Winning Text Messages

Week in Review - Episode 33 - Winning Text Messages

• Digital Cookies (Analytics and Ads) [0:51]
• 3 Winning Text Messages [4:17]
• Social Listening Update from The Prosper Group [13:48]

Show Links

• BLOG | Text Message Examples for Political Campaigns
• UPDATES | AM Rundown Provided by Social Listening from The Prosper Group

TRANSCRIPT - Episode 33 - Winning Text Messages

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TRANSCRIPT: Episode 33 - Winning Text Messages

You are tuned into the Week in Review presented by The Prosper Group where the right turns to win on. Join us each week. As we take a look at what is happening in digital advocacy and politics with a right-of-center focus.

Hello, and welcome back to The Prosper Group Week in Review podcast. Each week we cover politics and digital from right of center for campaign professionals, political insiders, elected officials, and candidates for office. From The Prosper Group, I'm your host, Dan Huber.

On today's show we'll discuss important cookies for your digital properties, winning text messages, and your weekly social tracking update using social listening from The Prosper Group.

Let's get started with this week's weekly digital. Last week, we talked about subscribing to competitor email lists. And this week we're going to talk about your important cookies to have on your digital properties, such as your website and landing pages. There's really two that are, of the utmost importance.

And this is website analytics and the advertising cookies. These are things that for most of you, you won't pay attention to day-to-day. Your digital team will know who the what to do with these, and they should be responsible for making sure they're there. But if you're not sure , if it's been taken care of, I would encourage you to reach out to your digital team and just make sure that it's done. These are important for being able to effectively do your digital advertising, making sure that people are visiting your website. One of the really valuable things from an advertisement advertising standpoint.

Is, you can set up retargeting ads. People who come to your website or people who visit your landing pages, you can put up little display ads that they'll see around the internet they're inexpensive, but a great way to make sure that you're continuing to get your branding out to people who visited your website from the analytics side.

This tells us a lot of information about. How your website's performing what people are doing when they get there. It tells us, gives insights to people who work on websites about how you're performing on your website. Now. These are important things to have, but I would say for most candidates and most of the campaign, these are set and forget things.

Make sure that they exist and then you're on your website. But for most of you, especially for candidates, these aren't the things that you want to be paying the majority of your attention to. It's important to measure your digital. And make sure that it's growing, but you should have people who are specialized in paying attention to that.

Particularly for candidates. I once had a first-time candidate that was more worried about what was going on with her social media accounts and the analytics on our website. Then she was about dialing for dollars and raising money for campaign. It shouldn't come as a big surprise that in the end, she didn't have the money to truly compete and.

Yeah, didn't win her primary. Didn't win her election. Make sure you're paying attention to what you should be paying attention to and have digital experts that are paying attention to what needs to be going on with your digital. But in the end, you should make sure that your website has cookies for marketing analytics and digital advertising, to make sure that when it is time, even if you're not at the point right now, You're spending a lot of money or paying attention.

The people who need it will have access to it. Definitely important for your digital team, even if they're not active now, which they should be, but in the future. So, well, next up, we're going to discuss winning with text messaging. We had a new blog post out this week and wanted to touch base on some of the content that's in that.

With that we had our 10 winning text messages for Republican campaigns. And I'm going to share three of those with you today. Three of my favorites and I'm going to link to the blog posts and the notes for today's podcast. But text messaging is becoming more and more important to political campaigns.

We've talked about this a little bit. Text messages get about 10 times the opening rate or the open rate of emails, about fifth, I'm sorry. About 90% of text messages get opened by the person that they're sent to significantly greater than what you get for an email. If you want to get a message out fast, rapid response, sort of experience, text messages are great way to go.

They're great for fundraising, GOTV, get out the vote, sharing news and endorsements, events... Lots of great things. As I mentioned, I'm going to share with you three of my favorite example, text messages. I'm going to give you an overview of them. If you want to see kind of what an example of what it would look like and in execution, definitely go to the blog post.

