1. Choose Your Creative Content Wisely.

In today's visual-first world, video is everything—but that doesn't mean you need a big production budget to create quality content. 

Our team can help you create a professionally shot video through one of our production packages, but don't discount the power of your own production. Some of the best video ads are selfie-style digital videos shot on an iPhone with a quick, compelling message. Take a look at this ad from Colorado State Senator,  Jeff Bridges:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQGCibwjVoA

Whether you're using video or not, display banner ads are a great, affordable way to get your message in front of voters quickly and affordably. You can create your own display banner ads using free software like Canva— or you can purchase one of our display templates from the Creative Shop or let our team create custom displays just for you. Whichever route you take, remember the three key rules for creative:

  1. Keep it simple. Limit your creative to ONE key message. If you try to cram too much into one ad, you will lose the voter.

  2. Remember your audience. What matters to your target audience? Design your creative with your audience in mind.

  3. Use your brand identity. Make sure your creative stays on brand with your colors, fonts, and logo for maximum impact.


Bottom line: Don't spend a fortune on creative, but do mix and match your creative to match your audience.

2. Start your digital ad plan with your full budget in mind.

Often, campaigns treat digital with a "nickel and dime" budgeting approach. Because it's easy to add funds incrementally to your digital budget, often it's the budget line with the least amount of designated funds. Don't create your digital budget based on what's left over after you've purchased your other big-ticket items. Treat digital as its own line item. Here's why:

In order for digital advertising to be effective, you want to aim for between 6-12 impressions per voter per week, which means you need to know that you have funds allocated to reach every voter the correct number of times for the duration of your campaign. If you are piece-by-piece putting together a digital budget, it's impossible to ensure your full audience is getting the benefit of digital ads to create a meaningful result. 

Once you know your budget, you should tweak three key data points to create a perfect campaign plan:

  1. Your audience size. Who are you delivering your ad to?

  2. Your impression frequency. How many times a week should your average target see your ad?

  3. Your campaign duration. How long will you run your ads?

Our Digital Ads Calculator provides a perfect tool to help you plan your campaign budget based on the size of your audience and the length of your campaign. Take a look at how your ad budget can change your strategy on the front end to yield a good end result on the back end:

In any of these cases, creating the wrong ad plan—that is, campaign duration, frequency goal, and audience size—for your budget would prove disastrous for your digital strategy.

Bottom line:  When you begin with the budget in mind, you can create a plan that works with an audience size that will help you reach your win number and a timeline that allows your message to resonate for the proper duration.

3. Build your audience strategically.

Building your audience can be one of the trickiest parts of digital ad buying, but it isn't as complicated as you may think. With the wide possibilities available in the digital universe, it's easy to get carried away with micro-targeting , but often that isn't in your best interest. Here's why:

If you're running for a statewide office, it may be worth investing in some creative digital strategy to use third party data to create micro-targeted audiences. But for most down-ballot and local races, the audience sizes are simply too small. Not to mention, many ad vendors are drawing the line on how granular political ads can be targeted. 

When you think about targeting your audience, there are three main areas you should consider when targeting:

  1. Voter geography. Why waste time and resources targeting voters who can't vote for you? Use our district-level targeting or target by zip code to narrow your audience to only those voters who can cast ballots in your election.
  2. Voting history. Are members of your ad audience registered voters? Do they have a history of voting behavior? The voter file is a great way to access this data, but our ads platform also has this information built in for you to click to target.
  3. Voter preferences. Are you running a turnout game targeting strong progressives? Or is your goal to persuade voters who you think are most likely to agree with you? Use voters' primary voting history or third-party data to predict behavior.

If targeting your audience based on these three factors doesn't get you a narrow enough audience to fit your budget, consider narrowing down further based on demographic data like age or gender—or narrow based on factors that make the most sense for your race, like targeting parents of school-aged children if you're running for school board for instance.

Bottom line: Don't try to get too granular with your targeting. Cast a wide net and reach voters in your area who have voting behaviors consistent with your strategy to reach your win number.

4. Don't be afraid to run multiple campaigns.

You may need to achieve a few different goals with your digital approach—that isn't uncommon. Perhaps you want to run ads asking your base voters to volunteer while also reminding progressive voters without a voting habit to head to the polls. Maybe you want to target moms of school age children with ads about your plans to improve public schools, while also targeting environmental voters with ads about your plans to clean up the local river. Or maybe you want to run ads to increase name ID for two weeks, then run ads about your key value for the next two weeks.

There is no reason you can't do all of these things at once!

Here are three ways you can break up your campaign plan to achieve multiple goals:

  1. Divide based on voting history behavior. Your message should be different when talking to people who consistently vote than when you talk to people who are irregular voters. If you're running a turnout game, consider dividing out your message to talk to different progressive audience subsets about voting.

  2. Divide based on target issue preferences. If you need to persuade voters to reach your win number, divide out your audience into two or three key audiences based on likely issue propensities to deliver a message relevant to their interests.

  3. Divide based on timeline. Your goal may be to do all of these things at once—and that's okay, too! Try breaking your ads down based on the election timeline. For a six week campaign, consider running two weeks of name ID, two weeks of issue ID, and two weeks of GOTV.

5. Don't put digital into a silo.

Once you've determined how you want to use digital ads for your campaign, consider layering in other communication strategies to make the most use of your digital budget. Take a few minutes to map out a communication timeline for the duration of your digital campaign to add in layers of "touch-points" for voters—remember each time you communicate with a voter while your ads are running, you increase their impact that much more!

Here are three ways campaigns layer in other communication strategies during their ad campaign:

  • Handwritten post cards or mail. Depending on how large your audience is, you can rely on volunteers to hand write and mail post cards at the onset of your digital campaign. If your audience size is too large, or if you don't have enough supporters to make this feasible, consider sending direct mail to voters through a mail house. This will provide voters with a tactical way to connect with your campaign. Each of your digital ads after this point will serve to reinforce what they've received in the mail.

  • Field strategies like canvassing, phone banking, and texting. For many of the same reasons mail reinforces your digital messaging, running a well-coordinated field campaign along with your digital message provides volunteers with an opportunity to talk one-on-one with voters and answer any questions they may have about your campaign. This is a great tactic towards the middle of your digital campaign because it allows voters to become familiar with your name and ideas before they receive the field communication.

  • Companion television ads. If you have the budget to run TV ads alongside your digital program, this is a great way to be on even more screens at the same time. Depending on where you're running, TV may be too expensive or have too much lost geography to make it worth the expense—in these cases, doubling down on CTV ads is a great way to give voters the TV ad experience without the TV price tag.

See? We told you we could get through all the basics of digital advertising in just 10 minutes! Now, check out the Turn It Blue Ads platform to sign up for a free ads account to poke around and see how easy it is to get started!