The Facts Are In: Your Voters Are Online.
According to the researchers at PEW, 77% of American voters are online every day. And in addition, 43% are online several times a day, while 26% reported being online nearly constantly. Building up organic followers through high-traffic sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allows you to create an audience you can communicate with, for free, on your schedule. And you can also pay to boost your content to your existing audience or to run advertisements to your targeted audiences. Learn how, here.
While these social channels are powerful, they are not the whole ballgame. You can – and you probably should – reach targeted voters on YouTube, on online radio channels like Pandora, using “traditional” banner ads you see on your trusted news sites, through premium video services like Hulu and through a number of other online channels.
A generation ago large campaigns could reach just about everyone by buying traditional broadcast television – and usually just four or five channels – because nearly the entire audience was reachable via those few channels. That started to change with the introduction of first 50 and now 500 cable channels, but voter audience was still relatively clustered.
Now the audience is increasingly atomized – not in five or even 500 places – but in thousands of places online and offline.
So, when you sit down to construct your online digital campaign, it is important to try to use as many of the channels as make sense – and most campaigns will certainly use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, paid search ads, YouTube pre-roll ads, other services that offer video pre-roll ads, online radio, and in larger campaigns, “premium” pre-roll like Hulu and others.
Creating and placing digital ads across platforms can seem daunting – but SpeakEasy Political helps you create and manage your digital and Facebook ads from one place.
PROTIP: Know the jargon. What is pre-roll? It is the six-, ten- or even 30-second ad that runs before you view video content online.
Learn more on how to build a digital strategy for your campaign in the recently released e-book, 12 Must-Know Facts About Digital Media, by SpeakEasy Political founders Eric Jaye and Danielle Winterhalter.