Online strategy essential to Cutler's strong finish
Owner of Bluecloud, an Internet marketing company in Portland
In early September, I was brought on to the Eliot Cutler gubernatorial campaign to build and manage an online strategy. This had never been done in Maine politics, at least to this degree, and it was an exciting opportunity. The end goal was to get at least 180,000 votes in Maine.
The online strategy was to create a network that informed voters of Cutler’s positions, abilities and priorities and devise methods to secure those votes and hopefully, donations. Our tools included e-mail marketing in the form of targeted newsletters; paid search, or the sponsored links you see on the top and right side of search results; and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
The first priority for me was to break down the singular idea of winning into smaller, more tangible efforts. The campaign was working with an archaic database system that needed to be integrated with the online marketing efforts. The first move was turning e-mail into a personalized and measurable marketing channel through newsletters and campaign updates.
We set up a new system that allowed us to track open rates, clicks and messaging of the e-mails we sent soliciting voter support and campaign contributions. By analyzing e-mail response rates and tracking web traffic, we could prove what people cared about and how to leverage that information moving forward. Conversion rates, as measured by donations, e-mail signups or volunteer signups, skyrocketed.
Paid search was used with specific keywords on search engines, which provided more real-time, exact data than any other channel, and was optimized accordingly. We saw what ads were driving the most clicks and adjusted the budget so we could maximize the impact paid search had on conversion rates.
Three major conclusions from the online efforts were:
1. Get relevant: Nothing is more powerful as a tool in marketing. On the campaign, this translated into custom landing pages, targeted videos and tailored user experiences, all of which increased the return on investment for the team.
2. Don’t believe the hype: What voters talked about on the news was not what they looked for on the website. We found that website traffic patterns did not reflect the external discussions about the race. We adjusted accordingly by adding links and buttons to the pages that were viewed most. This improved the amount of pages an average user saw on our website and increased e-mail signups.
3. You get what you give: When we spent more time segmenting e-mail lists and creating specific copy based on fundraising history, we saw improved results. When we built a custom landing page for our paid search ads, we saw a stronger conversion rate.
In the final weeks of the campaign, we closed a double-digit lead held by our opponents, much of it the result of our online efforts. Although we narrowly lost the election, we gained valuable insight into how online marketing can target voters in a way that had never been done before in Maine. Moving forward, this will be a staple for political marketing.
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