’s recommended to a user looking at a particular publisher. If you’ve ever looked at a “Recommended for You” sidebar and seen articles that came from the same website or publisher you were viewing, as well as links to articles or content on another site, you’ve seen native content marketing in action.
Unlike straight-up content marketing, native content marketing is typically “pay-to-play.” Your brand usually either pays to have your content appear in the recommendations or pays to have the content created and published on a particular publisher or platform. For that reason, native content marketing has more in common with advertising than other forms of content marketing. Disclosure is an essential part of any native content marketing strategy. That means you need to let the customer or audience know that you’ve paid to have your content appear as a recommendation or on a particular publisher.