On September 20, Canadians will head to the polls to cast their vote for the 2021 federal election. With this election officially a go, it’s time for marketers to plan and implement their political campaign strategy—fast. Luckily, with the right programmatic partner and demand-side platform (DSP) features, you can streamline your campaign delivery, and launch it quickly.
With this snap election, speed is everything—so look for DSP features that will enable you to plan and implement your campaigns fast and effectively. The right DSP will have features and support that will help you go from the campaign planning stage, to launch, and optimization smoothly, and with speed in mind.
Read on to learn 4 features and tactics that will help get your campaigns live quickly, and drive results.
Forecast Your Political Campaign Strategy
With the 2021 federal election just weeks away, you don’t have time to waste. Use campaign forecasting to better understand how your campaign is going to scale and perform before you spend a single dime. This way, you can plan your political campaign strategy not just quickly, but effectively. Forecasting will give you the ability to identify the highest-value opportunities, and ultimately, reach customers across an optimal media mix.
Since Forecasting is designed to help you understand how well your campaign will scale before it’s launched, it’s best to use this DSP feature in the early planning stages of your political campaigns. If you know what your budget is, and you know what locations and voters you’d like to target, then you’re in the perfect position to use this tool.
Forecasting will provide you the insights you need to get your campaign up and running quickly. By predicting how your campaign will scale ahead of time, you can make sure you’re planning the parameters that will help you reach the right audience, and maximize the impact of your ad dollars.
Use Geotargeting to Reach the Right Audience
Geotargeting delivers content to an audience using the geographic location information of the recipient. Some DSPs offer targeting by zip or postal code. Within the US and Canada, you can upload a list of codes to reach users. Or, you can target specific addresses or lat/long coordinates with geo radius targeting. Customize your radius down to the mile/kilometre to target users in mobile in-app environments. Both of these targeting methods enable you to reach your audience with precision.
Geotargeting is a key feature in political campaigns because it enables you to focus your efforts on specific regions. This means political campaigns can zero in on voters according to their location, which helps reduce the likelihood of wasting time and ad dollars on people outside of your target voting district.
Leverage Lookalike Audiences
Tapping into lookalike audiences enables you to reach potential users online who are likely to share similar interests and behaviours with your existing users. Using a pixel on your site, you can tag site visitors, and then leverage pieces of information about those users to target individuals that exhibit the same behaviour as those you’ve tagged. You can also build a lookalike audience around your CRM list to increase reach, or suppress a list if that’s needed.
Using lookalike audiences in your political campaign strategy can quickly expand your reach to new people who are likely to have an interest in your campaign and platform, even if they aren’t already familiar with it. It’s a great way to build awareness around your political campaign, and engage with new prospects who have the potential to identify with your political messaging.
Target Using Contextual Advertising
With consumer ad preferences and privacy-driven changes evolving, marketers are increasingly turning to contextual advertising. Rather than targeting ads based on user behaviour, contextual advertising targets ads based on the environment in which the ad appears. This targeting strategy helps you reach users while they are in a particular frame of mind, which is indicated by the content they are consuming.
With contextual ads, you can target niche phrases that are related to a campaign’s platform, or to the political concerns of your target audience. In the upcoming election, leverage contextual ads to reach politically engaged voters who are receptive to political messaging. This way, your advertising efforts reach the right audiences. Being just a few weeks out from the September election, there isn’t much time for experimentation. Reaching your target audience with precision is key, and contextual targeting will help you do that.
Time is of the essence! Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt and political campaigns.
