Launching a political campaign shares similarities with launching a marketing campaign. While the heart of a marketer’s campaign is selling products or services, the political candidate relies on similar techniques to brand their personality and market their ideas and manifesto to the electorate. A marketing guru is concerned with their bottom line, and the savvy candidate can use the same bag of marketing strategy to win an election. How does this translate to landing page development? Read on to learn more.
Political Campaign Landing Page
Think of a political campaign landing page as an anchor for your marketing ship. Your advertisements act like a flag; they attract the attention of voters, but they aren’t typically long enough to acquaint them with, or more importantly, convert them to your way of thinking. However, your advertisement can lead them straight to your landing page where you have more space to accurately convey your platform. Additionally, you should take the time to optimize your landing pages to ensure that online traffic will be steered toward them. As you develop your email or SMS marketing campaign, you should first have a well-developed landing page to direct voters to.
Homepage vs. Landing Page: Where Do You Direct?
Both the homepage and any other landing pages are important for attracting candidates. Generally speaking, your homepage provides a quick introduction to you. Attempting to squeeze too much information onto this page can make your website appear clunky and busy, which can be a turnoff to readers.
To alleviate this problem, streamline landing pages (and optimize them, of course) to directly tie to your email marketing campaign. Let’s say your email campaign poses a direct question. When voters click, they can be directed to the landing page that provides them with a straight-forward answer. Then, within that landing page, you can further direct traffic elsewhere on the site so they learn more about issues that concern them and reflect the candidate’s views.
Optimized Landing Pages
When developing landing pages, be sure that they're optimized for the campaign’s objective. Just like a Nike advertisement for athletic shoes should direct to a page selling shoes for sporting activities, a campaign advertisement should direct traffic to a landing page that includes campaign directives. If one of the tenets of the candidate’s campaign concerns their plans to promote new infrastructure, the landing page should include an image of the candidate speaking with contractors or text that explains proposals about infrastructure plans. Also, include prominent social media buttons that allow visitors to like and share the page.
Test and Analyze
Marketers aren’t content to launch their campaigns and hope for the best. They use today’s tech tools to test and analyze their efforts. How many voters are clicking advertisements and reaching landing pages? You need to know to ensure that your campaign is succeeding. You might think that your well-designed landing page is perfectly optimized for your campaign, but without the data to prove it, you can’t possibly know that voters are getting there and staying long enough to digest the message.
Collect Information
A well-designed landing page isn’t just about sharing information — it's about collecting it too. Candidates want individuals to vote for them, but it makes sense to ask for more. Ask for a phone number or email address so you or your staff can send more information about your campaign to them. You might even include a comments section for voters to ask questions or convey their thoughts.
Remember Mobile Devices
More people than ever are accessing the internet via smartphones. That means you need to ensure that your landing pages are optimized for mobile devices. If you don’t optimize for mobile, you might be failing to reach well over half of the electorate. That’s a costly mistake no candidate can afford to make.