3 Election Marketing Lessons To Boost Your Practice

Nothing can kill a bad company faster than a great advertising campaign. I believe that's what happened to the Harris campaign. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Practice Profit System. I'm Matt Gillogly, I'm your host, and if this is your first time, welcome. If you are a longtime listener, welcome back. Well, today we're going to talk about the election. Now, all right, before 50% of you opt out. I'm not here to talk about how great Trump is or how horrible he is or how great Kamala is or how horrible she is. That's not the point of it. I'm here to talk about the lesson that you can learn from the election and how you can apply it to your business. Okay? So just stick with me here, folks. Like, this has nothing to do with, like, the positions of the candidates. Alright? If you're there, you're, like, totally missing of what I'm about ready to share with you. But before I share that insight, I need to let you know about something. And that's this. I first learned a really valuable lesson about marketing and advertising back when I was a golf professional. And what I learned from a guy by the name of Roger Beasley— Roger, if you're listening, shout out to you. Roger's a brilliant, brilliant advertiser, marketer, strategist. And we were— I was working for a company called Golf South, and we were doing this thing where we had this whole new program about how we were going to get new golfers in. And Roger Beasley stands up in front of the room and he goes, nothing will kill a bad company faster than a great advertising campaign. And at first I had no idea what he was talking about, but today I really understand what he's talking about. So let me share this with you. One of the big questions that we get all the time is, Matt, I don't have any money for marketing. How the heck am I going to be able to market my practice and market my facility? Well, the reality is, is You really don't need that much money to market if you follow some very specific rules, which we'll talk about here in just a moment. But let's go back to the election. Now, if you haven't seen the news clips or anything like this, the DNC and the Harris campaign spent $1 billion with a B, billion dollars on the election. Now, this doesn't even count all the money that was spent by the PACs. Okay, that they don't control. Hey, I'm Matthew Gillogly, and I'm a maverick. Well, what is a maverick? A maverick goes against the grain. We find our own way. And if you're sick and tired of being pushed around by the insurance companies, come join us. We'll show you the way out. And you'll love medicine again. So the DNC and the Harris campaign, Harris-Wald's campaign, spent $1 billion on advertising. It's the first time that a candidate has spent over $1 billion to try and win a political office. The Trump campaign spent approximately $450 million to $500 million. Okay. Now, that number fluctuates a little bit because, you know, both those numbers can fluctuate a little bit. I mean, Harris might have spent $950 or $1. One, these numbers are still kind of in flux, but basically on what's reported, this is what they've spent. Now, here's what's fascinating about this. This is the lesson I want you to get. So Harris had 71 million votes as of the time of this recording. Trump has just shy of 75 million votes. That means that the Harris campaign spent $14.03 per vote. Now, that number is probably significantly higher. When you factor in that 90% of those votes were going to vote Democrat anyway. Okay. So like that number could be $140, it could be $1,400. But the point is, that's what they spent per vote. The Trump campaign spent $415 million based on the current filings of what we have today and got just shy of 75 million votes. They got 74,839,000 votes. This is as of today. I went and got kind of an average between Fox News and CNN. Okay. As of about 5 minutes ago, that means the Trump campaign spent $6.02 to get a vote. Now, same thing. 90% of those votes were going to be Republican no matter who you could run. Daffy Duck and 90% of those votes would still be either for Harris or for Trump based on the party affiliation. Okay. So here's what's fascinating about this. Okay. The return on the ad spend by the Harris campaign is abysmal. Now, If you, again, I'm gonna go just a hair political on this. If you go and you read the pundits, if you read kind of the analysis, the postmortem on this whole thing, everyone will tell you that Harris had a difficult time defining her message. She had a difficult time defining her message. She had a difficult time defining her market, and she had a very difficult time in our parlance of having a very specific solution, or in our case, it's an offer, right? So in the beachhead model, we have a message, we have a market, we have an offer. Compare that to Trump. Trump was, had a very, he understood the market. I believe he understood the market a lot better than the DNC campaign. I believe he understood the needs of the market. I think he understood the messaging a lot clearer. And if you go back and you look at polling, this is not just my opinion, folks. This is polling data will tell you that people coming out of the polls felt that, especially the people that were independents that were in that middle. They felt that Trump understood their situation better than Harris. Okay, now this is data, so don't get mad at me for repeating data. Do not shoot the messenger. Okay, this is really important because I don't want you to miss this. And he had a much clearer— he had a much clearer offer. Now here's the other thing: the Trump campaign understands the value of what's called earned media. Now advertising and marketing is going through a massive upheaval, especially what we call big box Advertising. 8 years ago, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, they all really dominated the airwaves. They don't anymore. You know that CNN averages like their viewership is like 780,000. Do you know that MSNBC, their average age is pushing 70 of the viewer? Fox News, the after they get 2.5 million viewers and their average age is like 63. Okay, so that demographic is changing. What Trump did a better job of is going and having specific conversations with specific groups about specific issues that they were related to. By the way, this is the same thing that Obama did when he won twice. So what's the lesson for you on this? Okay, this is a really— this is really, really important because I want you to understand this. We here at Mavericks and in our Stairway system, we talk about our version of earned media all the time. Let's face facts, people get their information from a different They don't watch the news anymore. They don't read— well, newspapers don't even really exist anymore in the print format. They're not buying magazines like they used to or going online or reading Time magazine. They're going to earned media places. They're going to places like Rogan, or they're going to