Eric James Wolf

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The twelve most common marketing mistakes made by politicians. (Part 1)

The twelve most common marketing mistakes made by politicians. (Part 2)

"Democracy is the government of the people by the people for the people."
Abraham Lincoln.

The twelve most common marketing mistakes made by politicians. (Part 1)

By Eric James Wolf

Marketing Mistake #1 - Not targeting voters enough

You deserve to have marketing that works because people feel like it is personally addressing their needs. No one wants to read a piece of campaign literature that is addressing problems they don‘t care about.

Everyone lives somewhere unique and different with its own peculiar tone and set of ground rules. You know your city and state so well that you understand how a target voter inside the city limits might be connected with differently from a target voter outside. Have you sent a mailing directed to the voters who have emigrated from another country? Perhaps in your district there are people who love the same sports as you, or you have three children and you can target those voters who have three children.

Marketing Mistake #2 - Failing to track the campaigns marketing effectiveness

It is no longer necessary to operate blind, without a sense of whether the campaign money is being effectively spent in a particular marketing plan of action. Along with tracking volunteer hours spent, money in the bank, and voter ID sheets, your campaign manager can have a campaign marketing plan. This marketing plan has a cost benefits continuing analysis of how each separate marketing action is doing.

Except where I have personally intervened, I have never once seen a politician create a successful marketing piece that tracked its response rate. Every piece of literature needs to have a yardstick by which you measure it. There is no excuse for having marketing that cannot demonstrate its effectiveness. The temptation is to get out there and start winning the good fight. I know how seductive this can be, but all marketing connected to your campaign needs to have a yardstick by which it can be measured.

Marketing Mistake #3 - Not evaluating marketing pieces.

Every piece of marketing literature needs to be evaluated constantly based on the cost versus the benefits. How are you going to do that if you are not tracking the response rate from each mailing, telephone call, canvas visit or media purchase? Every week you have to be throwing away material because you tried and it wasn’t good enough.

20% of the material that exists in politics is good enough, but if someone was really pushing to make your marketing better, what could it be? Don‘t be satisfied with average marketing campaigns. Find what really works and then stick to it.

Marketing Mistake #4 - Sending one-time mailings with little connectivity.

Everybody is more influenced by multiple contacts. Why would you throw away money by just contacting a voter once? Every piece of literature you send out needs to be logically connected to the next piece of literature. Each voter needs to feel he or she has a personal connection to his or her elected representative. Who is more likely to give you more money? A wealthy constituent who has never heard of you or a working class voter who you met in person at his residence.

We live in an electronic age where spam is a regular training device teaching all of us the value of personal communications. Clearly you can’t continue 30,000 personal relationships, but you can personalize your relationship to the 200 micro-communities in your district. Each piece of marketing material can be directed at an individual community.

Marketing Mistake #5 - Using boring branding and impersonal marketing pieces.

This is the most common marketing mistake that politicians make. Most people just assume that they want to be like Coke or Nike. Hey it took YEARS and MILLIONS of dollars to build that sort of brand recognition. You can‘t expect that sort of name recognition to happen in a short three to nine month period. It‘s just not reasonable to expect that people will identify with a new brand - unless, of course, you have a few million dollars on your side.

If you have millions of dollars, why would you throw that money away on an indistinguishable and interchangeable advertising campaign? You could be building real long-term relationships with your target voter populations. You could be creating marketing campaigns that can be judged and evaluated for their effectiveness.

Like this article? Check out by this author. ----> The twelve most common marketing mistakes made by politicians. (Part 2)

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