Why Your Political Campaign Domain Name(s) Really Matter
To paraphrase The Bard, “What’s in a name?” When it comes to acquiring domain names for political campaigns, it can mean a lot. Choosing the wrong name or failing to get the right name can cause problems for many candidates.
Political cybersquatting is pretty common, with speculators hoping to cash in buying domain names. Sometimes this can even trickle down to the local level, where someone buys the domain name of a potential political candidate. They hope to sell it back to the campaign for a profit.
Some political domain-related fiascoes include:
- Rand Paul paid over $100,000 for his domain name RandPaul.com just before he launched his bid for the presidency.
- Ted Cruz used tedcruz.org as his official presidential campaign website. Unfortunately, he did not own tedcruz.com. Those who bought that domain put up a very different message.
- When Carly Fiorina announced her presidential candidacy, it turns out that her campaign failed to buy CarlyFiorina.org. Now it’s owned by someone else and filled it with 30,000 sad faces to represent the people Fiorina laid off when she was CEO at Hewlett-Packard.
Unless your own campaign is high-profile or particularly contentious, it doesn’t make sense to register every available domain extension and variant. But if you can afford it and you think it may prevent a real problem, then go for it.
However, registering 3,643 website domains is probably overkill.
Whatever you do, don’t wait until the last minute to figure out your online strategy. Even if you wait to launch a website, it’s a good idea register your campaign domain name ahead of time.
A few years back, we saw a case where the signs and print items had been printed listing the domain name of a website that did not exist. A lot of money had been spent. Fortunately, the name was available and we were able to secure it without a problem. These days, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to rely on your second or third choice backup name.
Tips for choosing the best campaign website name:
- The .com extension is your best bet. If you can get your ‘firstnamelastname.com‘ domain, you’ve won the domain lottery!
- Avoid a year or position in the domain name if you plan to keep the domain throughout your political career.
- If you want the .org of a name, make sure you can also get the .com version.
- Check that a .org version of your website does not exist yet. If it does, it may show up in future searches for your .com site.
- Registering .org of a domain name is usually not necessary unless it is a high-profile race.
- If you have a commonly-mistyped name, it’s a good idea to purchase a variant domain – both for users and to keep a potential cyber-squatter from cashing on typos.
- If you have a nickname or an opposing candidate has a nickname they use about you, consider purchasing that as well. Do this more as a defensive measure.
- It never hurts to get domain name variants. You can always redirect additional names to your main website.
If you manage to get a good domain name that can be reused for future campaigns, consider keeping it registered. If you let the name lapse, someone else can pick it up and use it for an altogether different purpose.
If your domain has a been around for a few years and has a large number of backlinks, consider pointing the website name to another site you control. Otherwise, there’s a good chance your high-authority domain will end up being used for another site and flipped for a profit.
FREE DOWNLOAD: Political Domains and Hosting – What You Need To Know
Related: 5 Things To Know About Your Campaign’s Domain Name
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The Powerful Technique Candidates Should Borrow From Entrepreneurs
So, why are you running for local office?
It’s astonishing how many candidates don’t have a well thought out, succinct answer prepared for that question. Oh, they usually think they have an answer but when put to the test, they don’t. Instead, they’ll tell you about when or how they got interested in a particular issue or which event or candidate motivated them to get into the arena.
None of those things are inherently interesting to your listener (you’re not the celebrity host a reality TV show, are you?), and ultimately none of them provides the kind of answer that connects with most voters. (Even veteran candidates can fail this this test, sometimes spectacularly.)
Answering this question concisely and effectively is important for a few reasons. First, it’s something you’ll need to do over and over again during the course of a campaign.
- Whenever you address an audience.
- Every time you’re interviewed by a reporter.
- When you’re canvassing door to door.
- Every time you make a fundraising call.
Second, crafting a straightforward answer forces you to put your campaign in sharp focus. What are your priorities? (As the old saying goes, if you have ten priorities then you really have no priorities.)
Finally, a great answer earns you the right to tell the rest of your story. If you connect, your listener will stick around to hear what else you have to say. If you don’t, then it doesn’t matter how great the rest of your message is. Your listener will have tuned you out.
Clearly, it’s not something you can afford to ad-lib or leave to chance. You need an elevator speech.
If that’s not a familiar term, here’s the concept: Imagine you’re staying on the 10th floor of a hotel and you’re on your way to the lobby. Just before the doors close, in steps the biggest political fundraiser in your state. If she embraces your campaign, you could find yourself with all the resources you need to win. But you’ve never met her and she’s never heard of you. In this scenario, your job is to get her interested in your campaign before the elevator reaches the lobby, no more than 30 seconds.
A great elevator speech is a painstakingly crafted distillation of your entire campaign. It focuses on the single most important thing that your listener needs to know about why you’re running and what you want to accomplish. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of your communications toolkit, something you’ll use over and over again in all kinds of different situations.
It makes sense, then, to give your elevator speech the attention it deserves:
- Write it out.
- Memorize what you’ve written.
- Practice it out loud.
- If you can, get a skilled advisor to listen and critique.
- Notice what engages your listeners and modify your speech accordingly.
