When you begin your campaign for local office, you need to consider how you will market yourself to your potential constituents and where the public can go to learn more about your political platform. Using digital tools helps the public find you and educate themselves on your platform as well as support you. If you are running for local office, you need to be using these five digital tools to promote your campaign.
#1 — Start With a Political Campaign Website (They Help Fund Themselves!)
We live in a digital age where everyone can create a website and as a result, everyone has a website. If your political campaign doesn’t have a website, you come across as unprofessional to the public. They cannot trust you and they cannot tell whether or not you take your campaign seriously. At Lochte Technology, we help our political clients create local political campaign websites that strengthen credibility, imbue professionalism, and detail policy platforms.
Start a political campaign website as soon as you know that you will be running for local office. It takes approximately three to six months for Google to fully integrate sites into their search engine feature so setting your website up earlier will benefit your campaign. You will have a more established site and that in turn will rank higher on Google as well as other search engines so that constituents can easily find you. Your political website can even help fund itself when you set up online contributions.
#2 — Online Contribution Set-Up
When you create an online contribution set-up, you give your supporters an opportunity to financially support you and your campaign. Many of your individual supporters may not have the time to mail in support forms with checks or visit your campaign offices if you have them to pay it forward. However, many people can easily click on a link and make a one-time or recurring campaign support donation. Online contributions remove the hassle of supporting a candidate and you will find that you are able to gather more donations by offering this online financial support option.
PayPal is the cheapest option but both Stripe and ActBlue provide additional funding options. The right choice for you depends on the way you are currently set-up for campaign contributions as well as your long-term campaign plans. We have experience using all three popular online contribution platforms and can help you decide on the best choice for your official campaign website once we know more about your specific campaign goals.
#3 — MailChimp Helps You Grow and Track Your Email List
Email lists are powerful digital tools that every local political campaign should use and MailChimp is our favorite tool to organize your email list. Asking voters to sign up for your email list if they want campaign updates, gives you an easy way to communicate with your supporters. If your supporters want to know more about where you will be campaigning, fundraising, your potential policy updates, and policy platform, they can easily stay informed. You’ll find that MailChimp allows you to grow your email list as well as track how often your supporters open your emails.
#4 — Facebook (Ads)
Facebook ads are one of the best ways to digitally market your campaign to all of your constituents. While Facebook may not be the most popular platform amongst young people, it is still the most popular amongst all age segments. If you want to show voters who you are, then you can use Facebook ads to appear on their timeline and in their Facebook stories. Interested Facebook users can click on your ad to end up on your site and learn more about you. Facebook ads are also relatively inexpensive and allow you to set targeted ad segments including customizing age and geographical location as well as interests.
#5 — Find Digital Campaign Supporters and Use Their Endorsement
Do you want to build prominent online digital campaign supporters? Using your website to find digital campaign supporters can help you bridge communities and segments of the population that you might otherwise miss. You can gain new supporters and find prominent supporters. The local car dealership owner? The local restaurant owner? These people may support you online and give you the opportunity to take their support and move it to an endorsement. It is much easier to find endorsements when you can simply look at a supporter list of online voters who have signed up for your email list or directly donated to your campaign. Reach out to the most prominent local voices and ask for an endorsement. Then you can share these endorsements digitally as well and via your email list.
Local Vote is committed to providing superior website design services tailored to local political campaigns. We want to see great people in office and believe strongly in supporting politicians running for local offices. If you need help with your website and setting up these digital campaign tools, contact us for more information. Let’s work together.
