Internet Political Consulting
It is hard to believe in this day with the proven effectiveness of Internet Marketing that so few political campaigns are using the obvious electronic conversation technologies to their advantage. As a strategic Internet marketing professional, it is my pleasure to help open the door to a new age of political campaigning and share some strategies to help candidates and political organizations bring their message to the voting masses.
Candidates are slowly moving onto the Internet, most of them now have Web sites but still paid search advertising, natural search engine optimization, and Web analytic driven site optimization are being ignored or not executed to their fullest potential. Some have followed the path set down by MoveOn.org and embraced email marketing but it is still sad to see the email marketing best practices learned from ecommerce not being applied in the political arena.
My goal in this post is to help apply the learned best practices from ecommerce online marketing to the political arena.
Paid Search Political Consulting
Since most candidates already have sites, getting more of the right kind of traffic to them is a good place to start. Paid search engine advertising bought on the keyword level can bring extremely targeted potential voters to custom messages on a sites from bid search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com. It is a fact that most people choose to navigate the Internet through a search engine instead of typing a url directly into a browser navigation bar. The easiest way to control which Web sites show up on a page of search results related to a political issue or candidate is through paid search advertising. They can be deployed very quickly and tracked very effectively.
What keywords should a political organization consider purchasing? Take a lesson from someone who has driven hundreds of millions of dollars in sales through search advertising, people convert around brands. If someone enters a brand into a search engine, odds are they have their other hand on their credit card. In the political arena replace “brand” with “candidates name” and you’ll get some good results. People will test their faith about a candidate by searching for his or her name. The easy part of paid search marketing is that you can quickly control the message that shows up when a users types in this name.
Ecommerce companies execute extremely strategic paid search campaigns around every variation of their and their competitors brand names. Some Internet savvy politicians are beginning to follow. Paid search political consulting lesson #1 is “Controlling the message on a search engine result page around candidates names is essential.” Now try searching for a politician’s name through Google, if the message isn’t being delivered through paid search, one of the fundamentals of Internet advertising is being missed out on. Call me if this is happening to you, I can help. This is the space where people forming and changing opinions pass through and I can help deliver your message. Now you can see (if you are readying this close to 10/20/2006) that the age of Internet Political Advertising has only started.
Something else must be said regarding paid search political consulting even if I’m only lightly treading on this subject, and that is the major search engines allow advertisers the ability to restrict the geographic area in which their results show up in, and that bidding strategies can be managed per region. So just because you show up number one in one area, it doesn’t mean you are number one everywhere in the country, state, or even zip code.
Search Engine Optimization Political Consulting
Search engine optimization is the science and art of controlling results in the unpaid segments of search engines. This segment is more difficult to control, but some best practices identified here will go a long way to making sure your messages show up in a relevant context to what people are looking for at the very moment they are looking. The primary elements to getting good SEO are using the right text on your site that complements popular and related queries that people type on search engines (on page titles especially), making sure your site is being crawled regularly by the major search engines, and getting quality inbound links to your site.
While there is a lot more to be said on these key search optimization factors for political web sites too, I’ll just point the obvious free linking opportunities provided by myspace, youtube, the wikipedia, and the DMOZ.
Email Marketing Political Consulting
Of all the areas of political Internet marketing, politicians are engaging in email marketing the most. In fact many politicians are using email append to purchase the current email addresses of their voters. Most ecommerce companies view this as a questionable practices that can result in a lot of spam complaints. Hopefully email marketing political consultants are watching their blacklistings regarding these types of mailings.
Another email marketing strategy for politicians that is under utilized is the simple email sign-up form displayed prominently on a politicians site. When a first time visitors arrives at a site they are looking to form an opinion and they like to click around a lot. Providing users the option of joining an email list helps and then sending them something in real-time helps them form a positive impression with your site and builds their trust. Once you have an email address you can extend the conversation to far after they have left the site. Once you have an email address send them a survey, ask them their preferences, respond to their preferences, and remind them to vote when the time comes!
Political Web Analytics
I’ve just sampled 10 congressional Web sites from close races and I was disappointed to not see many Web analytic scripts in the page code. Web analytics allows you to see how your users move across your Web site. It identifies the content users find interesting and what they don’t. Hot Political Web Analytic Tip - if want your site to deeply engage users, watch the statistics of how users move across it and optimize content and navigation based on your findings.
In summary Internet Political Advertising could be the same silver bullet for politicians that is for online businesses, and a very cost effective one at that. Should anybody be looking for a professional Internet advertising political consultant, I can offer my services. I’ve worked for a major search engine for over 5 years and have deployed successful campaigns for many ecommerce companies in every segment (and more) that I’ve discussed. Give me a call and ask for Dustin - 916-202-5128. I don’t have much of a party affiliation, but more of an affiliation with a cause that is just. Given the late hour of this 2006 election my services are even on sale, call today.