Hillary, Trump, and Traction

While meeting with a friend she asked if I’ve read the marketing book, Traction. "You should read it, it’s the method we’re following and our startup is run by some of the smartest people I know.”

While I felt her infectious passion for her team, I admit I rolled my eyes to myself because I’ve read enough marketing material over the last year to circle the earth 7 times.

Getting another marketing book was not on my priority list.

However, I recently decided to pivot my target audience from Small Businesses to Startups. Even though the marketing services I offer remain the same, this pivot is non-trivial. It comes with a whole host of changes related to my digital footprint, including the language I use. 

Thankfully, some of my more comfortable, Microsoft’y terms, like “Agile” and “Data-Driven” are back on the table - but I now need to learn which others to adopt. 

I decided it couldn’t hurt to immerse myself into Startup Marketing lingo so I bought Traction. 

In parallel with this there’s the presidential election. I can’t go a full day without overhearing a conversation about Hillary or Trump. Of course, being from Seattle, the Trump convos are mostly mocking in nature "It's gonna be yuge".

Here’s where the two tracks are starting to collide — Traction and the Presidential Campaigns. 

In Traction, they offer a framework to help startups identify marketing channels, like SEO, Social Media, PR, etc... that will accelerate their growth. The authors, who founded DuckDuckGo, a formidable Google search engine competitor talk about their growth trajectory, "Since DuckDuckGo’s humble beginnings, we have grown five orders of magnitude (10x growth spurts), from that initial one hundred searches a day to now over ten million a day. Each step—from 100 to 1,000, 10,000 to 100,000, 1,000,000 to 10,000,000—involved figuring out how to get traction again. That’s because often what works in one growth stage eventually stops working." 

Trump loves his Social Media accounts and gained most of his impressive traction from those. According to mediaQuant, he's gained about $2 Billion in free advertising.

He believes the power of that is on par with Obama's data-driven approach. 

"Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine, and I think the same is true with me," Trump said in the Spring, explaining that he will continue to focus on his signature rallies, free television exposure and his personal social media accounts to win voters over.

In June that changed. Perhaps he realized his existing traction channels weren't going to be enough.

His website now has over 20 retargeting pixels which means when people visit www.DonaldTrump.com he can reach them just about anywhere on the Internet with one of those ads that follow you around. His goal is to bring people back to his website. That's an ok strategy. His site has between 2M-4M visits a month so he can reach a lot of people with retargeting.

But he isn't maximizing that traffic. He's not actively pushing email subscription on his site. I can't find any landing pages, most of his call-to-actions are subtle. 

He also isn't spending on Google Adwords. 

He is starting email marketing. On June 21, Trump sent his first fundraising email. Which had a very high spam score, so likely 60% of the people on the mailing list never got the email. Don't get me wrong, failing in marketing is part of the game, it's how you learn. But Trump should be hiring the best of the best marketers and let them do their thing. At this stage in his journey, I would love to either see him being much more scrappy by trying a ton of new things or even much more polished with one landing page and pop-up (like you'll see below from Hillary). 

Take a look at how Trump's website is getting it's traffic:

Contrast this with Hillary's.

The last two are the most interesting -- Hillary has two traction channels working better than Trump's. Mail and Ads.

Like Trump, she has tons of retargeting pixels on her website.

She's running Google ads: 

She has a landing page like this: 

She has popups on her website aggressively growing her mailing list.

Hillary has also apparently inherited a massive email list from Obama as well as all the data he’s collected over his last two campaigns. 

Looking at all this, I feel like Trump is not being aggressive enough about finding his next traction channels.

While Hillary is a seasoned business with multiple channels and months if not years of learnings at her fingertips.

Hillary has an 8 point lead. 

Trump may have met his match. My prediction is that his foray into developing new channels is going to be a little too little too late for him.

Then again, this is Trump we're talking about.

Jessica Jobes is President of OnTheGrid, A Marketing Agency for Seattle Startups. 

#datadrivenmarketing #agilemarketing #seattle #startups