Last updated on July 5, 2017
This post very briefly explains a process of using and scaling Facebook advertising for political marketing. It might not be clear for all readers, but professional online marketers should be able to follow.
The recipe for political marketing by using Facebook Ads:
- Create starting parameters (Age, Gender, Location, Message)
- Create total combinations based on the starting parameters
- Use prior information to narrow down search space: e.g., identify the 100 most important target groups (e.g., battle-ground states)
- Create Facebook Ads campaigns based on narrowed down search space
- Run the campaigns (the shortest time is one day, but I would recommend at least 2-3 days to accommodate Facebook’s algorithm)
- Analyze the results; combine data to higher level clusters (i.e., aggregate performance stats with matching groups from different campaigns)
- Scale up; allocate budget based on performance, iteratively optimize for non-engaged but important groups, and remove the already-converted voters.
The intuition:
You are using Facebook Ads to test how many different target groups respond to your message. You will cluster this data to identify the most engaged target groups. You will then try to maximize voter turnout within those groups (i.e., maximize conversion). In addition, you will create new messages for those groups which are not currently responding well but which you need to capture in order to win the election. You will keep testing these groups by creating new messages, one by one finding the most responsive groups for a given message.
Once a target group shows a high level of engagement, you will scale up your advertising efforts (think 10x or 100x increase). You will keep the test cycle short (a week is more than enough), and the scaling period long. Based on campaign events, you may want to revisit already secured groups to ensure their engagement remains high. Because you are not able to measure the ultimate conversion (=voting directly), you will use proxy metrics that reflect the engagement of different target groups (particularly, clicks, CTR, post-click behavior such as time-on-site, newsletter subscriptions). This enables you to predict likelihood to vote based on social media engagement. Once a person has “converted”, he or she is removed from targeting – this is done to avoid wasting your budget by preaching to the choir.
Here are some additional metrics you can consider, some of them are harder to infer than the basic ones: frequency of activity, sentiment level, interest in a single issue that cause votes, and historical voting records (district level). According to different metrics used, we can set a target level (e.g., time-on-site > 3 mins) or binary event (subscription to campaign newsletter) which represents conversion.
Overall, we try to mimic the best practices of online marketing optimization here by 1) testing with explore-exploit mentality (scaling appropriately), and 2) excluding those who converted from future targeting (in effect, they are moved into a different budget which is direct targeting by email – a form which is more personal and cheaper than ads). In addition, we delimit the search space by using our prior information on the electorate, again to avoid wasteful impressions and maximize ROI-efficiency.
Then, we fill the selected groups with data and observe the performance metrics. Finally, we cluster the results to get a higher-level understanding of each group, as well as find points of agreement between the groups that can be used to refine the communication strategy of the larger political campaign. Therefore, the data we obtain is not solely limited to Facebook Ads but can be used to further enhance messaging in other channels as well.
There. The methodology represents a systematic and effective way to leverage Facebook Ads for political social media marketing.
Also read:
https://jonisalminen.com/2017/03/agile-methods-for-predicting-contest-outcomes-by-social-media-analysis/
https://jonisalminen.com/2017/03/analyzing-sentiment-of-topical-dimensions-in-social-media/
https://jonisalminen.com/2017/03/affinity-analysis-in-political-social-media-marketing-the-missing-link/