The Marketing Strategy Ken Fleming Used to win an election
In today’s political climate, winning an election is about far more than simply being a strong candidate. Elections are won and lost in large part due to the strength of a candidate’s marketing campaign. Recently, our team had the chance to assist a Kentucky politician with his 2020 marketing strategy, proving just how effective targeted digital marketing for politicians can be.
The Strategy
Fleming hired our team at J&L Marketing to execute an omni-channel digital marketing campaign with a focus on the following key digital marketing channels:
- Programmatic Display Advertising
- Facebook Advertising
- Instagram Advertising
Through each of these channels, we modified our digital strategy and served ads to each audience segment based on key messaging points and party loyalty. By layering in the voters party loyalty, in conjunction with demographic characteristics, it allowed us to target the most relevant voters with the most relevant messaging to inspire them to vote for Ken Fleming.
The Work
Once we launched, we also performed continuous optimization and adjustments. Per feedback directly from Ken, and what he was hearing in the community, we would adjust budgets and our targeting strategy appropriately. This allowed us to:
- Focus on the audiences and groups that needed the most attention
- Drive the most relevant voters to our website
- Retarget website visitors with follow up ads
- Keep Ken top of mind on election day
When developing our creative, we knew that the imagery and message would need to be specific and strongly tailored towards our specific demographics and party loyalty affiliations in order to be impactful and motivate the voters.
Campaign Management: We monitored campaign performance daily, and utilized Ken’s feedback from the field as well as performance data in optimizing campaigns. Metrics we focused on were:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- CTR (Click Through Rate)
- CPC (Cost Per-Click)
- Conversions
- Bounce Rate
- CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions)
- Cost Per Conversion
- Social Engagement
- Comments
- Shares
- Reactions
Examples
Example #1,: Ads focused on women voters.
Our messaging centered around how Fleming surrounds himself with strong women in his life and how he is a family-oriented man.
Example #2: Ads focused on elderly voters.
Messaging was geared around more security and protection, with
health being a primary focus.
Example #3: Working class audience
Messaging was focused on how Fleming’s father worked for Ford for 35 years, where he learned that it takes cooperation and working together to make our community great.
The Results
In 2018
Democretic Rep. (D) 50.7% 11,851 Ken Fleming (R) 49.3% 11,525
In 2020
Ken Fleming (R) 51.1% 15,677 Democretic Rep. (D) 48.9% 15,014
Website traffic soared once the digital marketing campaigns launched in August 2020, reaching all-time highs.
Far more than set-it and forget-it strategy
At J&L Marketing, we believe that political advertising often falls short due to a lack of ongoing management. A strategic digital marketing campaign must involve a constant assessment of data, targeting specific audience segments. Weekly meetings, enable J&L to work closely with the candidates team and encourage collective decision making. Today, harnessing the power of audience segmentation, politicians have the opportunity to highlight specific messaging to the ideal group of voters.
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