Conservative Brands

It’s a classic tale:

Your company needs customers. So marketing steps in. They plan a beautiful, sophisticated ad campaign. The graphics are world-class. The copy is engaging. And the technology is second to none.

Instead of watching sales roll in, there are crickets. Maybe a few dollars here or there. But nothing moves the needle.

Few things are more frustrating than having a values-driven brand that struggles in the marketplace. You know your audience is out there. You know they would buy if you could only get in front of them.

Finding those people can feel impossible. The advertising and tech companies make it difficult to find people aligned with what you stand for. Your success shouldn’t be left up to a social media company’s algorithm. You should be in control of your own growth.

It’s time for a different playbook, one overlooked by so many marketers. It’s the playbook used by political campaigns. Think about it: political campaigns are often high-stakes, high-dollar engagements with much on the line. And since we have elections every year at the local, state, and national level, there’s a long history to follow of winning candidates.

We’ve helped hundreds of campaigns at the local, state, and national levels do this. Whether it’s a local race or a high-stakes national campaign, we’ve seen what works.

If you want to find the right customers, it’s time to be different. Here are the five ways your brand can be more successful in the next year:

1. Change your mindset. Success in a campaign requires thinking differently. It means operating like a high-stakes political campaign, not a marketing or typical donor campaign. This small but powerful shift sets the foundation for everything else. The mindset shift is to go from broad to targeted. Instead of trying to convince people of your cause, you only engage with people already aligned with what you sell and what you stand for.

2. Find the right data. Data is easy. There are tons of data sources out there, which makes it easy to waste time on useless, dated information. The path to success involves the right data. You don’t need everything. Political campaigns use databases with billions of data points combined into a simple database. Instead of seeing random numbers, you can get a clear picture of who someone is and what they care about.

3. Build a list of the right people. All of the data points are combined to give you a clear look at who you should engage. No more guessing. No more hoping for an algorithm to show your content to random people. Instead, you can target exactly those most aligned with your brand. This is a proven secret of politics: you don’t need everybody. You need the right people. It shouldn’t be hard to find people who believe like you do.

4. Test and measure. Wouldn’t it be great if campaigns were “Set it and forget it”? Life would be much easier. Unfortunately, this isn’t reality. Political campaigns realize this reality. They see the campaign messaging as a constant laboratory. They test, measure, refine, relaunch, and do it again. See your messaging as a living document. The more you test, the better your results.

5. Engage people in a variety of ways. When it’s election season, think of all the ways you hear from campaigns:

• Mail
• Phone
• Text
• Email
• Television
• Digital ads

And so much more. This is intentional. People need to hear the same message multiple times before they understand. Because campaigns have databases of voter information, they know all the ways to contact voters. By communicating across a range of channels to a target audience, campaigns call the right people to action.

Winning isn’t easy, but it’s simple. In the end, the path to victory is simple:

1. Find the right people.
2. Use the right words.
3. Engage in the right ways.

That’s it. That’s how everything from small-town mayoral races to nationally-covered races are won. The backbone, though, is data. Because when you have the right information in place, you eliminate uncertainty and see a clear path to win.