We are in the midst of the Irish Local and European elections and over the past few days there have been numerous articles written about the use of election posters, ranging from posters on top of mountains, to apparent poster sabotage. This got us thinking. Political campaigns are marketing campaigns and where are modern day marketing campaigns conducted nowadays? Online, that’s where, but why are candidates not utilizing their online audience?

Irish online habits

There are over 2.3 million active users of Facebook in Ireland. The largest age cohort on Facebook in Ireland is 25-34 year olds, a total of 29% of the entire Irish Facebook audience. While on Twitter, Ireland has on average 600,000 daily users, with 46% of these being 24-34 year olds. In other words, it’s not just “the kids” that are using social media, a large proportion of the Irish electorate are interacting, commenting and sharing their thoughts online, right now.

Candidates are always encouraging the younger end of the voting spectrum to give them their vote, but how many are looking up from their phones and taking note of posters? Wouldn’t a campaign fund be better spent on reaching their target voters through mediums they’re more likely respond to?

There is a major discrepancy between the online presence of politicians and the online presence of their electorate. It’s possible that this might be related to cost, so we’ve done a quick comparison.

Take a spend of a conservative €500, instead of investing this in poster printing and transport costs etc, lets see what it could get a candidate if it was invested in online advertising.

What can be done with a budget of €500 using YouTube Trueview

You can make a video ad for as little as $99 and upload it to YouTube to use in your advertising campaign. First of all, YouTube videos can be shared freely on Facebook, Twitter, Google and other networks, and posted to blogs or websites. This might grow organic views to a level where paid ad placement isn’t needed. By harnessing your supporters, and encouraging them to share your video online, you have the ability to reach your electorate directly in their homes and on their mobile devices. So before you even spend a cent on running a campaign, you can get away with spending only $99 dollars and get your message out to every laptop and mobile device in your constituency.

If you were to run an online campaign, a Trueview video ad campaign (for example) with the remainder of your budget, €400, you can guarantee the following reach…

Splitting up a proposed budget of €400 between the 25 days left to election day gives you a daily spend of €16 euro. With a daily spend of €16 candidates can expect to increase their video views by at least 1,000 views a day, not including sharing on social media and views on blogs or websites. That’s an extra 1,000 people seeing what you can do for them, every day.

How many posters will €500 get you?

Based on some numbers given in this article, (€2,000 for 200 posters) not that many, we must also factor in transport cost of putting the posters up around a constituency which will whittle down that budget even further.

ROI

While there is no effective way of measuring the ROI of a poster campaign, there is with video – YouTube campaigns can also be tweaked within minutes ensuring you get the most out of the budget. Imagine being able to change where your poster appears at the click of a button, based off real time data of how many people are looking at it where it is now!

While there’s still a place for traditional forms of advertising, we believe video commercials will be more effective in terms of being eco-friendly, cost efficient and in targeting a candidate’s electorate.

Advantages of video ads over poster

• Video ROI can be measured
• Video ads can be distributed through specific filters allowing refined audience targeting
• Social media activity can be boosted with video as posts or updates
• Video will attract 3 times more inbound links than posts with plain text
• After watching a video ad, 26% of people look for more information about the subject of the video

Convinced of the power of video yet? Make yours today at Viddyad.com. Check out the example below for some inspiration.