Sponsored articles are high-quality texts describing specific individuals, companies, products, containing a certain amount of promotional information.
Sponsored article - what is it?
A sponsored article is actually a type of advertisement. It used to be commonly referred to as branded journalism (describing specific brands), sponsored or partner content, and in Anglo-Saxon countries, native advertising. It used to be created for the press (and still appears in it, although less frequently now), but nowadays it is mainly intended for online publications.
At first glance, a sponsored article does not differ significantly from a regular article dedicated to a company, person, specific product, event, service, etc. However, the text includes promotion of the company, service, or product. Sometimes it is quite literal, other times it is subtle, resembling more of an advice for the undecided. Usually, it includes the company's logo, product photos, and links to the homepage, which generally do not appear in regular articles. On one hand, a sponsored article is high-quality content, on the other hand, it is a clear reference to the specific client's website. Some companies choose sponsored articles instead of ads to stand out, ensure higher quality content, or simply avoid traditional advertising forms, which are everywhere and sometimes no longer attract attention.
Sponsored articles also work differently on the recipient - while traditional ads distract attention and attract it for a moment, sponsored articles focus it on themselves, keeping the potential customer engaged for longer (both methods are effective, but work on different principles), and are not as intrusive. Sponsored articles have another advantage - over 40% of Internet users have some kind of ad blockers enabled: they apply to traditional ads, but most often do not detect sponsored texts.
Sponsored article - writing guidelines
Sponsored articles can take various forms. Most often they are expert and advisory materials, but comparisons, listings of a particular service/company with others, and even properly edited expert opinions or interviews with them can also occur. The most important thing is that they are clear and directly targeted at the recipient, arousing their interest in the leading topic of the article. They should present the company/service/product in a favorable light, interest the reader, emphasize its advantages. Most articles written nowadays use tools for creating and optimizing content (there are plenty of them).
Sponsored articles must be valuable to the reader - mere banal praise of someone/something can provoke resistance from the recipient, decrease their interest and engagement. It is important to ensure that the content is as up-to-date as possible, as well as the data about the company or its products. Linguistic and visual qualities play a significant role. The language should be directed towards the target audience, which may be interested (so if the text is about new generation equipment, it is aimed more at experts who follow technical innovations and cannot do without mentioning strictly technical data and names).
As for visual qualities, it is good to have subheadings, clear paragraphs, and appropriately matched graphics, tables, photos between them in the text. A very common technique is to write the text in a way that is associated with a particular company or individual, rather than with an advertising agency or just "dry" advertising - content from a specific person/company or someone who supposedly neutrally writes about them sounds more credible to the audience. Classic sponsored articles focused more on advertising are sometimes built according to the so-called AIDA formula: A for Attention (capturing the reader's attention), I for Interest (interest in the text), then we have D as Desire (arousing desire, curiosity) and A as Action (stimulating action, i.e. purchase, taking advantage of the offer).
Sponsored article - who writes it?
Most often, the client is an advertising agency acting on behalf of a specific company, less frequently the company itself commissions the article on its own behalf. In the latter case, someone from the company may write the sponsored article, especially if it is a company related in some way to the press. However, in general, copywriters working with an advertising agency or as freelancers are responsible for writing sponsored articles.
