Political advertising spend is on the rise! For the 2024 U.S. presidential election, 2024 election ad spending is expected to hit $12.32 billion—up nearly 30% from the 2020 presidential election.

With campaigns spending record amounts, it’s more important than ever to reach the right potential voters, at the right time, and with the right message; this is known as political micro-targeting.

In this guide, we’ll cover in-demand political segments and how to target them with your 2024 political advertising campaigns.

What is Political Micro-Targeting?

Political micro-targeting involves using data to tailor political advertising messages to individual voters. 

In recent years, data-driven personalization has emerged as a central force in political communication because it allows political campaigns to connect with the right voters, on the right channel, at the right time, and on the issues that matter most to them.

Political micro-targeting can enhance engagement and make it easier (and more effective!) for political parties and movements to communicate with potential voters and supporters. But, this powerful tactic only works if political advertisers can reach the right audience.

Find the Ideal Audiences for Your Political Campaigns

Whether your goal is political fundraising, voter support for a particular political candidate, or something else, begin by defining your audience. Here are some of today’s most sought-after political, voter, and donor audience segments.

In-Demand Audiences for Political Ads

Deep Sync’s compliant, privacy-first audiences enable political marketers to confidently use third-party data in today’s landscape of heightened consumer privacy concerns and ever-changing regulatory practices. 

We have pre-built audiences for key profiles—like Likely First-Time Voters, Gen X voters who lean Republican, Independent-Leaning Voters, and more—that can help political advertisers fill gaps in their data strategy. 

With these top political advertising audiences, remember: These segments are available for acquisition initiatives and can be appended to your first-party data. Below, you will find a sampling of our available audiences.

Essential Voter Attributes 

Likely New Voters, Young Adults, & Generational Cohorts 

• Generational cohorts, including: Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Gen X, Xennials, Millennials, and Gen Z
• Young Adults, including: High School Seniors, College Students, and College Graduates 

Donor Propensities

Rich Demographic Attributes

Our team of data experts can tailor the audience targeting process to your campaign goals and help you reach supporters across more than 700 destinations. We encourage you to inquire about additional demographic and lifestyle variables that can be applied to further refine and add focus to your audience. 

We can also create exclusive, customized recommendations for your political and fundraising campaigns. And if new needs arise, we can build custom micro-audiences. 

For example, if an area in western Pennsylvania becomes a hot button for your campaign, our team can immediately build new audiences to start addressing those people and households—knowing that they will precisely target the right people and homes in that specific area.

We can also help political advertisers suppress audiences. For example, a Republican-leaning cause can suppress a segment of Democratic-leaning audiences so they can focus on audiences that are more likely to convert—reducing wasted resources and improving campaign ROI.

Use Your First-Party Data for a Successful Campaign

In addition to our pre-packaged segments, your organization’s data can be leveraged to create personal, purposeful marketing interactions with your donors and supporters. And, this same data can inform prospect audience creation to support your campaign and fundraising growth goals. 

But, that all starts with clean, accurate data and a clear vision of how to use it most effectively. Here are our suggestions to improve your first-party data and how to use it to power your political advertising.

Improve the Quality of Your Supporter Data

To use your data to its fullest potential, start by ensuring its quality. Data hygiene and suppression services can help you cleanse errors and irregularities, standardize addresses, flag undesirable profiles, and improve the overall usability of your data.

Whether preparing your supporter data for direct mail or online advertising, these measures create a solid foundation for your political ad campaigns. 

Enrich Your Data

Develop a deeper understanding of your current constituents’ behaviors, needs, and wants by adding valuable data attributes to your database. Data enhancement, also known as data enrichment, can add supplemental information to your existing data.

This added intelligence can power your online and offline political campaigns by improving segmentation and personalization efforts, allowing for more tailored communications.

Get Insights About Your Supporters

Better understand the supporters in your database with our Customer Insights Report. We can pull insights from your database to uncover key attributes about your supporters and significant audience segments.

Learning that your supporters are largely new homeowners or fall within a certain age bracket, for example, can help you more effectively communicate with your supporters and ensure their ongoing support.

Lookalike Audiences & Modeling

Lookalike audiences & modeling solutions can analyze patterns within your first-party data to isolate key segments designed to meet your campaign and fundraising goals. Whether you seek demographically-driven lookalike audiences to expand your reach or predictive models to guide your efforts, Deep Sync has the data science expertise to execute analytic processes. 

Enhance Your First-Party Onboarding

Ensure that your candidate, cause, or mission remains top of mind when you activate your offline data for online use and reach more of your supporters online. Deep Sync’s Enhanced Onboarding enhances your data with online and offline identifiers to boost first-party match rates on social and programmatic platforms. 

Get Single Supporter Views

Unlock the full potential of your valuable supporter data with an exclusive identity solution that creates accurate, unified records by applying unique individual- and household-level identifiers to your first-party data. Additional contact data points, including emails and phone numbers, are also added. 

Power Political Campaign Performance with Voter Moves

Maximize valuable campaign dollars by reducing irrelevant communications that result from aged data, and identify prospective supporters before they appear on updated voter rolls. Our industry-leading New Mover data makes it possible to enhance your candidate’s reputation by delivering accurate, personalized campaign messaging that recognizes the recipient at their current address.

We can identify voters who have moved out of the district and provide access to prospective voters who are new to the area. Voter Moves provides you with an edge in your outreach initiatives, including campaign messaging, fundraising appeals, and rallying supporters.

How it works: We match your constituent data to our New Mover dataset to identify voters no longer living within your district. Where matched records indicate a move out of the district, we flag the records so they can be excluded from future campaign initiatives. 

Following suppression, records for prospective voters who moved into your district within the past six months are provided. These new community members seek to build local relationships while settling into their new homes and may significantly benefit from information shared on behalf of your campaign.

Political Advertising for CTV

CTV is predicted to absorb 45% of digital political ad spend for the 2024 election cycle. This channel has become an increasingly effective way to reach swing voters in local, state, and national elections; in fact, 73% of swing voters in battleground states can be reached through streaming TV ads.

Additionally, Independent voters pay more attention to CTV ads. According to MediaPost: “Independent voters are paying about 4% more attention to political ads than the average viewing of all TV commercials.” This makes CTV a key channel for election campaigns.

According to The Trade Desk, better ad targeting and frequency capping allow CTV to reach households 36% more efficiently than traditional TV campaigns. However, many political advertisers struggle with precise CTV targeting due to data quality issues and signal loss. 

Deep Sync data can improve your CTV targeting, allowing your campaign to reach specific demographics without relying on niche media outlets. Our data is available for CTV targeting in marketplaces and platforms like MNTN, LiveRamp, and Cadent, and can be used for improved targeting in demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk and Google DV360. We can also onboard first-party data for more effective targeting this election season.

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With improved addressability and identity, your campaigns and/or political candidates can reach voters more effectively than ever. Whether your goal is to educate voters, promote voter registration, or reach undecided voters with your political messages, Deep Sync can help you improve ad targeting across various ad types and platforms.

Trust Deep Sync to drive successful political audience creation for your organization. Our unrivaled access to privacy-safe, cross-channel audiences—as well as our complete suite of first-party data solutions—enable political marketers to reach constituents in the micro-moments that matter most. Contact us to learn more.