whatever. They're going to Jordan Peterson or whomever they're listening to, or Rob Lowe or whomever else, right? The power of a podcast— you know that the average American listens to 3 podcasts a month? Fascinating. Do you know that people are getting more and more of their news from places like TikTok, Twitter? They're watching more and more of videos like this, and they're watching video shorts, because this will be taken up and it'll be cut up in video shorts and they'll be put out on YouTube. Do you know that people are using that as their vehicle with which to get and make informed decisions? Now That's the power of earned media. None of that is paid for. These are things that are just organic that people are pumping out there that people are watching. And what they're doing is they're talking specifically to the issues that people are having. You know, I knew that the Harris campaign was really struggling when I saw a couple of things. One, and again, this is just data, folks. This isn't based on my political views. One, I was out in Las Vegas and they kept hammering home over and over and over again women's control over their bodies. Now, I'm not here to say what, where my position is on that, but here's what the data told us about the conversation that was going on in the prospect's head. They couldn't buy butter and milk and they were missing the point, right? They were not running a very focused campaign. They were trying to tell people what should be important as opposed to answering the questions that they were having about what they saw was important. They were talking out to people versus talking with people. Okay. And hearing what the issues that people had. I believe that the Trump campaign did a significantly better job on that. Now, again, I'm gonna say this 1,000 times because in the world that we live in today, 50% of you are judging me right now, thinking that, trying to guess which way I voted. That's not the point of this. If that's where you want to go, you're totally missing the boat because there is a massive, massive lesson in this. And just because you have a lot of money to spend doesn't mean your business is going to be successful. It doesn't mean you're going to win. It's more important that you understand your market and have clear messaging that answers that, that basically does the Bill Clinton to them and says, I feel your pain more so than it is to try and prove that your messaging is what they should hear. Here's the second time that I knew that the Guevara campaign was in massive, massive trouble: when they bought ads on the outside of the Sphere. Now, this was a stupid, stupid idea. Why was it a stupid idea? I'll tell you why. Who goes to Vegas? Because the people that were seeing that message on the Sphere, they were not targeted. It was not a targeted message to the people who were still trying to decide who they were going to vote for. People are in Vegas to forget about the election. They're not there to make a decision about the election. People are flying in from all over the world to go to Vegas. They're not there because they're here for a political rally. This— the other thing is it's a massive, colossal waste of money. It's— I don't know how much it is to advertise on the outside of the Sphere, but it's not going to drive anybody. while they're in Vegas to say, you know what, I'm gonna change my vote. They made a classic mistake. They thought that if we outspent Trump, 'cause everybody's always touting, oh, we have way more money than Trump, we're gonna destroy Trump, we're gonna buy up all the airwaves, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn't matter. Trump's message was more on target with different demographic groups about what was important to them. And he spoke directly to that versus the Harris campaign. So let's go back to my original statement. Nothing can kill a bad company faster than a great advertising campaign. I believe that's what happened to the Harris campaign. I believe that they went out and they spent so much money that people started tuning 'em out and they didn't really resonate with what they're— it basically killed a bad campaign. It killed a bad campaign. Let's just be frank. They ran a bad campaign. Now they had a lot of other issues, right? They had, you know, short timeframe, all of this stuff like that again. But if I was, if I was selling soap and I was able to get away with selling $450 million and control the market versus spending $1 billion and losing, I'll take the $450 million any, every single time. Okay, so let's just talk about, let's just kind of go back through this real quickly. One, You don't need a ton of money in order for your message to come through. In fact, I would encourage you not to spend a ton of money. Go out and get what's called earned media. If you don't know, if you're going to sit there and say, I don't want to do podcasts or I don't want to be an influencer, you're totally missing the point. You need to contact our office, listen more and more to our podcast and what we talk about. Come to an event that we're going to be hosting, a one-day event, which are great opportunities for you to learn more about our system. There'll be a link here in the— in just a moment for you to be able to check that out. Okay, so look, get earned media. You don't have to spend a fortune. Second, make sure that you have a very clear message to a very specific market with a very specific quote unquote offer that gets them in the door. We talk about this in our one-day trainings. We're going to be hosting one here soon out on the West Coast. You can get the data on that. It's actually going to be in Phoenix on December 7th. It's a one-day event. You can learn all about this. It's your opportunity to connect with us and learn more and more about this and what we do. And that power of that message to that market with an offer will do everything. And then the third thing is make sure that you have media that people can get to know you, like you, and trust you. Use earned media. Take a video, make it a podcast, make it a short, put it into an article, do whatever you have to do, but get out there and get more earned media so that people will know, like, and trust you. All right, I hope you enjoyed this. Hope I didn't piss you off too much. But again, hey, we're Mavericks here at Mavericks Profit System, and we like to rattle cages sometimes. In fact, we do it all the time. My name's Matt Gillogly. I'm your host. Thanks for listening to the Practice Profit System, or if you're watching this on YouTube, please like and subscribe and forward this on. Same thing with the podcast. Check us out. Learn about our one-day event coming up in Phoenix. There'll be a link below in the show notes so that you can check it out. And if you want to come spend a day with us, it's limited to 12 people. 12 entities get to spend a day with me where we'll dive into your business, help lay out a plan. Okay. All right, everybody have a great day. Enjoy the ride. See you soon.