Political campaigns have a deadline most businesses never face. Election Day doesn’t move. That pressure changes everything about how a digital marketing campaign has to work, from the first ad impression to the final Get Out The Vote (GOTV) push.
Reach Voters, a full-service political digital marketing agency based in Miami, has spent over 15 years helping candidates compete and win across Florida’s districts. Their work spans social media, paid placement, email marketing, web development, SEO, and digital fundraising, all coordinated around a single campaign timeline.
The Distinct Nature of Political Digital Campaigns
The Distinct Nature of Political Digital CampaignsConsumer products can be redesigned; political candidates cannot. You can pull a failing digital advertising campaign for a brand, refine the offering, and launch it again. But in politics, once the election is over, that moment is gone forever. Creating a digital marketing strategy for a candidate carries this immense pressure: get it right, or face the consequences for four years.
The basics are the same as in any other marketing campaign: target the right people. Engage them with the right message. Measure success. The distinction is that a politician is not a consumer product. A politician cannot be easily swapped out, nor does that product usually come with a money-back guarantee. Instead, a political campaign asks much more of the voter than “buy now.” These campaigns ask donors to donate, ask volunteers to get involved, and ask voters to take time to go vote. These calls to action are harder to achieve than buying a product. Political candidates, therefore, need a strategy that is more tightly focused, more targeted, and more personally tailored than is typical in other industries.
A Campaign’s Digital Marketing Strategy for Fundraising
If you are doing fundraising, email campaigns can still have a powerful impact. Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of all digital channels, and political campaigns are no different. To get the most value out of your email marketing efforts, you will need:
- Segmented lists that take donor behavior into account
- Landing pages that optimize the donation experience
- Testing of email subject lines for engagement before sending
When you send a direct fundraising email, you are looking at two different metrics to see how your campaign is doing. First, you can look at how your email recipients responded and clicked through to your campaign landing page. Then, you can see how effective the donation page was by looking at the number of people who clicked through from that initial email and actually donated money to the campaign.
This is something you can do in real-time as your email campaigns go out to your email lists. That means that instead of waiting until the end to see how your campaigns performed, you can make changes on the fly and potentially make a huge impact on your fundraising.
Persuasion Messaging and the Voter Decision Timeline
Few voters are going to wake up on Election Day ready to vote, only to go to the ballot box and decide at that moment who they will actually vote for. Instead, voters are exposed to campaign ads and develop an impression over time as they hear about the candidates. They see some contrasting information about the candidates at a certain point. Finally, they settle on one candidate to vote for.
The goal should be to deliver a consistent message across every point along that spectrum so that the voter can move through your messaging and arrive at a decision that feels natural based on the messaging they have received.
Paid media on Google, Facebook, Instagram, streaming TV, etc., builds name recognition with the public, especially at the start of the campaign. Social media channels keep the candidate in front of the voters in between those larger campaign events. Search engine optimization will make sure that when voters go looking for the candidate, or an issue, the political candidate comes up first on the search engine results, rather than their competitor, or nothing at all.
All of this is predicated on delivering a consistent message to voters. Once your messaging or the visual branding shifts across platforms, you are losing out on persuadable voters. You might as well burn some of that ad money in the process.
GOTV and the Importance of Real-Time Campaign Optimization
Get-out-the-vote is where campaigns can see the payoff (or failure) of their digital strategies. SMS campaigns are able to target voters on the device they always have with them. Targeted and timely email campaigns will allow you to reach out to voters just in time before Election Day and shake those voters out of their complacency before it’s too late to vote.
The key to winning the GOTV phase of the campaign is keeping a close eye on your results as the campaign moves on. Effective digital campaigns that do well in the final stretch are not necessarily the ones that spent the most on GOTV; they just happened to pay closer attention to the analytics.
Reach Voters keeps a close watch on GOTV efforts and shifts resources toward what is performing best, improving click-through rates and conversion at every stage.
What the Ideal Digital Marketing Campaign Landing Page Looks Like
What the Ideal Digital Marketing Campaign Landing Page Looks LikeFor all the ads and emails your campaign will send out, your audience is going to need somewhere to go after clicking on one of those links. If that page takes too long to load or if that page doesn’t deliver the message promised in the ad, your conversion rate will plummet. You can have the perfect email or ad, but it all comes down to whether that campaign landing page has what the voters will need. A landing page has to load fast on mobile, be safe (and not look unsafe), and deliver on the promise of the ad with a clear call to action at hand. Those things aren’t just best practices; they are the essentials.
But campaigns really need to dig deeper into the best practices, specifically for their own landing pages. When the campaign copy on the landing pages of each ad closely matches what was promised in that ad, conversion rates are noticeably higher for that ad. You can’t really just pick one campaign message and use it for everything; message consistency, paired with personalization, is a revenue-driven decision that lifts both brand awareness and ROI.
Targeting Districts Across a Local Digital Campaign
You can’t just target every voter in South Florida for your campaign. The region is too vast. Instead, you need to break the region down into smaller, localized areas. Each district has different voters. Some have different demographics. Some are more English-speaking. Some are less so. You will find that what works for one district in South Florida may not travel ten miles down the road.
Reach Voters approaches political campaigns in this manner. Campaign strategies begin with localized research to understand where the persuadable voters are and how we can reach them. We then deploy paid media across digital marketing channels, including LinkedIn, email campaigns, SEO efforts, SMS campaigns, and other local digital marketing activities to make sure we get to the voters we are looking for.
Election Day doesn’t wait. Neither should your strategy.