We have 10 examples for you of great text messages. You can be sending out to your supporters and followers to help advance the messaging for your campaign. The first one, I'm going to go through is store promotion. This is great for campaigns that are selling items on their website. It engages supporters, raises money, enhances your message, and really gives you an opportunity for some of that word of mouth with.

I know there's a couple of campaigns that I've seen really great items for in the past that people have shared with me. And I said, oh, I want to get on this message list. I subscribed to their list, purchased the item from their campaign store. It was a win-win for the campaign because they increase subscribers. They increased sales/fundraising for the campaign. It's a really great opportunity.

I'm going to give you three keys to what you should do for store promotion texts. One is you're going to want an MMS with images of your featured items. MMS is just a type of text message that allows you to share an image, a video, something like that.

Whereas traditional SMS has a very limited number of characters that can be sent and no pictures are sent with that. You're going to want to send an image if you're promoting your store. I think it's definitely worth that too. You want to make sure you include some great copy with a call to action for.

The donation or really selling the item that you're looking for, which remember on campaigns, we sell items in our store, both to enhance our message and increase our, our supporter base, but alto raise money for the campaign. Any additional money that's made on item sold in our store is fundraising for the campaign.

The other thing I would suggest that I think is a really great tool for using the store promotion. Text message is if you have limited time items, definitely promote them through your text messaging. This could be something, maybe as we go into hunting season or Thanksgiving, maybe you sell blaze orange.

Campaign shirts or something related to the Turkey season, the deer season, maybe something with camouflage. Definitely push that out there. Say limited time item feature that I think that's a great opportunity for your store promotion. Again, the three keys are a featured item. Have great copy. And if you have limited items, definitely promote those and push them out to your, to your supporters.

All right. The second of my favorite items that we're going to talk about as surveys, surveys are really great for engagement. This is a great opportunity to tell people you want to hear back from them. I think a lot of time with marketing and messaging, we really focused on pushing out information and don't always do a good job of getting information back.

Surveys are a great way to do this. They can help enhance your list. If you have the, if you have the capability to record the information from your survey. And add value to your house file. I think that's, that's a great opportunity here. If you want to better understand what your voters are interested in.

And they, they often can provide an opportunity for a light fundraising asks. That's really valuable to your keys here. I have two keys for you today. One, keep it simple. If you're doing a survey. Tell him you're doing a survey.

Give them a very basic question and encourage them to respond.

And then the second is: avoid redundancy. I think particularly in the survey situation, don't send out the same survey multiple times, or if you're going to send it out more than once, make sure that you're narrowing down your list. If somebody responded trying to avoid sending that same survey to them, but definitely continuing to try and engage and talk to them.

Keep it simple, avoid redundancy. Now the third one that I'm going to go over. The text messages that are, I think, kind of stock playbook, text messages is promoting your latest TV ad or just a latest ad in general. Sometimes in today's world, we focus our ads directly online. Digitally. That's fine too, but definitely take this opportunity to support and promote them and push it out to your supporters.

Reward them with early access. Let them know. Hey, I want you to be the first ones to see this. It creates an organic opportunity. To expose the campaign. Encouraging them to share it and push it along. If you give early access, people are going to be all the more inclined to say, Hey, check out this new video that came out it allows really rapid message reach which improves your overall saturation.

Again, going back to the fact that text messages get 90% open rate, the people that you want to see your messaging, they're going to see it right away. The keys for this are again, use MMS with an interesting visual. As I said earlier, MMS as the type of text messaging that allows you to include an image or a video and make sure that you do include an interesting visual and may just be a capture of the video that you're sending out with a little play button.

People know what they're getting. Definitely think about that. Have a link to a landing page where you host the video. I think that's really valuable and then have some sort of call to action on that landing page that you want people to do, whether that's making a contribution to get that ad on the air or push it out via streaming.

Whether it's sharing it on social media or with your friends, make sure you have some sort of call to action. In general, most things you do. You want to have some sort of call to action, whether it's sharing on social media fundraising, that's not limited to this TV ad or new video ad promo.

Keep the CTA in mind. Again, our three keys for the latest, the latest ad latest video ad are use a visual to keep it, to make it interesting. Use of visual to keep it interesting. Send people to a landing page and provide a call to action for what you want them to do once they're there.

