Essential Digital Marketing Practices for Your Political Website On or Before Elections

How do you attract voters to your campaign, or how do you get your politician elected? You'll need more than good speeches and colourful campaign posters! Luckily, political digital marketing has evolved significantly over the past few years, making it much easier to get your message out there and raise awareness of your cause. Here are nine essential digital marketing practices that can help you with your political campaigns and elections.

Improve Social Media

Social media has gained significant momentum in recent years, especially as a tool for political campaigns. Politicians' most popular social networks are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. You need to be present on these platforms if you're running a political campaign, but getting followers is only half of it. It would help if you also used these sites strategically to build momentum with voters. So, you should focus on creating and managing fan pages, company pages and profile pages where you can share exciting material consistently. Create a social media calendar to track results and connect with your followers personally for an added touch.

Watch your step with SEO

Search engine optimisation can be very complex, especially if you're trying to use SEO for your political campaigns. So keep it simple, at least at first. Optimise for Google, and worry about Bing, Yahoo! or any other search engine later. This will help ensure that people will find your website—and increase brand recognition—when they search for information on your campaign. Analyse keywords and track your on-page optimisations. Be careful with your content. Track all the results you put into your SEO and identify successful methods which you can repeat.

Focus on Local SEO

Make the most of the virtual world with local SEO, which can help websites rank higher for geo-based keywords. With the use of map data, local SEO can help you with your SERPs with geo-based searches. Local SEO can help you in getting citations through relevant websites and get reviewed by locals on websites like Yelp.

Personalise your content

Google cares about high-quality content. The first step in creating any kind of digital marketing campaign is understanding who your audience is, what they want, where they look, and how you can provide that information in a way that adds value to their lives. Understanding your audience allows you to create valuable content that resonates with them: like political SEO guides tailored for each voter group depending on where they live or vote.

Go global on SEO and social media strategy

You can't just set up a campaign website for your local candidate and call it a day. To be truly effective, you need to expand your strategy across political domains in other parts of your country, if not beyond. So make sure you know how SEO applies across borders, as well as on social media because odds are your opponent does. So, optimise your content and marketing strategies to reach a global audience. Connect with websites around the world and appeal to users around the globe.

Analyse your competition and gain an edge

When you're starting out, it's important to get an edge on your competition by analysing how they do things online. You should already have a plan in place, but now it's time to kick-start your SEO strategy . First of all, run a political SEO audit so that you know what's out there right now; then make sure that your website is optimised for search engines—but make sure it doesn't look like everyone else's. Look at places where your competition is failing and capitalise on it by devising strategies quickly. You have to show your audience that you're better than your competition.

Empathise with your users

When you empathise with your users, you consider what they care about think about their goals, motivations, intentions and feelings. This helps ensure that you meet their needs in a way that resonates with them. In digital marketing terms, this means creating content that resonates with people and appeals to their reasons for visiting your site or viewing your content. It also means catering for what they want (and don't want). Doing so can help shape your digital marketing strategy from conception through implementation (and beyond).

Care about your people

We often think about SEO as a website issue, but it's not. Google is an information retrieval system, and people are more concerned with getting answers than shopping. This means you need to care about your people in every aspect of your digital presence: how they get there, what they do when they arrive, how you treat them when you meet, etc. In other words, SEO for political campaigns is really just SEO for all your digital efforts. Good luck!

Be a leader

Every leader is, at their core, a salesperson. That's right! No matter what your title is (other than CEO), if you want people to pay attention, if you want people to listen and if you want people to follow through on your ideas, there are two things you need: results (and an ability to explain those results) and credibility. Start with credibility; it'll help get your foot in the door. Focus on posting content that's researched well and cites excellent references. You should be producing high-value content and speaking from a position of authority on social networking sites.

The Bottom Line

You might be wondering if you need SEO for political campaigns. If you want to succeed in your next election, yes, you do. A thorough understanding of digital marketing will go a long way when attempting to successfully win office.