Apple competes with other companies (like Samsung) for customer attention, but never engages in price wars. They don’t need to. The brand creates products that customers love, and its marketing has become the standard for companies seeking global popularity and revenue growth. In short, whatever you do, you have a lot to learn from Apple.
In this time of advertising everywhere, it’s important to draw attention to products without annoying potential customers. That’s why Apple makes heavy use of native advertising that fits naturally into consumers’ lives.
Native advertising started as an “inconspicuous” mention of a brand in a movie, book, or play. Now it’s useful content that helps build brand trust. Native advertising is a way of veiled promotion of a product or service without a direct call to purchase with the help of material that is perceived as part of the author’s content on the site.
The main goal of native advertising is to quickly reach a certain audience through platforms that these people trust. That is, to make unfamiliar users loyal in a short period of time.
Pros and cons of native advertising
Advantages of native advertising:
✅ Can’t be blocked. About 26% of users enable ad blockers on their computers and smartphones. There’s no way to bypass native advertising on the internet. And ideally, you won’t even want to.
✅ It goes straight to the target audience. If you pick the right media with the right target audience, you can get great reach among your potential customers.
✅ The brand gets a reputation as a media or opinion leader. People trust media that they read, watch and listen to regularly. Therefore, recommendations from a familiar source look more credible.
Disadvantages of native advertising:
❌ Costly. Native advertising is not cheap. For different platforms, content placement prices can vary widely. For example, native integrations from well-known bloggers can cost several million dollars.
❌It is not always possible to assess financial efficiency.
❌Takes a lot of time and resources. Usually, native publications are prepared in several stages and often require experts.
Let’s take a look at three types of native advertising that Apple actively uses.
Product Placement
Apple uses the oldest form of native advertising, proving that time-tested methods remain effective.
Apple utilizes product placement in movies and TV series to showcase its products. At the same time, the company is very careful when choosing films: they will only agree to placements if the product is portrayed in a positive and inspiring way.
- For example, in the movie “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise’s character relies on an iPhone 13 Pro to communicate with his team during a mission.
- And in an interview with Businessweek, Gavin Polone, producer of the movie “Welcome to Zombieland” and the TV series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” said: “Apple don’t pay for advertising, but are always willing to provide as many computers, iPads and iPhones as you want.”
Push Notifications
The technology of push notifications itself is not something new. But for advertising purposes, push notifications started to be used quite recently. The push ad format gained popularity in late 2018, attracting advertisers with its simplicity, affordability, and effectiveness. Apple first introduced it back in 2009 to send messages to users from a server or app, and soon after, Google and then Microsoft adopted this innovation.
Push notifications appear on the user’s device in real time, resembling a personal message or important alert from a website, and they display on top of other open windows. This format ensures maximum visibility, as it’s almost impossible to ignore—unlike banners or native ads, which can be easily overlooked.
Realizing that most internet users have adapted to the abundance of ads and ignore banner ads, nutra push ads chooses creative approaches and pays great attention to the visual component in order to increase clickability and consequently conversion rates.
Unpacking
If you type “Apple unboxing” into YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of videos of Apple unboxing its products. Apple has made the process fun and even here they keep things intriguing. From year to year, they change the composition of the box a bit.
In 2012, the company unexpectedly added Earpods headphones to the iPhone 5 box. In the box with the iPhone 7 was a special adapter that allows you to plug standard headphones into the Lightning connector.
Because of this, unboxing videos from bloggers, especially popular ones, are always relevant and interesting. People are waiting: “What Apple has prepared this time”. Each such video is a brand promotion.
Conclusion
It is no wonder that Apple’s marketing strategy brings the company revenues and popularity around the world. In fact, any company can achieve significant results – if they utilize some of these tactics when launching new products or promoting existing ones.
Have a great conversion rate!