Political Campaign Strategies That Stink
It’s something most voters claim to hate, but negative campaigning and mudslinging seems to rule American politics – from national campaigns right down to local elections. Unfortunately, these negative political campaign strategies and dirty tricks tend to work. If they didn’t, politicians wouldn’t use them.
Lies and Misrepresentations
It seems a lot of campaigns spend more time digging up dirt on political opponents than actually addressing the issues. All too often, election campaigns break down to a (s)he said/(s)he said over trivial matters.
Scandal Mongering by Machine
Robo-calling, or automated pre-recorded calls that dial potential voters, has a mixed reputation. Some studies show that they have no effect on an election outcome, while some political consultants believe they work. Robo-calls are often used to deliver last-minute attacks – legitimate or not. Our advice is to keep aware of what your opponent is doing right up and including the day of the election.
Counting on Ignorance
Some years ago, we were involved in a grassroots campaign to prevent an inappropriate commercial project from being constructed. Our state representative did not take a side at the time. Her opponent, however, helped us greatly by providing advice and helping to bring attention to the issue.
However, right before the election, the incumbent sent our area a targeted mailing stating that she had helped our community by ‘joining the fight against inappropriate development’. This, of course, was after the issue had been long resolved without her help. Needless to say, her blatant dishonesty did not earn our vote.
Rising Above it All
How do you fight the negative? It’s tough, but here are some tips that can help.
1) Don’t overreact. Keep cool and don’t say or write anything while you are angry.
2) Take the high moral ground. Let your surrogates take down your opponent.
3) Focus your messaging to special groups. For example, if your opponent is trying to scare seniors about your proposals, send them a direct mailing addressing the situation.
4) Address EVERYTHING through your campaign website. Cover every negative article, ad and rumor through your website. Let nothing go unaddressed. Updates should be announced via email, RSS feeds, social media and any other means you use to connect to voters. This strategy will also help with the local media. If they know that your website provides rapid-response to the issues of the day, reporters will keep an eye on the site – and it may even help influence your campaign coverage.
In the end, the political campaign strategy that works best is to simply target your resources at getting more votes than your opponents. You’re not looking for gossips and political bystanders – you’re looking to turn out real voters on Election Day.
In the end, it’s the only way you can win!
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Political Campaign Link-Building Tip: Related Blogs
Looking for links that will bring traffic and a positive mention? Consider reaching out to like-minded blogs and websites. With a little work and luck, you can help boost your campaign website’s rankings and pull in some additional visitors who may be interested in your campaign.
To start, run a search for “political blogs” and your region or state. You should find some sites or even a page with a listing of relevant sites. Searching for blogs related to a particular campaign issue may also yield results, though you may find more sites that deal on a state-wide or national level.
Blogs of a similar political affiliation or goal tend to link to one another. Once you’ve found prospects, you’ll likely find more just checking what other sites they link to.
Once you’ve found your sites, you’ll want to reach out to them with a brief, personalized email, mentioning the blog and how your campaign or issue relates to them. Depending on the site, you might want to have campaign staff participate in online discussions through the comments section of the posts.
However, this should be done carefully and the participants should have a good knowledge of the site and its ‘rules of the road’.
Linking out is a great way to get their attention and provides a great opening when contacting them. “Thanks for the article on XYZ. I linked to it from my campaign site at…” Directly reaching out and getting to know local site owners and writers is a good way to influence coverage and possibly suggest story ideas which could help your or hurt your opponent.
Sending a tip or story is a good way to get noticed. Be selective here, and only send information to bloggers who have a specific interest. In other words, don’t just send a stream of press releases. That’s a sure way to get a bad reputation. You may get mentioned, but not in a nice way!
Keep in mind that a niche site may get the same tip from multiple sources, so it’s nothing personal if they don’t specifically mention you. Also, make sure the recipient has not already posted something about the story.
Another idea is to offer to do an interview, either as a series of questions you answer or a series of blog posts or recorded podcasts. If it is an issue-based site, you may even want to provide a guest post. In any case, you’ll want to have the material link back to your own website if you can.
Blog owners typically follow related blogs. Once your candidate or campaign has appeared on one blog, don’t be surprised if other sites start reaching out to YOU!
Online Candidate’s website packages are affordable for any campaign. We also offer a variety of popular campaign guides, including our book, Running for Office as an Online Candidate.
Who, What and Where of Your Campaign Site Visitors
To find out how many people are visiting your website, how they are finding you, and what they are doing once they arrive at your website, you’ll want to set up some sort of website analytics program. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and tool we recommend has the best price of all – free!
Most servers come with basic analytics tools, such as Webalizer or AWStats. These programs use server log information to generate results, but they only provide basic information. For example, in some instances they tell the difference between a human user and search engine robots. High-end packages, such as Omniture, are out of the price reach of most political campaigns.
A popular alternative is Google Analytics. This is a free web analytics service offered by Google. It’s easy to set up and even the default reports can provide a wealth of website traffic information. Google Analytics can track website visitors from all sources, including search engines, banner advertising, pay-per-click, email marketing and even links within documents, such as PDFs.
