Campaigns Must Arm to Win the 2016 Digital Race

Campaigns and causes will be competing on a digital battlefield as never before in the 2016 elections. A recent MediaPost.com article by Mike Werch, marketing manager of SocialCode, offered eight key digital strategies to boost message impact, expand voter base and capture donations. Werch advises: 1) target unaffiliated voters by serving digital ads to lookalikes, people with the same interests and behaviors as those in the voter, donor or e-mail subscriber files; 2) recapture donors with digital remarketing (use of Website Custom Audiences) to target people who visit a donation page but fail to donate; 3) apply digital insights across channels, using the creative test results of digital video to hone TV or print ads, for example; 4) improve primary audience response with digital geo-targeting, testing geo-targeted digital video to perfect expensive local TV ads, for example; 5) segment audiences for more digital leverage, using Facebook's rich user data, for example, to deploy ads relevant to targets' demographics, behaviors and interests; 6) do a local-interest digital campaign in an area before hitting the pavement, and follow up with conversion-focused ads to build mailing lists; 7) do digital "get out the vote" campaigning, messaging politically inactive Facebook users who also match political affinity targeting as an example; 8) test 2016's new and improved ad options for political campaigning, such as Facebook's lead ads for mobile sign-ups and conversions with pre-filled forms. For more detail, read http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/264971/how-2016-presidential-candidates-can-win-the-digit.html