Aontú, Ireland’s fastest-growing pro-life Irish political party, hired Birch Lea Strategies in May 2024 to run its online paid media campaign for the party’s local election contests in June.
Overview
By May 2024, Aontú was the only political party without a paid media strategy for the June local elections. The party hired Birch Lea Strategies to run its paid media campaign on Meta with a budget less than half of any other party in the State. The party wanted to double the number of Councillors in the State (from three to six).
Issues
When Birch Lea Strategies joined the campaign, there were a number of issues to resolve:
- Only five weeks (32 days) remained until polls opened across the country
- As a relatively new party (founded in 2019), it had only one T.D. (lower house representative) and three Councillors – the party remained unknown by a large portion of the electorate
- The previous year, the party lost all its seats in the Northern Irish Local Election
- Aontú’s paid media budget was a fraction of any of its competitors
- Aontú has no dedicated marketing team, and had neither the means nor the resources to develop high-quality content for the campaign
Solutions
Upon quickly auditing the paid media strategy for other national parties, we discovered a key error. Other parties were spending the majority of their budgets on individual local areas. As a small, sparsely populated country, this strategy was guaranteed to result in underperforming ads and a lot of wasted money. We implemented a national advertising strategy to target only high-propensity voters across the country. We put additional emphasis on certain regions and occupations where the party would have an electoral advantage.
Most of our ads used video content. These highlighted the party leader’s work in parliament, in the media, and in local areas on key aspects of the party’s ‘bread-and-butter issues’ platform. To make the content suitable for Meta’s dimension requirements, we made edits to the source content.
We ran campaigns optimized for high on-platform interaction. We targeted the segment of the audience most likely to interact with content online. This created an upward spiral of interactions and reach, eventually reaching hundreds of thousands of voters well over one million times.
Results
Aontú won 8 Council seats in the election, nearly tripling its previous number. The party won four of these seats on the final count, pointing to the critical effect that online advertising likely had on voters.
Despite having the smallest budget of any party in the State, Aontú’s online paid media resulted in the lowest cost per impression, according to data available from the Meta Ads Library.
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