Mention advertorial to most people and they are likely to cringe. After all how many times have you come across a so called advertising feature in your favourite magazine, which is poorly written, offers no value and simply spams you with line after line of hard sell?
Sadly advertorial has earned a poor reputation and is often overlooked as much as in your face display advertising, but done correctly, advertorial can be awesome.
And the first trick to achieving great results from advertorial is to is to invest in its creation. High end agencies will charge upwards of £3,000 to produce a well conceived and designed full page display advertisement. Most small businesses will spend around £500. For this amount you can engage the services a of great copywriter who will produce an article that rivals in quality and engagement anything most media platforms can author.
Most of the good quality in-flight magazines carry a high proportion of promotional or sponsored editorial. Most of the people who read it don’t notice this. Great advertorial copy sneaks in as a well written travelogue or engaging description of an event or review of places to eat. It doesn’t say ‘go there’ or ‘must attend’ or ‘visit this’. The bulk of the copy is informative, descriptive and evocative – often supported by great imagery. The sell is a subliminal one and leaves the interested reader challenged to find out more information for themselves.
But print media is not the only platform suited to promotional editorial. Email, blog posts and even social media platforms can be used effectively to provide the reader with really informative, useful articles, which profile your business, your event, your expertise or your products and services, in a way that is non-invasive or irritating. For example if you want to promote a product you can do so by providing the reader with a generic ‘How To’ guide. 80% of it contains useful in-depth information around the problem. 20% is about how your product can help to solve the problem, but the reader won’t mind reading this because they have learned something they weren’t aware of. The chances are they will remember you for this. A great example of this from years ago was the Guinness Guide to Oysters. The killer marketing tactic in this case was brand association with great educational content.
So if your business offers events and experiences for example, you could create and place sponsored editorial that looks at things to do in a particular area or the 10 most popular experiences nationally. You aren’t selling them, but from this you could be.
Creating credible and engaging content for advertorials is a art and one Junction Media can help you with. If you found this article useful and interesting, call us today to discuss your requirements.
