What Digital Marketers Can Take Away From The 2016 Election

As a tech blogger, I’m always looking into digital trends that impact society, and a lot of it involves debunking myths. The most recent elections are perfect examples of this. I found it highly relevant to digital marketers.

Before you get the wrong idea, I approached this strictly from a technical and digital marketing perspective.

No politics, no opinions; I only wanted the takeaway.

First, the man behind the miracle

The Trump campaign hired a web developer named Brad Parscale in 2015 to be his digital campaign manager. Mr. Parscale was running a web design agency in San Antonio when team Trump asked for his help. Ironically, by his own admission, he didn’t have much experience in social media, much less digital marketing.

When he came aboard the Trump campaign, he did what any smart amateur would do - he hired a crew of Facebook consultants to help him out. Not only that, but he had them visit his office.

Before he did though, he screened them to make sure they were Trump supporters before he hired them to help his campaign. (who wouldn't?)

There’s nothing clandestine about this.

Facebook offers a free 15-minute consultation service by phone for all paying customers. This is a service I’ve used many times in the beginning when I was trying to figure out how to properly run Facebook ads.

Obviously, you have to pay more to visit you. Their job is to show how to run an ad campaign in a systematic, intelligent way.

Nothing more.

These consultants have no special privileged or proprietary information that would give their campaign an edge over the competition. They don’t have the information that only Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe only his inner circle would have. It’s his secret recipe, so we can’t blame him for that.

What the consultants did have though, in droves, was enthusiasm for their candidate(Trump), and it was an edge because team Trump spent over ? of their ad budget on Facebook alone.

This is - by the way - double what they spent on Google Adwords. As a side note, they spent nothing on Twitter. Surprise, surprise!

Here’s what Cambridge Analytica did and didn’t do.

There’s a lot of myth and sensationalism and hype about what really went on around the Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) scandal.

To date, we don’t have definitive proof on how much all the data they collected on 80 million Facebook users helped give them an edge or not.

One useful service they did provide was called “psycho-graphic mapping”.?

This is a fancy word for a process in which they create a virtual map of the entire US, and map out entire communities and zip codes that had a high percentage of undecided or persuadable voters.

This would provide a useful road map for Trump’s campaign rallies.

What is psycho-graphic mapping?

It would provide data they needed to decide where to concentrate their Facebook ad spend. Other than that, Cambridge Analytica was more snake oil than real AI or scary psychological warfare, like they liked to claim.

One thing they discovered through “psycho-graphic mapping” was that the Rust Belt area was rich in undecided (and persuadable) voters.

They also discovered that a hot-button issue in these places was “crumbling infrastructure”. So they would drop similar phrases and keywords into many of their Facebook, Youtube, and Google ads, and Trump’s speeches.

This is information they could’ve gotten from surveys and polls, but this process was quicker, and time was of the essence because there were only 2 months leading up to the election by the time they hired C.A.

Team Trump far outspent Hillary Clinton's campaign on Facebook.

It is - after all - a numbers game.

If you took all the pro-Trump and anti-Hillary ads on Facebook, and all the pro-Hillary, anti-Trump ads, and compared them side by side, far more money was pumped into the former than the latter.

While it’s true that many of the ads originated from “the boogeyman” Russia, many Facebook ads also came from Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to influence this same election. Therefore (contrary to popular belief) Russia did not have a monopoly on Facebook when it came to the 2016 campaign, nor were they the sole players on social media.

The point here isn’t about apportioning blame, or now unnatural and unfair that Facebook is or isn’t only for Americans.

The point I make is that the numbers suggest that the ads alone must have heavily tilted the odds in Trump’s favor.

It’s no accident that team Trump decided to put most of their money on Facebook rather than Google, and really put much of their ammo in the Rustbelt - Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

It was in the end, only 70,000 votes in those 3 states that made the difference and won him the electoral victory. You can bicker as much as you want about how the electoral college is unfair, and Hillary in reality won the popular vote by a long shot.

What matters is that team Trump had the audacity and foresight to proactively run a data-driven campaign on social media (in contrast to the Hillary campaign which relied primarily on older, more traditional channels (aka TV).

In today’s social media-saturated world, it’s a numbers game.

Brand recognition alone isn’t proactive.

Spray and pray won't work anymore

It’s not enough to saturate the internet with ads. Ads have to be based on data analytics, and that is only available if you run enough ads to get enough data on them, so you could run split tests like you’re running a lab experiment.?

In this case, return on investment (ROI) comes down to that - the bottom line.?Did she win the election?

While it’s true that Trump way outspent Hillary, and Hillary probably saved money by not spending, but in the end, none of it matters because she lost, and he won.?

The Moral Of The Story?

In digital marketing, there’s no half-ass. You either go all the way or don’t do it at all, because like Hillary, (who did in fact devote a smaller part of her ad budget to social media) all that money will go to waste.

If you’re not willing to pay, don’t even bother to play. This may not be always true in marketing campaigns, but in political campaigns, it often determines which candidate gets the edge, and heavily influences who wins.

https://fortune.com/2016/12/09/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-campaign-spending/