Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can boost your sales!

The following is a guest editorial by Paul Orford, Head of Institutional Sales at AMB Prime.

As many of my friends and colleagues know, I am often quite critical of various marketing campaigns from within our industry, which seem to be carried out without any real care or knowledge of what their end result is or who their message is targeted at.

Much like a monkey with a machine gun, various marketing departments litter my inbox with emails showing me how my life can change with ‘7 must have indicators’, or how to achieve the path to enlightenment by following guidance on ‘how to becoming an expert trader’.

I don’t mind receiving them as I see it as a nice reflection on how to conduct an email campaign from a bygone era.

After the gold rush of football team sponsorship and the change in regulations regarding incentivizing the client to open a trading account, how will marketing departments fight to dominate the narrative. Instead of perhaps looking at what their competitors are doing and carrying out a copy and paste marketing strategy, a more intelligent way is to look at the techniques which are used into the ultimate ultimate sales and marketing sphere, the electoral campaign.

It is widely acknowledged that both Donald Trump and the Leave EU campaign had a message that many believed would be challenging not only to be listened to, moreover to be accepted by the public at large prior to the result being called. In fact with the majority of bookmakers offering overwhelming odds for the opposite outcome, should we not look more closely at how these victories were achieved for our own ends?

If you are not aware of what big data is, it can be described as an extremely large data set that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends and associations especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Essentially this can be interpreted as to why Adwords sends me messages about why I should consume more goods and products from a specific vendor and type. My behavior has been tracked analyzed and refined to hone the message that I receive and for me as the active participant to act upon it.

Although many political commentators argued both campaign messages were not getting across, by utilizing big data they were able to construct a message which had been devised by a team who understood how to use analytics, and how to transform the huge amount of data into a ‘coherent’ message.

An example of this was Trumps team acknowledging in order to win specific regions they had to mention that he was going to bring back jobs in the coal industry as it is specific to a certain region. Moreover, when discussing what are the fears of the electorate, they will give the response and he then creates a message accordingly regarding building walls and sending back ‘bad dudes’.

Further to this, the most poignant message of the Leave campaign was the large red bus stating that more money would be going to the NHS if you cast your vote for Leave. Furthermore, Nigel Farage’s faction was giving a very graphic ‘failing point’ image. These messages are not created by pure happenstance or on small scale focus groups of the past, but by the advanced utilization of big data and its interpretation and analysis as to what specific voters trigger points.

• HOW DO THEY GET THE DATA?

The modern successful electoral machine now employs large departments to calculate the data that is being received from the front line of canvassers. This is then packaged to become more specific and targeted message for the targeted region. Jim Messina who was the campaign director for the Obama campaign in 2012, outlined that they had a 12-person team carrying out the data analysis for the 2008 campaign, in 2012 they had 165. He argues that in the old days people were treated as a number, now we need to treat them as individual people. Moreover, he goes further and states that they knew the name of each of the 69 million people who voted for his candidate in the 2012 election with the advanced data analysis tools.

• HOW CAN YOU GET THIS DATA?

If you have a multi million dollar budget like many of the political parties and causes mentioned, many of them begin with Cambridge Analytica that specialize in big data and psychographics. Having played a prominent role in many recent campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic recently, from the extrapolated data they can help form a party or causes key arguments.

Although some may argue that we can see this via current analytical tools, they do not really touch the surface when looking at what the client needs. Moreover, all they do is give us analysis on the questions we ask, rather than feedback upon what a client requires. This appears to be the wrong way around in generating a service that is of value to the end user. In an age where every electronic activity is monitored and a profile built, we are coming to the end of giving out a broad brush stroke message.

Without these huge budgets you may think that all is lost, however this is not the case. By using very basic methods of retention and improving the likes and dislikes of a client, you can build up the same picture as the information received by the canvassing masses who knock on the doors of the voting public. They can give you feedback into what they want, as opposed to forcing what you offer you can tailor make the service and increase your rapport with the client.

After all, which client would not like to have a specific service designed for them, rather than the usual vanilla affair that 90% of brokerages have.

Remember we work in an industry where data is gold, why not make your brokerage a Fort Knox!