While budgeting for signs and mailers, how much of your campaign spending will go toward online marketing? While social media through Facebook and Twitter may be ‘free’, you may want to boost your online exposure with paid online advertising. Below are a few popular and low-cost marketing ideas suitable for local political campaigns.
Advertising your campaign is generally done for branding purposes, though advertising can also be used for informational purposes and even as a fundraising tool. For branding, it’s all about exposure and getting your message to as many people in as many places as possible.
Your best bet for Pay Per Click advertising is Google Ads. PPC ads are based on targeting particular keyword searches on Google. If you decide to use PPC advertising, you will want to target a specific audience and keep an eye on your costs. It’s easy to spend money on irrelevant searches, so you will want to primarily target phrases and exact terms in your ad campaign. As you discover unrelated terms that attract clicks, you should add them to your list of negative terms.
Larger political campaigns often advertise on more than just the search engines. They may also allow their ads to appear on the Google Display Network which would place the ads across potentially thousands of websites. You’ll need to be authorized before your campaign can advertise on Google.
Have you produced campaign videos? Paid search on YouTube is called promoted video ads. It’s similar in concept to Google Ads. You select a video to promote, write promotional text, and choose which keywords should trigger your ad. Your video promotion (a thumbnail of your video with your text) will appear next to contextually relevant search results.
Marketing on Facebook can be very effective. Instead of targeting based on keywords, Facebook allows advertisers to target people based on their demographics. This means you can drive your message directly to voting-age users that match specific locations and have expressed a preference in particular interests. The minimum required daily budget is a dollar, so the barrier to entry is low.
Before you start advertising with Facebook, make sure that you are authorized to do so.
Banner ads are still relevant, especially when run on local media sites, such as local newspaper websites. Banners can help with branding and messaging efforts regardless of how much they are clicked. While traditional banner ads often have click-through rates of less than one-half of one percent, banner ads often perform much better when they appear on a local outlet, such as a newspaper website. The cost for banner ads varies with the market and the outlet.
How much should you budget? This varies on the size of the campaign and the extent of the advertising. It’s better to commit a small budget early on to see what works and what does not. If you use advertising as a way to promote online fundraising, it should be able to pay for itself and then some. Tracking your advertising success becomes critical in this case, so you aren’t spending more money than your campaign is raising.
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