3 Ways Marketing Analytics Benefit Political Communications

By now, it’s common knowledge that geopolitical organisations, for good or ill, have learned to excel at the game of digital influence, and impressively so. As global internet connectivity and digital communications drive down the barriers to entry for meaningful political engagement, such organisations have become increasingly adept at running their operations in ways akin to some of the world’s best-known brands.

For this reason, nation states and corporations are becoming increasingly concerned at the ability of dangerous non-state actors to influence global policy making and public opinion. The most innovative brands in the world have developed well conceived strategies to mitigate perceived threats, gain market share and influence public opinion. However, the same can not readily be said of political communication brands.

As the world becomes increasingly data-driven and political organisations make better use of their digital presences, corporations and organisations must reconsider and refresh their analytics strategies, and turn those insights to competitive advantage. Increasingly, decision makers must ask themselves, whether their current analytics programmes improve the ROI or effectiveness of political communications?

The means to understand the behaviour of key politically-motivated audiences and groups has never been more robust, or complicated. The dizzying range of digital touchpoints and devices available has spawned a flood of data and complex range of tools and methods to make sense of it all. However, the diverse activities of geopolitical actors large and small call for increasingly sophisticated approaches to successfully engage with them. By adopting and modifying some of the approaches seen in marketing analytics to impact brand behaviour, the activities of extremist, humanitarian and overtly political ‘brands’ become more transparent.

Enter Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics “comprise the processes and technologies that enable marketers to understand and evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives by measuring the performance of their various digital efforts using essential, innovative metrics.” Marketing analytics inform how your digital marketing efforts perform in the real world. By aggregating data from across all marketing channels, a common view from which to extract analytical results to drive your marketing efforts forward can be created.

Here are some of the main benefits:

• Data Input from Unlimited digital channels: with marketing analytics you get a deep understanding of each of the individual channels (such as blogging, social media, email marketing and SEO) and how well they perform individually and together


• Integration of people-centric data into digital campaigns: as marketing analytics moves away from single data sources, to the performance of particular people and groups of people, this allows you to understand the digital performance of individual organisations or people over time


• Speed of Analysis: machine learning and scalable cloud computing make the transition from data analysis to decision making is increased, and can occur in real time

Accurate marketing analytics are an essential part of political communication campaigns because they allow decision makers to gain insights about marketing programmes across the entire digital landscape. Social media data on their own are not enough, neither are web analytics. By analysing behaviour across all digital channels over time, decision makers can make better, more efficient and more impactful decisions.

We’ve only touched on some of the benefits of marketing analytics for political communications. The true value of analytics in this burgeoning space is to ultimately improve the impact of your digital performance, and we will cover this in more depth in ways to make your analytics more actionable.

Source: B2C