AAPC’s recent Digital Politics Virtual Conference featured a session about how to continue to build your digital plans around shifting big tech regulations. Looking forward to 2022, speakers Caeli Mahon, Managing Director at Targeted Victory, Domonique James, Founder of Politics with Purpose, Christian Curto, Director at Campaign Solutions, and Julia Ager, Founder & President of Sapphire Strategies shared what they learned and how they adjusted their campaigns and approaches accordingly.
“Having a diversity of different outlets and media platforms is critical at this point,” said Julia. “Our ad plans have started to incorporate more outlets so if one decision gets handed down, it doesn’t leave our candidates in a bind and we can still continue our media plans.”
It is also important to be able to “look at the results of your digital campaigns and discern whether the quality of your lead is worth it.” Caeli suggests that you must “know what your goal is, and then figure out how much you want to invest in your goal.” “Digital is really the only area where you can turn on a campaign and see if it’s working. We can be so flexible and agile, but we are held to tight standards if we don’t reach our goals.”
On the data side, Christian is acting more aggressively to “make sure we are doing everything we can to work with our audiences and pre-target.” “Spend more aggressively up front if something proves to be successful. We can’t count on having the same number of opportunities.”
On the deliverability side, Christian suggests using social listening to leverage the power of organic posts and email sign-ups. “I get a lot of questions from clients about what social listening is, and how it differs from ordinary media monitoring. Media monitoring tells you what stories out there, where listening tells you what people are saying about it and if that’s positive or negative. If you want to know if someone wrote a story about you, just set up Google alerts!”
“I use Sprout Social for our monitoring. There are a ton of affordable solutions out there, any of which can provide some insight. We found Sprout offered the best detail and scale for building our product, CDI Social. We place our clients into the interesting conversations happening and use social listening to improve the value of organic content instead of only using ad dollars.”