4 Pillars For A Solid Political Digital Strategy

As online political campaigning has grown in recent election cycles, it has also become more complex. If you take your cues from recent presidential campaigns, you’ll think that you will need a deep and extensive online operation.

Truth is, many local campaigns are not prepared to manage a large online presence.

First-time candidates often have little experience with online marketing. Small political campaigns have limited time, resources – and often little experience to run an offline ground game. That’s why it’s important to have a clear, focused plan for a digital strategy.

There are four major pillars to creating an effective political campaign digital strategy. Each element is important, but when combined they are even more effective in building online support.

Social media strategies

You are going to want to start building your online presence early, long before you start your candidacy. If you’ve never spent much time online, it’s a good idea to start reaching out with social networking. Facebook and Twitter are a good start. Create personal profiles, reach out to friends and start interacting a bit.

Having an online network of supporters in place gives you a leg up when you announce your intention to run for office.

When coming up with a digital strategy for your political campaign, you’ll find a large number of social media platforms to choose from. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to be everywhere – so don’t. Unless you have the staff and resources, it’s better to keep your online presence focused. Local campaigns should stick with established social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

• Social media is instrumental to engage voters on a personal level. It can help you promote events and to drive traffic to your campaign website. Social media also allows politicians to circumvent traditional paid advertising or earned media.
• Don’t wait to start learning. Open your own personal social media accounts. Learn how to join groups, find friends and interact on the platforms. That will make it easier for when you use them for your political campaign.
• You will need to pay for the privilege to reach your followers. Facebook, for example, will only allow a tiny percentage of followers to see your posts. You can get around this, of course, by paying to promote your posts.

If you decide to use social media in your campaign, you must remain active. That means making regular posts and active outreach to others. Journalists often follow candidate’s social media accounts. Creating accounts and abandoning them is worse then having never created them at all.

Email communication

Email is one of the most powerful tools a local campaign can use. It can help your campaign keep in touch with supporters throughout the campaign. Email can affect both your online and offline success. A good use of email can help rally volunteers, improve donations and enhance your GOTV efforts.

Campaign is email is different than personal email in several ways. First, it is impossible to manage a campaign email list through a personal email account. Maintaining subscribers and segmenting large email lists requires automation.

Email marketing vendors offer advanced tools and functionality, including:

• Mail merge: You can insert the member’s name, email address, or other information into the text of the message.
• Automatic subscribe and unsubscribe of email addresses.
• Automatic error processing: Bad email addresses are flagged and removed from the list.
• Trackable URLs: You can track how many people click on the links in your emails. This feature can be useful in determining the effectiveness of your messages.

There are many email vendors that can serve your needs. Some services, like Mailchimp and Aweber, are free for smaller lists. This can be a great option for local campaign.

Expect to incur some costs, though, as your subscriber numbers grow.

Political online advertising and digital marketing

If you want online exposure, you will need to pay for it. Dedicate a percentage of your promotional budget for online advertising.

The three most common forms of online advertising for local campaigns include:

• Social media adverting: Compared to television, advertising on social media platforms is inexpensive. It also allows you to target segments of people more directly.
• Pay Per Click advertising: PPC through Google is one of the easiest ways to target users and deliver traffic via search engines. You pay each time someone clicks an ad that appears for particular searches. Target your location, name and issues.
• Retargeting: Keep your campaign brand front and center. Show display advertisements to people who visit your campaign website.
• IP Target Marketing: Reach specific households by physical address. Home addresses are converted to IP addresses so you can display ads across all devices in that location. The ads appear through popular ad networks and show on millions of popular websites.
• Other online marketing includes direct ad buys on local websites, such as newspapers.

For campaigns with limited budgets, make sure that you properly budget for digital. While online advertising can range from the inexpensive to the ridiculous, you’ll want to know early on how much you can dedicate to digital marketing. Don’t forget to budget for a large push near Election Day.

Build a campaign website

The forth pillar acts as the ‘hub’ of your online campaign. You will need to build a campaign website.

First, these days voters expect political campaigns to have a website.

When voters search for you online, you’ll want your site to rank at or near the top of the search results. Doing this requires good site content and links.

And a great place to get those links is from your social media accounts. We’ve found over the years that sites with social media accounts tend to start ranking for candidate names and races faster and easier than sites without these links.

Limiting your exposure to social media limits your ability to reach all voters. Not everyone uses or follows social media.

A website provides informational platform and a place to reference in your advertising. The domain name that you choose acts as your ‘brand’ name. Your website should be linked to from your social media accounts and on your offline print material.

When people search for you, you want your website to appear in the top search results. It may well be the first place that people read about you online. On your website, you can present your message without filters or distractions.

Post position papers, press releases and extra information. You can even add an online press kit for journalists to access.

Through your campaign website you can grow email subscribers, recruit volunteers and raise donations.

Don’t Wait!

The Internet is not a substitute for ‘traditional’ campaigning. Use online efforts to promote offline events. You can also encourage online participation in many ways. For example, you can post ‘live’ during your campaign events. Attendees can be asked for their email addresses when they arrive. Encourage them to follow the campaign through social media for future updates.

Online Candidate can help you build the pillars of your online campaign. We provide affordable political website design and marketing services. Contact us today!