Text messaging is a very powerful tool to really great for rapid response. It's excellent for fundraising, especially when big things are happening and really it's a great way to push out your messaging in general. My big takeaway for you would be if you're not already, and we've talked about, talk about this frequently.

Be sure to incorporate texting into your campaigns. It really is a cost effective way to quickly reach voters and supporters, and even more. Getting your message points out in real time to the people that are the greatest supporters of your campaign. That's really, really an important thing that I would encourage you to do.

All right. Well, we're gonna wrap up with our final portion of the show. Every week we share the weekly social listening update. And during the weekdays, when we're not doing our weekly update, we send out the Amrun down from The Prosper Group, which is powered by social listening from The Prosper Group every day.

You get a social summary, social trends and politics and a digital best practice. If you're interested in getting that. Daily in your inbox, please go to prospergroupcorp.com/am-rundown, and you can sign up to receive the am rundown updates. Let's get started with some of the, some of the topics we've been following that are pretty sticky in the media right now, relating to digital or politics or both.

One of them that we've really been following this year is the filibuster that conversation's up 26% this week. It continues to be a big piece. Another one we've been following is the border crisis. A big bump on that this week up 477% week over week to just under 200,000 tweets in the conversation this week.

Again, a very big jump. From last week to this week, and then the third sticky conversation that we've really been following as gas prices that conversation too is jumped a lot this week, 172%. This past week guests hit the high for this year, which is, I believe in an eight year high. At $3, 18.40 cents per down.

Up almost 2 cents this week and continues to be part of the conversation. I think as correlated to a broader conversation, that's going on about inflation out there, but we alhave some more current events that we've been following this past week. We had talked about the California recall.

I don't think it's going to be a shock as that goes in the rear view mirror, that's down 92% this week, and we probably won't visit that again in this forum. But it is dropping off and no surprise there, Texas abortion that conversation's up 31% week over week. And there's been a lot of conversations going on there.

With administrative actions or attempted actions, as well as, some local news coming out of Texas have at least one doctor who's. Not following the legislative, parameters that are part of the heartbeat act they're in Texas. Definitely conversation going on there. The next, the next, and we have a couple of new topics that we've been following this week.

The first one is the debt ceiling. This is a really big topic and it's. It's a big portion of what's going on right now in Washington. That conversation is up 774% week over week. Obviously as those votes occur and it becomes a major focus in Washington, the conversation has grown significantly. Right now around 257,000 tweets in the conversation, this past week. A lot of activity going on around the debt ceiling conversation.

Then the second of our two new conversations is the infrastructure bill. Which is actually down 1% this week, week over week, but we're going to be following it for at least a little bit because the deadline's looming in the next few days of when Speaker Pelosi had promised moderate Democrats, that there would be a vote on the infrastructure bill in the House.

And we're still waiting to see what happens with that. It was part of a broader conversation about the $3.5 billion, spending package that they had put through about a month ago. That's something we're going to follow. I anticipate it's going to increase significantly in the coming week, we'll see what happens there, but.

What I would say is, and what I tell you every week as checked back next week, to see how the conversations are progressing around the important topics of the day. If you're interested in getting daily updates about what's going on in politics in social media, sign up to receive our am rundown at prospergroupcorp.com/am-rundown.

Thank you for listening to The Prosper Group, we can review it's produced and published every Friday. Hit the subscribe button and enjoy your weekend. And we will talk to you next week. You can find The Prosper Group Week in Review podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. If you liked the show, please subscribe and share

The Prosper Group is an internationally recognized, award-winning digital marketing agency headquartered in Indianapolis. The firm specializes in online media, strategy, and fundraising for Republican political candidates, advocacy organizations, associations, and non-profits. The Prosper Group's best-in-industry work has been recognized for awards dozens of times by prestigious organizations such as the American Association of Political Consultants and Campaigns & Elections.

The firm has worked in tandem with Trump for President 2016, Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Congressman John Katko, the National Association of Manufacturers, Fox News, and many other candidates and organizations.