🔱 Sign up for a free demotoday to see how the latest AI and digital advocacy tools can transform your work.
2 Minute Read
How To Master Or Disaster The Small Budget Campaign
Perhaps the question we get the most is how to maximize small budget campaigns. With budget pressures increasing on organizations from all directions, it's more important than ever to be hyper-efficient in public affairs campaigns. In today's short read, we show you a quick illustration of how even a modest miss in your tactics can virtually guarantee missing your targets.
Quick Math On Missing Your Target
Let's say your budget buys you 145,000 ad impressions and you have five Members of Congress you're trying to reach. That may sound like a lot of ads. But most location-based tools can get you only within one mile of a given location. Meta and many programmatic ad platforms are a good example of this. If you're trying to reach the U.S. Capitol, they'll let you target a minimum of a one mile radius around the building.
In any given month, at least 500,000 unique people typically enter that radius around the Capitol. This includes predominantly tourists (the most popular Smithsonian Museums and other major tourist attractions fall within this area), travelers (Union Station is within the boundary), professional sports fans (a Major League Baseball and NBA stadium are both included), local residents, workers outside of the Capitol, and many other people who are not your decision-makers. Now assume a frequency cap of 10 impressions per person.
This means you have a 1 in 49 million chance of reaching all five of your targets even a single time! Many lottery odds are better.
Check the math on your favorite chatbot if you find this hard to believe.
Quick Math On Hitting Your Target
There's a much better solution. Instead of targeting a one mile radius around the Capitol, you can individually target the decision-makers. This can be done either with home-by-home geofencing, cookieless IDs, or a combination of both. We've covered each of these topics in prior newsletters that you can read here.
Now take those same 145,000 impressions targeted individually.
This means you can guarantee delivery of 29,000 impressions per target, leaving plenty of room to just reach not just the decision-makers, but also their influencers.
Two Ways To Operationalize This Email
🔱 Review your reporting from your last small budget campaign and see if you can determine how many times you actually hit your targets.
🔱 Learn more about home-by-home geofencing and cookieless ID matching. Make these tactics your foundation for reaching specific targets.
🔱 If you're enjoying this content, please consider forwarding this email to a colleague or friend. If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up here to stay up to date on the latest developments in political technology.
🔱 If you have ideas for topics you'd like to see us cover, feedback, complaints, or thoughts to share on digital advocacy topics, please reply to this email. We'd love to hear from you.
