2020 is quickly approaching, and we are all most likely up to our knees for business planning for next year. One unique thing about next year is that it is also an election year, and election years can throw a wrench is business digital marketing campaigns.
2020 will be my third election cycle as a digital marketing professional, and up until 2016, everything went pretty much as predicted. Candidates bash each other, supporters of said candidates share opinion pieces about the rival, yadda yadda. However, shortly after the New Hampshire primary in March of 2016, I watched the client’s customer bases leave Facebook with the droves leaving the night and day following when we learned who the nominees were. These people also did not log on or interact again on Facebook until well into 2017.
At that point in 2016, it was just Facebook where the political advertising warfare was raging among the masses. Instagram was pretty much unaffected by the political advertising machine. Instagram, we were still seeing plenty of dog and latte posts with somewhat positive captions that the masses were even interacting with and again somewhat purchasing from businesses.
The sales trend for purchasing non-essential products and booking services stayed statistically low, as is predicted during an election year. During election years, statistics show that consumers are more conscious of how they spend their money and are more apt to think twice before purchasing because the outlook financially for the next four years is uncertain.
However, once Facebook jumping began, marketing plans were altered, and email marketing, SEO, and Pinterest became the focus. Which with these changes, businesses’ monthly marketing statistics stayed consistent as non-election years. People are not going to leave the internet because we live here now. People are, however, going to avoid places on the internet that suck for them.
If Facebook and Instagram are the only marketing platforms that your business is focusing on, I’m sorry to tell you, but in 2020 they could let you down hard. Facebook has already said that they will not filter and will allow all kinds of political ads to be run. Since late September, I have already seen a dozen or more political all sorts of ads popping up on Instagram. This makes me believe that once the Iowa caucuses happen, Instagram will also become penetrated with ads, influencers, and those dogs and lattes photos we all love will be captioned with political comments. At which point, the cycle of leaving and logging off of social media until November 2020 will begin.
With all that said, the key to running a successful digital marketing campaign during an election year is to be prepared for anything and focus on areas of directly connecting with customers via their inbox and their searches. What worked well for one month could very well not work the next month or as soon as the news cycle is updated. If this election is anything like 2016, we are all going to be opening up our apps to the wild world wide web together.