What happens when your “persuasion” audience is very narrow? What if it’s one person?
Most of the time and resources spent on political campaigns are to persuade large portions of the electorate. High-turnout persuadables, mid-turnout partisans, low-information voters.
But today I’m going to talk about audience targeting after the election. When campaigning turns into governing. Public affairs and advocacy groups need to influence a much smaller audience when it comes to shaping policy:
White House staff (one in particular)
Legislators
Committees
Cabinet secretaries
CEOs
And when public affairs groups are leveraging these audiences for targeting, they shouldn’t settle for:
High upfront costs
Lack of audience transparency
Lack of measurement
How do we build these audiences?
Targeting a single person or a group of 1-10 people is not feasible in advertising. Those claiming they can do this either:
Have questionable privacy practices
Are overstating what they can actually do
But beyond the technology and privacy issues, targeting just one person usually doesn’t influence anyone.
Influence comes from the people around them. That’s how these campaigns should be built.
Start with the influencer(s) - member of Congress, CEO, etc. Then expand outward:
Staff and close colleagues
Family
Members of political/policy groups they are in
In-district business leaders
Donors
Relevant media
What we’re not adding: fillers like college classmates.
The goal is building an influential audience that creates a groundswell around the message.
What inputs are needed?
With the right team and technology, these audiences can be built with relatively little input.
But the process should still be collaborative.
Advertisers should expect:
To provide examples of influencers early to optimize the audience
Full transparency into who is included and why
The ability to tweak the audience as needed
No vendor understands your influencer, issue, or pressure points better than you do.
How do we contact these audiences?
Notice I didn’t say advertise. This needs to be broader than running display ads and hoping they work.
The audience should be matched to online and offline identifiers and reached across multiple contact mediums:
1-to-1 targeted video ads
High-match-rate social ads (ask us how we do this)
Texting
Direct Mail
Live Calls
A lot of frequency in one channel usually does not work. The message needs to follow the audience across formats.
What should these audiences cost?
Nothing. Advertisers are paying far too much for these audiences.
If you are already running targeted media strategies, these audiences should not require high out-of-pocket costs.
Advertisers should expect:
Low minimums
Full transparency
Clear reporting
How do you prove value?
Reach and frequency reporting to the target audience. Exact reach percentage and frequency.
What does this mean for public affairs advertisers?
Demand Transparency - Influencer audiences play a pivotal role in the public affairs advertising playbook. You should know who is in your audience.
Don’t Overpay - It doesn’t make sense to pay a high subscription cost for the audience before you ever advertise to them.
Measure Reach - Just as you should know who is in the audience ahead of time, you should understand if you’re actually reaching them as the campaign runs.