Don’t Just Study, Practice

In my work on marketing operations for the Institute for Humane Studies, I am working with our fundraising team on an online advertising campaign. We have posted ads on websites where potential IHS donors might visit. When people click on our ads, they are taken to landing pages on IHS’ Learn Liberty website.

Landing pages are web pages designed to drive visitors to action. In this case, we want folks to sign up for email updates from Learn Liberty and make a donation to the project.

We are disappointed in the results so far, so we got on the phone with an agency helping us with the project. It turns out a decent number of people are clicking on our ads and checking out our landing pages, but they are not signing up for emails or making donations.

Why?

Our representatives at the agency went through our landing pages with us and pointed out a few changes we could make to possibly improve performance. These were pretty simple changes such as moving the email signup form towards the top and putting our calls to action in an eye-catching gold font.

I should have known better. In fact, I did know better.

As part of getting up to speed for this job I have been researching and studying digital marketing, including building landing pages. Having your calls to action easy to find and “above the fold” is basic advice I already learned.

But I hadn’t put it into practice. I hadn’t built a landing page for a real fundraising project before.

As I continue to do this work and build my skills, I expect I’ll make mistakes in building landing pages and other areas. At some point, the basics of building effective landing pages might become automatic so I can focus on testing more elements for best performance.

Studying will help you try but mastery will only come from practice.

Politics Is Rarely About Policy

Theresa May gambled and lost. When Brexit was unexpectedly passed by voters, May saw a political opportunity and rode to power as Prime Minister by shifting from opposition to support of Brexit. It appeared as though she would benefit from this populist wave in the UK for years to come.

This was just the first of some surprise populist electoral victories in recent years. We of course saw Donald Trump elected President. In France, voters discarded the major right-wing and major left-wing parties forcing a general election between center-left Macron and the populist ethno-nationalist right candidate Le Pen. I even think the surprising rise of Socialist Corbyn taking away May’s majority in the UK fits the trend.

What is the trend that explains the rise of both right-wing Donald Trump and left-wing Jeremy Corbyn? I think it’s the middle finger. Seriously! People are angry. Trust in government is low. What we are seeing is an era in which voters are more willing than ever to reject whoever is currently in office. Step into the ballot box, raise your middle finger, rinse and repeat. That’s how you end up with Theresa May possibly being the shortest-serving Prime Minister in history (we shall see).

I constantly encounter the assumption that populism is synonymous with a set of policy changes, particularly opposition to free trade or immigration along with support for nationalism. This exaggerates the importance of policy within politics. Voters are rationally ignorant. Political stances are often attempts to signal and boost one’s status. Because most people have so little ability to actually change the outcome, politics is closer to a professional sports game than it is to an actual conversation on governance.

This populist wave isn’t about bringing coal jobs back to West Virginia or a “hard Brexit” over a “soft Brexit.” It’s about using one’s vote to say “I’m angry” (to the small degree that voting allows you to make a statement). If you are surprised that Donald Trump’s base continues to support him even though he hasn’t delivered on his campaign promises like a border wall, repealing Obamacare, and tax reform, look elsewhere. He has delivered, just outside of policy. He makes left-wingers mad and he has damaged the media’s reputation. These are the non-policy desires of angry voters.

This trend is good news and bad news for libertarians. We are living in an era of Big Government (in the US I’d argue since FDR) and if voters want a change, libertarianism could be that change. But keep in mind my main point here, politics is rarely about policy. A libertarian campaign likely won’t be about libertarian policy, which is uncomfortable for most libertarians. On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that low trust in the government is dangerously harmful for society. The erosion of institutional trust can lead to authoritarian populism.

As a footnote, I have seen many pundits take away from May’s recent failure that British voters support a soft Brexit over a hard Brexit. Maybe they do, maybe the don’t. Regardless, I don’t think a policy distinction should be your first assumption about the motivating factor. Look elsewhere.

What I’m Working On

Three months ago I started a new job at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). My role is focused on digital marketing, in particular marketing automation and marketing analytics. So far I have found the work challenging, interesting, and rewarding.

Marketing automation is the use of software to “automatically” handle marketing tasks. For example, if a potential customer visits your webpage for a product but doesn’t purchase it, you can automatically send them an email with more information (assuming they have granted us permission to email them, of course!) Done properly, you can connect all areas of digital marketing: email, social media, websites, etc. I came in with the preparation for our marketing automation platform finished and was responsible for launching it with training and support. For the most part, this has gone smoothly and it is now used daily to great success. There are more powerful features we haven’t scratched the surface of yet.

Marketing analytics is simply the collection and analysis of marketing data. Working at a non-profit, sales can be a little tricky to define. While a sale is straightforward for our fundraising team, for our programs team it is a more complex question. At IHS, “sales” are more or less participations in our programs, such as PhD scholarships and research seminars. On this front, I have made progress in our ability to collect marketing data in an accessible manner. The next step is to analyze this data and use insights to improve our work.

At IHS we engage with students and professors around the country to encourage the study and advancement of freedom. If you look at higher education today, there is a dire need for the spread of classical liberal ideas throughout academia. I’m proud to be playing a part in furthering this mission while gaining valuable experience in marketing techniques along the way.