How To Start Your Digital Political Campaign Early for Success

With 2022 upon us, it’s time to start your digital campaign for the upcoming primary elections and even the 2024 elections! Starting early sets you up for success, but so does your strategy. Here are three ways to enhance your political campaign marketing strategies in the social media and digital sphere.

Starting From Zero

You likely already have your own personal social media accounts on Facebook, IG, and Twitter. While those followers are great to have, we recommend separating most of your personal life from your political campaign.

In most cases, having a political persona that’s likeable and authentic actively helps your campaign. Developing that persona requires a level of intimacy with people, but you don’t have to be super personal with your supporters or potential voters. Therefore, separating your personal and political accounts allows you to keep those two worlds primarily separate.

So when you’re making those social media accounts for your digital campaign, be smart with your usernames. Suppose your persona and your political marketing materials (yard signs, banners, T-shirts, etc.) all have your last name by itself rather than your full name. In that case, your social media usernames should be something like “lastname2023” or whichever year you’re running in.

Your username could even be your campaign slogan if it’s short enough. Whatever you choose, try to make all your usernames the same, with all of them being as short and memorable as possible. This will make it easier for voters to find your accounts, and it adds to your brand image and reputation as a politician.

This advice goes for your website as well. Invest in your domain name early so that your website is easy to remember too and solely has your name or campaign slogan.

Don’t Spam, But Keep Up

Once you’ve set up your accounts and website, it’s time to start posting! Keeping up with current events and giving your political opinions through quality content is important, but don’t spam your followers. Remember, quality over quantity.

Be strategic about the issues you choose to post about. If you’re running for a local position, your posts should be relevant to the local issues occurring in your area.

If you’re running for a state position, stick with mostly state issues but tie in local stories and solidify yourself as a member of the local community even if you would like to represent the entire state. State politicians can seem distant to the local community if they are too focused on state or national issues and not on local current events.

Don’t be afraid to take a stand on a certain issue and plant yourself in that position, but think hard before taking that stance. Once you take a certain side, it’s hard to retract statements and change your opinion, especially if your competitor can use your past statements against you. Decide what your political positions are, and then stick with them long-term. Constantly going back and forth or retracting multiple stances will make you seem wishy-washy and unreliable as a candidate.

Don’t Lose Momentum

Political campaigns require you to be in it for the long haul, so the chances are that your digital presence will plateau or that you’ll reach a point where you’re not sure what to talk about or where to go in your campaign. This is where planning comes into play.

Our political campaign strategy template recommends content planning six months to a year in advance. This allows you to prepare for content surrounding holidays, as a common problem for social media management is forgetting an upcoming holiday, forcing you to rush a social media graphic or other content pieces of you commemorating that holiday.

Content planning allows you to formulate a scheduling plan in advance to make sure you’re uploading content regularly while giving you some room to talk about breaking news and other current events related to your political campaign. If it’s a slow news week and there’s not much to post about, this plan will be able to give you some guidance and make sure your digital campaign doesn’t lose momentum.

Political Campaign Strategy Template | Political Campaign Marketing Strategies

Our team at Reach Voters can put these strategies into action for you and make sure your digital campaign sets you up for success. Give us a call today!