Creating a political audience is as simple as defining the segment of your community you want to talk to (or not talk to). A campaign may have multiple audiences for multiple purposes, so you want to think critically about who needs to receive each message at a particular time.
There are several types of audiences you can build in Turn It Blue Ads, and you'll need to know at least the basics about each of them. Remember: geography is completely separate from audience targeting, so don't worry about where your voters are when you are creating your political audiences (at least not yet). Just focus on who you want to talk to.
When you begin to build your audience, the first thing you need to determine is where your data is coming from. Do you have a list from the voter file or from your campaign's CRM you need to use? Do you have a retargeting pixel on your website that informs your audience selections? Or maybe you don't have any data and are counting on our team to figure out where to start? Regardless of the answer to those questions, you can build an audience that works.
There are four ways to create your audience within Turn It Blue Ads. You can access your options either by clicking on "My Audiences" in the left-hand menu or
by going to step three in the campaign builder:
If you have your own data you would like to use, whether from your voter file or CRM or from retargeting, you can do that in two ways:
- You can target your voter file or CRM list or your pixel list directly in its own audience, or
- You can exclude your voter file/CRM Audience or your Pixel Audience from a Custom Audience.
Learn more about the technical aspects of how to do that here:
- How to use first party data (aka Voter File or CRM data) to create an audience
- What are retargeting ads and how do they work?
If you don't have any data you'd like to use, don't worry! We have two great options to build your audience without any data of your own.
Curated audiences allow you to just click on a previously-created audience that works for you. This is great for GOTV efforts or other commonly used political targeting options.
Custom Audiences are built by you, using data segments hand-built by the Turn It Blue Team. When designing your Custom Audience, think of your core data set as the main group of who you are talking to, and your narrowing data sets as restrictions on that segment. Your geographical data restrictions simply limit where your target audience is. Learn more about the technical aspects of how to do that here: How to use custom targeting to create an audience
The result? Ads delivered to the right people, in the right place, at the right time—and that's how you win elections!