Common Political Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Where campaigns and causes went wrong online in 2008, from treating a website as a brochure to building no email list at all before it mattered.
The 2008 election cycle made the gap between a strong digital operation and a weak one impossible to miss. One presidential campaign built an email list in the tens of millions, a supporter network with its own fundraising tools and a YouTube channel that functioned like a private television network. Most other campaigns, at every level of the ballot, did not. The mistakes below were common enough in 2008 to be worth naming plainly.
Treating the campaign website as a digital brochure. A lot of sites in 2008 amounted to a biography page, a policy list and a donate button, with nothing that gave a visitor a reason to come back or take further action. A site with no ongoing content and no path for a supporter to do more than read once was leaving most of its potential value on the table.
Starting the email list too late. Because email lists take time to build and every list member represents a relationship that has to be earned, campaigns that waited until the final stretch to start collecting addresses were working with a fraction of the reach that early, consistent list-building would have produced. By the time a race gets close, there’s no way to make up for months of list growth you didn’t do.
Sending mass messages with nothing personal or timely. Blast emails that read like a form letter and arrived on no particular schedule got ignored or unsubscribed at a far higher rate than messages tied to something specific happening that week, a debate, a local event, a deadline.
Ignoring text messaging entirely, or overusing it. Some campaigns never built an SMS list at all and missed an entire channel. Others, having built one, used it too often for routine updates, which trained subscribers to ignore it right when an important message needed to land.
Underestimating video. Producing one or two expensive ads and calling it a video strategy meant missing the much larger opportunity in cheap, frequent, less polished video: full speeches, local events, direct-to-camera updates, all published where supporters could find and share them without any media buy at all.
Being present on a platform without a plan for it. Simply having a Facebook page or a MySpace profile, without a rhythm for what got posted or how supporters were asked to engage, produced little. A social presence with no strategy behind it looked active from the outside while doing almost nothing to move actual supporters to act.
Making donation and volunteer sign-up harder than it needed to be. Every extra field, every unclear next step, cost a measurable share of people who would otherwise have completed the action. The campaigns that raised the most online kept the smallest possible ask as simple as physically possible.
Not connecting the online and offline operations. A digital list that never fed into local canvassing or turnout efforts, or a field operation that never captured emails from the volunteers and voters it talked to, wasted the value each side could have added to the other.
None of these mistakes were exotic. They were mostly a failure to start early, keep it simple and give supporters something specific to do, the same failures that show up in ordinary business marketing every year.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2008 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