To create an account, visit www.google.com/analytics and Click ‘Sign up now.’ You will be asked to sign in to your current Google Account or to create a new Google Account if you don’t have one. If you are already using Google Adwords for your campaign or you use Gmail for your campaign, you might want to use the same account for analytics.
The signup is fairly simple. Once you have added the site you want to track, Google provides you with a block of code. Copy this and save it to a file.
The final step is to add the tracking code to your site. You’ll need to copy and paste the HTML code directly into each page of your site. For Online Candidate websites, go to the Site Setup > Site Settings section and paste the code directly into the ‘Custom Code’ tab.
That’s it! If everything is set up properly, you’ll start to see visitor activity in your reports within an hour or so.
You can drill deep into reports to find all sorts of information and insights. For example, your ‘Traffic Sources’ report will show you direct visits, referring sites, search engine and keywords used. The ‘Content’ report will give you an overview of what pages visitors are first arriving at, what pages they look at and for how long, and top exit pages where visitors leave your site.
Even with the most basic setup, you can benefit from know where your site traffic comes from and what your visitors do when they get there. If knowledge is power, having analytics for your site will give you plenty to work with.
For more information on setting up Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.
Need help setting up Google Analytics? Analytics setup is included in our Site Launch Addon service. This can be added with your campaign website order or at a later time.
Candidates Need Money So Badly, They’ll Spam Anyone To Get It
Is spamming thousands of people really the best way to raise campaign funds? Is it a little creepy getting an email from a candidate you’ve never heard from before, asking you to click a link and donate? Just because political spam is legal doesn’t make it right—or even welcome—to the recipient.
This is the second or third political campaign email I’ve received this week. The messages come to an email address that I rarely use or check. At some point in the past, I must have used that address to register for a candidate’s or organization’s email list. Either way, that email address is now being circulated to a number of political campaigns, which send me campaign donation requests.
While I’m personally not bothered by the messages, most people really don’t like spam, political or otherwise. Here are some thoughts on these unsolicited messages:
1) The campaigns either bought or borrowed my address from another campaign or organization. Unfortunately, I can’t tell where. Usually, when I sign up for a newsletter, I use the domain of the list’s website as my name. That way, if I get spam from another site using the other website as my name, I can tell who ‘sold me out’.
2) The candidates don’t care enough to actually keep me in the loop about the campaign. Of the recent messages I’ve received, they’ve all been one-time requests for money, and none of them followed up with further news. It’s nice to feel a connection there.
3) All the campaigns that have sent me this political spam are from out-of-state. Does this really work, asking out-of-state people for political donations? I guess with the cost of sending bulk email, it doesn’t hurt to ask everyone, everywhere, for a few dollars. Still, I think it annoys more people than inspires anyone to open their wallets.
4) All the messages have unsubscribe links. I don’t bother because opting out of specific lists won’t help me avoid receiving new messages if a larger organization has harvested my email address and distributed it.
5) If enough people mark these messages as ‘spam’ in their inbox, many email services will shut down the list (and possibly the sender’s account). It seems risky to send bulk emails to thousands of people who do not have a connection with the campaign.
What about CAN-SPAM?
The CAN-SPAM Act covers only e-mails promoting commercial products or services. Political campaigns are exempt. However, our advice to campaigns is to send email messages only to people who have specifically requested to be contacted. Period.
As political campaigning online continues to grow, so will the problem of political spam. For now, I’m just glad they don’t have my primary address.
This is the second or third political campaign email I’ve received this month. The messages come to an email address that I rarely use or check. At some point in the past, I must have used that address to register for a candidate’s or organization’s email list. Either way, that email address is now being circulated to a number of political campaigns, which send me campaign donation requests.
While I’m personally not bothered by the messages, most people really don’t like spam, political or otherwise. Here are some thoughts on these unsolicited messages:
1) The campaigns either bought or borrowed my address from another campaign or organization. Unfortunately, I can’t tell where. Usually, when I sign up for a newsletter, I use the domain of the list’s website as my name. That way, if I get spam from another site using the other website as my name, I can tell who ‘sold me out’.
2) The candidates don’t care enough to actually keep me in the loop about the campaign. Of the recent messages I’ve received, they’ve all been one-time requests for money, and none of them followed up with further news. It’s nice to feel a connection there.
3) All the campaigns that have sent me this political spam are from out-of-state. Does this really work, asking out-of-state people for political donations? I guess with the cost of sending bulk email, it doesn’t hurt to ask everyone, everywhere, for a few dollars. Still, I think it annoys more people than inspires anyone to open their wallets.
4) All the messages have unsubscribe links. I don’t bother because opting out of specific lists won’t help me avoid receiving new messages if a larger organization has harvested my email address and distributed it.
5) If enough people mark these messages as ‘spam’ in their inbox, many email services will shut down the list (and possibly the sender’s account). It seems risky to send bulk emails to thousands of people who do not have a connection with the campaign.
