Donald Digital Marketing: An Exploratory Study of Digital Political Marketing in Trump Presidential Campaign

Digital marketing harnesses the interactions of individuals through the Internet. Its growing popularity among politicians has potentially important implications for a wide range of digital political marketing activities, such as social media building, constituents’ engagement, website development, and digital advertising. This paper explores Trump presidential campaign in 2016 for understanding the digital political marketing implementations and challenges. Four different social media platforms and a website were explored, discussed and compared. The results of the exploratory study were presented based on the digital media used within the 20 months Trump presidential campaign to offer an overview of the relevant evidence in the digital political marketing mechanism. It discusses how this previous work is being extended and combined with insights from detailed data on Trump digital media usage in order to determine which digital marketing strategies are being used in the Trump presidential campaign and how these strategies relate to constituent engagement. Finally, it identifies opportunities that this new area presents for digital political marketing research

Digital marketing, digital political marketing, political campaign, social media