Successful political campaigns have several things in common. One of them is consistent messaging.
A candidate who has a message that strikes a chord with the largest group of voters often wins the election.
Without a message, you don’t have a campaign. You need to let the voters know what problems you want to fix in office, what your plans are to fix those problems, and what makes you qualified to do so.
Yes, there’s more to a winning political campaign message than that (I go into it deeper those messaging elements in this article) but what voters really want to know is how will you make their lives better.
Once you have a message, you need to make sure it resonates with voters on an emotional, logical, or moral level. Hopefully on two of those levels, if not all three.
A great campaign message touches voters on all three levels, particularly on the emotional, is often a winning a message.
But it is the emotional level that matters most when it comes to winning elections.
Why is this?
Because most people make decisions based upon how they feel about a candidate and the candidate’s agenda.
When you have a plan to make voters lives better, you are giving them hope and alleviating anxiety. That is how you make an emotional connection.
And when you have that winning message in place you stay on it. You don’t deviate. You don’t change. You don’t try out new material. You stay on message until the polls close on Election Day.
You the same speech fifty times.
You give the same answer to the same phone call one hundred times.
You give the same pitch for your candidacy at a thousand doors.
You send mailers that convey the same message over and over and over again.
You put television and radio commercials on the air that have the same message.
You make sure that message is on your website, your Facebook status updates, in your Tweets, and your text messages.
In marketing, advertising, and political campaigns the key to success is repetition.
You have to repeat your message to the voters as many times as possible so that its sticks with them and you win their vote.
Today repetition and consistency of message is more important than its ever been. We are the most marketed to group of Americans ever.
Everywhere we turn we are being marketed to. There’s always an ad before our eyes or being put into our ears. We learn to tune them out or skip over them.
The only way marketers can be sure to punch through is to keep pushing their ads through hoping that they will get noticed by the intended audience.
Political campaigns are no different than commercial marketing efforts.
You need to punch through and you need to make sure when that one thing does get the voters attention that it speaks to them with a message that resonates with them at their inner core and stirs their heart.
While you may have sent or said the same more times than you can count, it may be that voter’s first time to see or hear it, which is why you must stay on message.
Granted, there are so many things that you can talk about when running for office and its tempting to let people know that you know a lot about a diverse array of issues, but if you want to win you need to be sure that you always bring it back to your message time after time after time after time.
It takes discipline to be consistently repetitive, but that’s called staying on message. And it’s worth it if you really want to win your election.