As political campaigning online continues to grow, so will the problem of political spam. For now, I’m just glad they don’t have my primary address.
For fundraising and campaign correspondence ideas, check out our Political Letter Templates. (Just don’t use them for political spam!)
Political Web Design Trends Over The Decades
Over the seven years that we’ve been building political websites, politics online has taken a lot of different turns. Social media, blogging, online donations and the adoption of video have really changed how candidates and voters interact. With these changes in technology there have also been changes in political website design trends and styles.
Here are some of the biggest changes we’ve seen since we started political web design in 2003:
Site width
Around 2003, the average monitor was set at a 800×600 pixel resolution, which meant that our campaign websites were built at 780 pixels wide or less, so the entire site could be seen without left or right scrolling.
As of last month, less than 2% of visitors to this website had a screen resolution of 800X600 or less. Our typical site is usually 1100 pixels wide, though some candidates request even greater widths. One reason we don’t recommend going too wide is that it become difficult to read the content of the pages when each line of text is 40-50 words long. It’s easier for users to read in narrow columns.
Website headers
Because of the average screen resolution, you didn’t want to have a head that was too deep. Anything deeper than 150 pixels started to take up a lot of space. Over the last few years candidates have requested much larger headers on their sites, along with larger candidate photos.
This site didn’t even have header on the home page…
Navigation
Years ago, our site navigation text was usually bold in a narrow column. This was more the style of the times than because it looked particularly well. In 2010, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in design requests. Color rollovers are still popular, though the trend has been for the navigation bar to be wider with larger text. A few of our recent sites have the navigation appearing as large ‘buttons’ that roll over with alternate colors. The larger donate and volunteer buttons that a lot of national political sites favor probably influence this style. In some cases, the entire site needs to be widened to accommodate this design.
Colors – red, white and blue
Red, white and blue are still favorite color schemes for US campaigns, though the colors tend toward darker reds and more purple blues. Some candidates go for greens or yellows. We always try to match their campaign material or create a complementary color scheme.
Text and copy layout
We’ve always encouraged our clients to use bullet points in their copy, organize text with sub headers, and use images to break up areas of text. These days most of our clients do a great job in laying out content. (In the past, sometimes not so much.) We’re always glad to help tweak body copy if someone needs help, because when the design and content both look good, it all comes together!
Other web features whose popularity has faded include text in multiple colors and reverse backgrounds, blinking text and those annoying web counter buttons that proudly display to the world how many ‘hits’ your page has. But one thing that’s increased over the years are the donation buttons… they seem to be everywhere now!
What other political changes online have you seen over the years?
Check out a selection of our own more current political website examples.
Related: Political Web Design: A Primer
Political Pay-Per-Click Advertising Ideas
If you are using Google Adwords or other text advertising networks to promote your campaign, you are likely buying text ads on keywords related to your candidate’s name, your opponents’ names and on issues relevant to your race. Those are the most obvious terms, and they work well. But here are some long-tail keyword suggestions that you may not have considered for your pay-per-click campaign…
THIS POST HAS BEEN REDIRECTED TO: https://www.onlinecandidate.com/articles/online-advertising-local-political-campaigns
Types of people: Have a campaign issue that is specific to particular voter demographic? Create an ad specific to them. For example, if the issue is about a local hospital closing down, create an ad about your candidate’s position on the closing and bid on local keywords variants related to local hospitals and health clinics. Have the ad link directly to the issue or position page on your website.
Local businesses and organizations: Targeting a particular type of voter – perhaps one that would frequent a particular business or belongs to a certain organization? Try bidding on that name with an ad targeted toward that demographic.
Geographic areas: Go broad and target any searches related to your area. This can get expensive, of course, but it’s a way to put yourself before a larger audience. These broad terms might be best held off until the end of the campaign cycle as part of an overall ad blitz.
News stories: Bid on phrases related to topical stories and link the ads to your relevant issue or press release pages.
Endorsements: Bid on the names of any organizations that have endorsed you. Link to your endorsement page, press release or issue page that relates to that organization.
Targeting PPC ads with such refined niches takes a lot of planning and a lot of testing to deliver highly targeted messaging. Ads will need to be broken into groups, and then broken down further as new niches are discovered. Some ads will have low click-through rates and others will perform well. Tracking how well each ad performed in clicks, e-mail sign-ups and donations will help you make the most of your advertising dollars.
Remember that landing pages are critical to any ad campaign. Your landing page should match your ad’s theme. If you run ads, you may want to tweak your pages to make them ‘fit’ your ads better. It’s important that the content a visitor sees relates to the ad they clicked on. The better the landing page, the more likely that a visitor will sign up for your email list, volunteer or make a campaign contribution!
Related: How Candidates Raise Money For Local Campaigns
Looking for letter templates that cover all aspects of a local political campaign? Save time and effort with our Campaign Letter Templates. Visit our Download Store for more digital items.
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