With November fast approaching, political campaigns need to start thinking about how they’re going to implement a content strategy leading up to election day.
Political advertising is often associated with the 30-second TV spots many of us have already grown sick of, digital content gives candidates and interest groups a chance to interact with voters in a completely different environment. Rather than blasting people with a message they’re not interested in during the commercial breaks, content discovery allows campaigns to build trust with their audience by giving them useful information they can choose to engage with and consume at their leisure. In addition, the digital ecosystem provides measurement, personalization and content creation tools that simply aren’t available in the slow-moving world of traditional media.
With this in mind, here are three ways political campaigns can turn content marketing into their secret weapon this fall:
Use digital measurement to optimize for the results your campaign needs.
One of the drawbacks of advertising in traditional media is that it’s extremely difficult to figure out what your audience does after seeing your campaign message. Sure, you can suggest that people visit your website for more information, but it’s not easy to find out how many viewers wound up doing so. With digital content, you can establish clear calls to action and measure how many people followed through by registering to vote when subscribing to an email newsletter or making a donation.
Even better? Monitoring these metrics allows you to alter your content strategy for optimal results moving forward. For instance, if you find that content about your candidate’s environmental plan is doing a great job of persuading voters to sign up for your newsletter or donate, you can make the data-driven decision to create more content honing in on this issue. Conversely, you can shy away from negative campaigning if you find that those kinds of posts are failing to increase your donation totals.
Take advantage of digital’s flexibility to respond to the news cycle in record time.
The flexible nature of digital content means that political advertisers have the ability to tweak their messaging and push new versions of their content out to the public in a matter of minutes. Given the speed of the news cycle in our social-media obsessed world, this is a major benefit.
For instance, imagine your rival candidate were to make a gaffe related to their tax plan. In the old media world, you’d have to spend hours and maybe even several days stitching that screw-up into a new attack ad for print, radio or television. But using a content recommendation system, like Taboola, you have the ability to to swiftly adjust the headlines you’re using to promote a piece about your candidate’s tax plan to something like, “We Know John Doe’s Tax Plan Is A Nightmare — Read About A Solution That Actually Works.”
In some cases, you won’t even have to produce new content yourself. If your team receives a great piece of press from an independent media outlet, it only takes a few clicks to promote that story to your target audience on across digital channels.
Personalize your message to make sure the right user sees the perfect piece of content.
It’s unlikely that any one political message will resonate with every member of your audience. But when discovering content in digital environments, people have the opportunity to click on the articles and videos they find interesting.
As a result, political advertisers can create different pieces of content that are tailored to different interest or demographic groups, using the headline to get the attention of a specific block of voters. For instance, a candidate could create a piece of content about healthcare reform to appeal to voters who are concerned about getting the care they need. And for voters who are interested in gender equality, that same candidate could produce additional content about the importance of maternity leave for American workers.
This personalization opportunity even extends beyond the content itself. Using dynamic keyword insertion features, political organizations can change the headlines people see based on where they are located, such that a voter in New York could see a post titled “What Every New Yorker Needs to Know About Healthcare Reform.”
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By keeping these tips in mind, political advertisers can position themselves to unleash the full potential of the agility and performance content marketing can provide this fall. With the right strategy in place, candidates will have all the tools they need to engage and excite their supporters and drive people to the polls.
Ready to get started? Email politics@taboola.com to reach out to a member of the Taboola sales team.