If you’re doing all the things you ought to be doing as a candidate (i.e. knocking on doors, talking to local groups, making fundraising calls), you’ll wind up using your elevator speech repeatedly. In fact, you’ll probably get sick of hearing yourself deliver it. When that time comes and you find yourself tempted to go “off script,” remember the words of Frank Luntz, probably the greatest political communications specialist of our age:
There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard, but you’ve just got to keep repeating.
If there’s a single indispensable tool for every political candidate—especially first time candidates—a solid elevator speech is that tool. It will make you a more confident, more effective candidate. And it will earn you the right to tell the rest of your story.
George Colombo is an author, entrepreneur, and activist. He provides consulting and content creation services for small businesses, nonprofits, and political candidates.
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!
What are the Elements of an Online Political Campaign?
Today, even the most local political campaigns are finding that an online presence is critical to election success. Traditionally strong candidates can be outclassed by opponents who simply run a better online campaign. Knowing the opportunities and taking advantage of them will improve your chance of success.
Here’s a quick overview of the basic elements of an online political campaign:
Your Online Reputation as a Candidate
When you start a local political campaign, keep in mind the information that voters will encounter about you. Your online reputation is what people are saying and seeing about you online. It’s the information that is found when anyone searches about you or your campaign.
As a candidate running for office, you will want influence over what people see, hear and read about you on the web. To do that, you need an online identity. For political purposes, that means creating a personal brand. That means getting yourself – your history and goals – out on the web. This is done by creating identities on social networks, creating a campaign website, active online engagement, and generating positive buzz.
The ultimate goal of building an online identity is search result page domination. This means that when someone searches your name, they will find positive information about you in the top search results.
Your Campaign Website
By starting a political campaign website early, you can raise campaign seed money that much faster. A website set up for donations makes it easier for donors to contribute. Someone is more likely to quickly click and donate than to write out a check, put it in an envelope, and mail it out.
[bctt tweet=”Starting a campaign website and social media presence early helps establish your online ability to raise critical seed money. http://ow.ly/VPlH30gBifO”]
Online political campaigning is a multi-faceted effort. Having a central location to promote the different elements of your campaign comes is important. A website with a good domain name is standard for just about any political candidate today.
Your Social Media Presence
Signing up for X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and every social network you can find is a recipe for disaster. Building a consistent presence on multiple social sites is hard work. You might not be able to keep up with all of them. It’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first – and sticking with them.
Building an online social network before you start your political campaign gives you a leg up when you announce your intention to run. The payoff is that your group of friends and fans will be the first to check out your campaign website, provide feedback on it, help promote it, and perhaps even help in your fundraising and volunteer efforts.
[bctt tweet=”Start your online network long b4 you launch your political campaign. http://ow.ly/VPlH30gBifO”]
Email – Still the ‘Killer App’
Despite the popularity of social media, email is still the ‘killer app’ of online campaigning. A multifaceted online push is the most effective way to build support. By starting early, you can accumulate more e-mail addresses from supporters. Using email to keep in regular contact helps get your word out and keeps supporters informed.
If you plan to use email extensively, use an email marketing service. Your ISP will not allow you to send mass emails from personal accounts. Email services have arrangements with ISP that allow for better delivery rates. They also have tools that allow people to automatically add and remove themselves from your email list. By using more advanced techniques such as split-testing, you can target your messages better and achieve a better response rate.
Online Advertising
Your campaign website, social media and email campaigns are all promotional methods, but paid social media exposure (like Facebook ads), pay-per-click, banner advertising on popular local sites, text messaging and targeted online ads help get the word out. Be sure to budget for online advertising expenses from the start – and save a portion of the budget for your GOTV strategy.
[bctt tweet=”Budget for online advertising expenses in your political campaign, particularly for major announcements and #GOTV.”]
Kind of Online Advertising (But Not Exactly)
This includes SMS/texting campaigns. Text messaging has a high delivery rate and is fairly simple to set up. Once you create an account with a short message service (SMS), you will be able to pick a Keyword for your campaign. People then opt-in by texting that Keyword to a particular number. (Ex: Text SMITH4GOV to 555432) Text alerts can then be sent to all subscribers on the list. You can begin a mobile texting push with a small budget.
Of course, you will want to tie all of these elements into your online fundraising, support building, and GOTV efforts.
Making a successful run for office isn’t easy. It takes a multifaceted effort. With the majority of voting adults online in one way or another, even local politicians should take the time and resources to promote themselves online.
After all, only your election victory hangs in the balance!
Our candidate web page design services makes building your online presence as quick, affordable, and pain-free as possible.
Tracking Your Political Advertising Campaigns
How do you know that the money you are spending with your online political advertising is worth the investment?
Tracking your marketing campaigns is crucial to understanding where your website traffic comes from and what elements of your political marketing are working best. Simply sending traffic to a landing page on your campaign website without knowing how well that traffic converts is a waste of time and money.
Use tracking links with your political advertising
Tracking URLs are essential if you are advertising via email, Pay Per Click advertising, ads on other websites or via retargeting campaigns. By properly creating tracking URLS from your different traffic sources, you’ll be able to report on multiple elements of your advertising campaign, right down to a granular level.
