More campaigns are turning to influencers to build trust and persuade voters — particularly in diverse communities. This is happening, in part, because voters are relying less on the media or political endorsements for guidance on how to cast their votes.
Case in point, the Biden campaign has already announced a social media war room for influencers.
Still, there are going to be some hurdles to climb in this new realm of voter contact. These early-adopter campaigns must quickly learn that popularity is not persuasion, and how voters know a friend from a fake.
Why Influencers Now?
Voter distrust in media, politicians, and government is at an all time high. Instead, voters increasingly rely on their communities and peers to inform decisions about candidates and issues.
“Asked who they trust for election information, Americans were much more likely to say ‘friends and family’ than they were ‘poll results’ or the ‘news media,’” according to recent polling by YouGov for The Economist.
The embrace of influencers was paved by the rise of digital relational organizing – the buzzword of the 2020 election – which accelerated recognition that the messenger matters as much as the message in campaign media. Local or so-called micro influencers are authentic members of the community, and it should surprise no one outside the beltway that they better understand what residents in their neighborhoods want than consultants.
This study for the DGA speaks to higher recall from Virginians than campaigns in “digital door knocking” through micro influencers.
Influencers Are a Trap for Campaigns
Any campaign having attempted to recruit influencers will understand how much work goes into the practice: identifying, credentialing, recruiting, negotiating, managing, approving, and distributing posts, videos, ads, memes, and other content at scale.
With that in mind, here’s some guidance as the cycle takes the training wheels off the hottest tactic in brand marketing:
- Popularity is Not Persuasion: Taylor Swift is not the answer to an influencer strategy. Celebrities don’t influence elections. Celebrity influencers don’t actually share the same experiences or connections as members of the community. They are aspirational versus real. Exceptional versus real. As a result, the result is awareness, not persuasion. The one exception being tactics such as Hometown Heroes.
- Identity Matters: Voters trust their peers, neighbors, and communities. Fortunately, campaigns can now source influencers matching highly specific voter segments for the first time – influencers who share districts/cities/counties/states, ethnicities, professions, employers, genders, ages, parties, religions, patient conditions, and even affinities with diverse voter segments.
- Influence Is a Media Mix: An influencer strategy looks a lot like a paid digital media mix model, in which different influencers drive different outcomes for a campaign if blended together correctly:
- Macroinfluencers (100,000+ followers) generate awareness, but most of their followers are out of district or state, and their content is the least persuasive
- Midinfluencers (20,000 to 100,000) drive strong consideration among voters especially if they match specific voter segments
- Microinfluencers (2,000-20,000 followers) generate the highest recall and persuasion, especially when run as white listed social ads, because they are the most authentic, personal and real
- You Get What You Pay For: Volunteer influencer campaigns (user generated content) rarely work. If campaigns want quality content on-time, on-message, and access to proper rights and usages, they have to pay influencers equitably. Pollsters, staffers, consultants, and many canvassers are paid, and so too should a passionate voter who raises their hand to create a campaign video on Instagram or a post on Nextdoor. The Dunns are the face of political ads in 2024, and they deserve to be partners.
- Voters Want Real: Political TV ads look more and more like TikTok videos these days. In a recent study by Meta evaluating all ads on all its platforms, lo-fi, peer-to-peer content not only generated higher recall but higher conversion than studio produced ads.
Voters simply respond to people who share their values and experiences – their in-groups. The word influencer is often a euphemism for real people sharing real experiences with their communities, and campaigns cannot afford to ignore TikTok, the epicenter of community activism in 2024.
The number one factor in the success of an influencer post is whether the creator shared something personal in relation to the candidate or issue. Length doesn’t actually matter if the content tells a personal and emotional story. This reality is why influencer content achieves higher performance than campaign ads with the same message.
Campaigns are slowly learning how to organize personal stories from real people. It’s really no different than door knocking, and if done authentically, it’ll have a large impact on elections up and down the ballot.
Curtis Hougland is co-founder of People First, the first influencer agency specializing in politics and advocacy founded in 2018.
