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How political campaigns are using contextual insights to reach more voters

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How political campaigns are using contextual insights to reach more voters

With midterm elections coming up, political campaigns are pulling out all the stops to reach voters in the shifting digital landscape. Strategists are having to navigate a new set of privacy data restrictions, different but similar to those facing non-political marketers. How? With contextual data, just like the rest of us.

It used to be that campaign strategists could easily target likely voters on Facebook based on candidates and issues they followed. But this has changed.

“In both January and March [Facebook] placed restrictions on what variables you can target by – in short, nothing related to health, sexual orientation, religion, political beliefs and so on,” said Craig Becher, senior director of channel partnerships for audience discovery and managed services company Hybrid Theory. “Therefore, you are no longer able to, let’s say, select Joe Biden as an account that you want to target followers of.”

Instead, campaigns have to rely on voter files – databases that connect publicly available information to registered voters across the country. (How voters voted in past elections, however, remains private.)

“Outside of the voter file, targeting based on those following an elected official, organization, or cause were the main variables selected to reach the intended audience…all of that is gone now,” said Becher.

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Expanding the audience for a political campaign

In the current cycle, political advertisers are looking to gain a competitive advantage by expanding their audiences beyond voter files.

“Voter files don’t give you everyone and won’t help you expand your voting population beyond who’s already voted before,” said Jones. “So the question is how you intelligently reach people beyond that, and understanding what issues they’re reading, the type of content they’re exposed to, and how they’re thinking about those issues is key to messaging to them effectively.”

“The voter file isn’t dead, but people really want to move away from that because it’s a finite pool of individuals,” said Becher. “Political advertisers are coming to us asking how to use contextual relevances, like general marketers in the private sector would.”

He added, “It’s fairly intuitive to find shoe shoppers. But targeting nuances around inflation, health care or other issues, that’s where the art meets the science.”

The amount of overlap indicated by the data also suggests that voters aren’t as locked into news silos and “echo chambers” as some talking heads on TV might have you believe.

“[The data] shows the massive overlap between conservative and liberal news sources, underlining both the nature of how people browse and also how many people are still persuadable and not reading one outlet only as their source of truth,” said Jones.

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It might take more digging to find persuadable voters, but there is treasure to be found in contextual insights.

Identifying key issues

If political campaigns can’t target directly through the politicians and issues that voters follow on social, they have to target contextually. They look to content and programming that relates to key issues, and they message the voters by advertising around that content. 

The challenge for campaigns is how to determine what issues are important to their key voters. There is a lot of overlap between issues and news sources, as anybody can see from the data Hybrid Theory assembled for the 2022 election cycle.

How political campaigns are using contextual insights to reach more
Image: Hybrid Theory.

Keeping up with the news

Because of the polarized political climate, key issues are more volatile than ever. For instance, this data was taken in May, just after a draft of a Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark abortion rights Roe v. Wade decision was leaked. But the data was taken before a string of mass shootings that have fueled more recent gun law debates.

“The roughest thing about all this is that while predicting the key issues has always been difficult, it was at least something you could ballpark in 2016 and 2018,” said Robert Jones, vice president, research and insights for Hybrid Theory. “COVID and Black Lives Matter absolutely shattered that in 2020.”

Prior to last month’s SCOTUS decision leak and the nightmare swarm of mass shootings,it looked like the economy was going to be the top issue. Topics like inflation and job seeking, in the above chart, show overlap across many areas of the political spectrum. Liberal, centrist and conservative news sources were all covering inflation and jobs, as well as the Roe v. Wade issue.

“While [the economy] is always a central issue among all politicians, there’s so much more on the table right now that it makes understanding the landscape much more complicated and difficult,” said Jones. “The Roe leak may completely change the electoral map and political strategies and put fire into the bellies of a lot of the suburban moms who were previously thought to be lost to the Dems for the midterm cycle.”

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Read next: IAS introduces new contextual targeting Control Panel

Improving efficiency by weeding out hate-watching

Complicated news viewing habits add another layer of complexity. People “hate watch” news sources they virulently disagree with. For instance, there’s a band of overlap between liberal news sources and content labeled “anti-vaccine news sources.”

Identifying these overlaps gives political strategists additional insights about the voters they intend to target. A liberal candidate might conclude that within the audience of traditional liberal news sources, there are a number of conservative, or otherwise anti-vax, viewers who are hate-watching the liberal news coverage about the pandemic. This means they have to find other signals to weed out the hate-readers when they advertise to the liberal news audience. Otherwise, they’re wasting resources.

Above all, it’s important with a limited campaign budget to weigh the importance of issues. Critical race theory, according to the Hybrid Theory data, was not as significant an issue once the Supreme Court draft decision was leaked, giving much more coverage to reproductive rights.

Advertising to voters is high-stakes, but it involves many of the same channels and analytics strategies as consumer marketing. Political strategists are catching up to this fact and adopting more tactics from the consumer marketing playbook this time around.


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About The Author

datafuelX launches predictive analytics solutions to improve linear TV anddatafuelX launches predictive analytics solutions to improve linear TV and
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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