With the proper tracking urls, marketers and campaign can know which of their advertisements are working to bring in more visitors. By knowing which of their ads are working best, they can improve their strategies and make necessary changes to maximize return on investment (ROI).
All this means is that you append your regular advertising link with some additional items.
Here is a sample tracking link that works with Google Analytics:
https://www.yourcampaignwebsite.com/?utm_source=fundraising&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=summer-drive&utm_content=Fundraiser-Form1
- Source – Used to differentiate the type of medium. This is the most ‘broad’ element of your tracking. It may be fundraising, donation solicitations and so on.
- Medium – This is the medium used to send your campaign. Include “email” for an email campaign, “cpc” for ads, “social” for a social network or “landing-page” if you’re tracking button clicks from a landing page.
- Campaign -The name of your overarching campaign – e.g. spring-2016-fundraiser or summer-2016-advertising. Be sure to follow a consistent campaign naming structure.
- Content – This is essentially a bonus field and is the most granular. It can be used to track many differentiating factors for your campaign. For example, you can use this field to track different versions of your email or landing page – e.g. “email-version2” or “fundraiser-July15”.
Google even provides a simple tool for creating tracking links. You can find it here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
You can use tracking links on a variety of online marketing services, including:
From there, you can track how well your traffic performs. You can determine what each advertising channel provides in:
- Visits
- Donations
- Volunteer signups
- Conversions for polls, surveys, etc.
Why your advertising numbers may differ
You may find that the numbers provided from your advertising service provider or vendor differ from what you are tracking from your own website analytics. The answer is simple. The vendor tracks clicks directly from their end. However, when the visitor arrives at your campaign website, they may not appear in the analytics due to ad blockers. They prevent the tracking code from loading, so the visitor is rendered ‘invisible’. It doesn’t mean the visitor didn’t see the page or interact with the site or even sign up for something, it just means their visit (and possible conversion) might not be properly track
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5 Assumptions That Will Tank Your Campaign Website
Here are common assumptions that can cause problems for political campaigns. These issues can apply to those who already have campaign websites or are looking to start one.
Assumption 1: You don’t need a campaign website.
More and more, with the rise of social media, the role of the campaign website has shifted from being the bulk of a candidate’s online presence to more of a hub. But the website is still critical, both from an online presence, and as a brand to point to with your offline advertising. While the campaign website contains the core message and branding, people follow candidates and campaigns through a variety of methods – from blog feeds to Facebook and Twitter updates.
Online politics has expanded greatly over the last decade. The web is where voters look for candidate information. In short, voters expect candidates to have a website. If you don’t have your own voice online, then someone else is doing the talking about you.
Assumption 2: Your website will be the first search result when someone types your name.
Go ahead, ‘google’ yourself. Type in your name and search for your name. What shows up? Maybe you share a name with someone else, and links about that person are showing up. Maybe it’s an unflattering newspaper article or blog post?
Do you want to have a say in what shows up on those results? Well, you can.
One reason why we recommend using a candidate’s name as a domain name is that it goes a long way in making that website relevant for the candidate’s name searches. Even if there isn’t much content on the site, the fact of having a domain name that includes the candidate’s name will help it to appear for searches of that name.
You’ll often see a candidate’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages in the search results. These pages tend to appear nowadays because those domains are considered strong and authoritative to the search engines.
If you want to help ‘push’ certain web pages or sites up the search results, you may need to give a little ‘link love’; that is, point links to those pages. For example, to build links to your campaign website, you’ll want to link to the site from your Facebook and Twitter profiles, from supporter’s websites, and from other political sites. You’ll also want to link out to your social media pages from your website, as well.
Assumption 3: People already know about you.
Believe me, they don’t. How many people do you know that can name their congressperson or state representative? One thing we suggest to candidates is that they include enough information about themselves and their race. The ‘who, what and where’ must be immediately picked up by your site visitors. We’re always amazed when we see local campaigns sites that don’t expressly state what they are running for, and where.
“Vote Smith for Mayor.”
Smith who? Mayor of where? Vote when? People should be able to know within a second or two if your campaign matters to them. If they can’t figure it out right away, they won’t stick around to guess.
For all the talk about interactivity and social media, your campaign website is the perfect place to make that initial introduction. The reality is that many voters simply don’t know you – yet.
Assumption 4: Visitors already support you.
Depending on the race, there are likely a block of independent or undecided voters who can swing an election either way. While ‘red meat’ partisan attacks may play well to a base, it will likely turn off some voters. Just because Washington, DC is hyper-partisan doesn’t mean that the average voter is looking for that in their local elections. In fact, most independent voters are turned off by excessive partisanship.
Assumption 5: Your website will become your campaign’s ATM.
If you set up a campaign website for the sole purpose of raising campaign contributions, there’s a good chance you will disappointed.
A website CAN produce significant revenue, but only if your campaign is capable of attracting donors in the first place. The campaign website should inform and persuade first. Allow people to follow your campaign through email and social media. Promote your site offline as a way to contribute toward your campaign. Build trust and rapport, which is the key to opening donor’s wallets.
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