Blog

Elizabeth Gibbens

Advertorial Blogs: High-Performing Content Outside Your Company’s Digital Territory

January 20th, 2012

Marketing, User Experience Design

When considering your company’s content strategy, take into account all the options for deploying your branded content—not just on your own site and digital platforms—but also third-party sites, particularly in advertorial content on journalism sites. The advertorial blog can give your content exposure to new prospects and develop customers into brand advocates.

Online magazines are making over the advertorial of print journalism, and the renovated model is helping consumer brands engage their customers.  In Wired, Condé Nast is test-running advertorial blogs, which might outperform the Trojan horse “news” articles that print audiences have come to know. The key difference is that the advertorial blog does not promote a product or service but rather an entire brand. The online publication has a GE-sponsored blog called “Weekly Wellness” and an IBM-funded “Cloudline.”

When an audience is already coasting through the environment of a trusted publication, with its particular look, feel, font, and voice, that audience is likely to be receptive to the same stylistic signals—even when reading promotional copy.  A guest blog on the Wired website gives GE credibility, a well read, high-quality audience, and all the appearances of an endorsement by the acutely chic magazine.

Even traditional advertorials work. In one Reader’s Digest study, the results demonstrated that an ad that looked like a magazine article generated 81% more orders than the same copy delivered in a conventional advertising format.

I recently looked at a fashion magazine and found myself in the middle of a “Color Trends” story only to see “Paid Advertisement” in tiny print at the top of the page. A little miffed at the time I’d invested in reading an ad, I still found a new type of eyeliner I might try at some point. (My retaliation will be not to make a point of remembering what kind it was.)

Departing from ye olde print advertorials, the typeface of an advertorial blog can look a little different from that of the host publication. Instead, branding and editorial style anchor the blog back to the trusted online publication—in this case, Wired. Similar to print advertorials, it almost appears as though the publication is recommending the brand.

What’s different is the user doesn’t feel fooled by the blog, even though promotional, advertorial blogs invite the participation of—and not necessarily quick sales to—readers. For one thing, blogs include space for comments. And by including Twitter and Facebook links in each blog post, a company can develop real give-and-take through its online conversation with readers.

This willingness to listen gains the trust of readers online. It demonstrates a company’s commitment of time and energy to answering readers’ comments and to developing solutions out of the interchange. As a marketing tactic, advertorial blogging shows far more appreciation for customers’ purchases than traditional advertising.

In addition, advertorial blogs can share valuable information. In “Weekly Wellness,” GE takes data mined from health records—strips it of the private identifiers that connect it to specific patients—and re-examines it to “find out what can be learned about personal health from the collective information people shared with their doctors.”

In one posting from December 15, 2011, researchers for the GE advertorial blog reported on a medical controversy—whether or not cholesterol-lowering statins can cause cancer—by re-examining 90,000 “de-identified” patient records in its Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC) database.

Although re-examining the results yielded no conclusive finding, the fact that GE put out the information on a blog shows altruism. The company is sharing expensive proprietary data to solve a significant health question affecting the 15–20 percent of patients age 50–70 who took regular doses of statins in 2010. By putting the data in a blog, GE also makes itself part of the conversation about cholesterol-lowering drugs, keeping its name current among patients and healthcare providers. With its informative, analytical advertorial blog, GE makes an indisputably positive PR move.

Wired readers share curiosity and a value for keeping pace with digital culture. By creating the “Weekly Wellness” blog, GE says it respects this audience—it will go where they are—and GE earns not only the audience’s online engagement but also their loyalty as consumers.