Recently an internal Facebook white paper was leaked: The company’s data scientists agree that Donald Trump’s campaign outperformed Hillary Clinton’s.
Let’s reverse engineering ‘what happened’ and then perhaps transfer some relevant bits to our business and ourselves.
Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the presidential campaign and rapidly tested them to spread those that generated the most Facebook engagement, according to the paper.
Clinton ran 66,000 different kinds of ads in the same period.
28% of Trump’s ad spending was tied to third-party data files on voters, and leveraged a FB tool that helped the campaign show ads to lookalike audiences.
Clinton’s ads aimed for broader audiences, with only 4 percent of her Facebook spend on the lookalike tool.
84 percent of Trump’s budget asked people on Facebook to take an action, like donating, compared with 56 percent of Clinton’s.
“Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” according to paper, citing revenue of $44M for Trump and $28M for Clinton. “But Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged FB’s ability to optimize for outcomes.”
What usefulness can we synthesize?
Keep this brief away from the marketing and sales department. Bring it exclusively into your own thinking.
To disrupt the installed, legacy market leading ‘orthodoxy’ vendors, have your marketing, sales (and competitive intel) keep its target boxed into excessive issues and your messaging precisely targeted on the rhetoric needed to agitate the bottom of their base client support. Give it all the opportunities to make mistakes. The orthodoxy provider can never recover from mistakes, it needs its legacy client base and its systems to defend it. Let the competition draw down on its internal resources.
Be more innovative than the orthodoxy, bureaucratic counterparts. Accelerate and direct the prospect/client insurgency by paying attention and interacting with it. Tweets and media mentions incentivize innovation and spread new ideas across the insurgency in minutes.
Present many ideas and let them fail quickly, adhere to the ones that find advocates that can swarm. This is not an abundance of pivots, rather it is a strategy to amplify intimacy with the client/prospect. ‘We here you’ rapidly reiterated
Good luck!