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How To Reach The One Key Decision-Maker

We often cover tactics in this newsletter to reach  the right audience—the right group of decision-makers. This is critical in most public affairs work. But many times, the issue comes down to just one person. One elected official. One policy-maker who decides the fate of your issue.  If the last two weeks have reminded us of anything, it’s that so much can boil down to just one person. This time it was President Trump (and it often will be), but so many other times, it’s  one committee chair, one Administration official, or one procurement officer. 

So today, we briefly discuss what to do when your outcome comes down to one target. 

How Many People Will Actually Decide Your Outcome? 

First, let’s be clear-eyed in each debate you find yourself in. Do you really need the whole legislature, the whole house, or the whole committee on your side? Or is the reality that one person will decide your outcome?  This is often the case—perhaps more than we’d like to admit in an organized democracy. 

Now that you’ve wiped away the cloudy vision of political theory, you can zero in on the realities of communicating to one person. 

Focus On The Person, Not The Platform

Even when it’s clear that one person will decide the outcome of the issue, many public affairs professionals turn to focusing on  one publication—Fox News, Politico, the local political insider site. But this amounts to substituting an easy question for a hard one. It’s easy to get in one publication if you have the resources. It’s hard to get to one person when there is no guarantee they will be on any one media outlet at any precise moment. 

So when you must reach one person, you can’t guess where they might be at any given time. Instead, you must precisely capture the person in your targeting, and communicate to them wherever they are. This means having access to  thousands of advertising-enabled websites and Connected TV platforms through programmatic advertising, so wherever your target is, you can reach them. 

You might think a particular official only watches Fox, but the data nearly always proves otherwise. We don’t want to go so far as to call politicians normal people, but they do have some normal behaviors. They check sports sites. They check the weather. They consume virtually ANY article that mentions them, even if it is from a media outlet on the opposite side of the political spectrum—one you wouldn’t think to buy ads on. So when it’s critical to reach one person, you must take the guesswork out. This is the value of programmatic advertising. Instead of a gamble, you get a surgical strike. 

One Decision-Maker Does Not Mean One Target For Your Message

Once you’ve reached the one decision-maker directly, your next job is to reach their influencers. We have covered the topic of influencer targeting extensively in this newsletter and will continue to do so. But if you remember only one thing on this issue, it’s that AI has utterly transformed how influencer targeting works, and has left expensive, legacy tools behind. These black boxes of data have been replaced with instant targeting that identifies who is in the decision-maker’s orbit at any given time. This makes it more viable than ever to win over the one key person in your campaign.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱  Think about your next campaign and honestly ask yourself: “How many people will actually decide this issue?” 

🔱  When it comes down to one person, ask yourself how you know your message is actually reaching them. 

🔱  Don’t confuse a platform with a person. No one media outlet can guarantee getting one set of eyes on your message. 

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