The rise of ad-blocking technology now means that over a quarter of paid ads never reach their intended audience. As a result, more and more brands are turning to native advertising campaigns to reach consumers. However, native ads are far more challenging to craft because they’re customized to fit each placement site. They must also compete with the site’s other content for engagement.

Capturing user attention means deploying unique and captivating visual content that compels click-throughs. The question, then, becomes how to create those visuals. Here’s what you need to know about the role of high-quality visuals in high-performance native ad campaigns. We’ll also cover how you can study your competition and broader online trends to craft high-performance native ad visuals.

It’s All About Attention

To understand how compelling visuals are the key to successful native ads, you must first understand a few things about your audience. One is that you have a maximum of eight seconds to grab the attention of an average internet user. If you’re aiming at younger demographics, you may have as little as 1.3 seconds. With that little time, text-based content is all but useless as a main draw. It’s no wonder, then, that visual content gets approximately 94% more views than text-only content. The trouble is, every marketer worth their salt knows that, so your competition is always fierce. The good news is that you can employ some basic strategies to overcome that.

Crafting Compelling Visuals to Power Native Ads

If you’re looking for the shortest route to success with native ad visuals, it runs directly through your competitors. Here are the three strategies you should use to create compelling media for your ads.

Learn From the Competition

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the advertising world, that means it’s worthwhile to study your competition’s ads closely. That lets you see what works and what doesn’t, and you can use that information to guide your content creation. You can conduct detailed competitor content research using a native ad spy tool. They contain millions of native ads drawn from dozens of ad networks. You can perform detailed searches using keywords and boolean queries to narrow down examples relevant to your specific content needs. You can even use them to follow particular advertisers to track how their content evolves over time.

Pay Attention to Social Trends

It’s important to know that studying competitors’ ads alone will only take you so far. While it will show you what types of visuals work, it won’t tell you why. To understand the nuances that go into an engaging native ad visual, you must understand the types of non-advertising content users gravitate toward. One of the best ways to do that is to keep careful track of changes in social media habits among your target audience.

Social media trends can clue you into your audience’s tastes so that you can weave appealing content into your native ads. For example, are your targets engaging most with infographics? With internet memes? Or maybe animation? Knowing that can be the difference between your native ads capturing the attention of the right people and them landing with a dull thud among your target audience.

Use AI To Make Your Images Stand Out

Once you settle on an idea for your native ad visuals, you can work on creating them. The good news is that it’s easier than ever to turn out dazzling images with little effort. The key to doing so lies in AI image tools. If you’re creating content from scratch, you can use generative AI solutions like DALL-E for rapid prototyping via text prompt. However, using generated images as your final product is not a great idea, lest you inadvertently run afoul of copyright law.

Turning Attention Into Loyalty

Now that you know how to create visuals that drive engagement with your native ads, there’s one more thing to understand. It’s that your visuals are just the gateway to the rest of your content. Surrounding your captivating images with content that delivers real value to your audience is crucial. That’s the key to converting the attention your images generate into brand loyalty. When your viewers see your content as a pure advertisement, all your other hard work goes up in smoke. So, take care to put just as much effort into the non-visual aspects of your campaign. Then, you can leverage your quality visuals to the greatest possible extent.