Online Marketing in Political Communication – Its Essence, Instruments, and Functions

Online marketing is nothing else than a model of traditional marketing in cyberspace; it is a hybrid of previous forms of mass communication. In the first decade of the 21st century, the instruments used in marketing in political communication were revolutionized by the emergence of solutions enabling the interactions of users on the Internet. This type of marketing is characterized by a range of concepts, and includes online advertising campaigns, websites, interactive social networks, video-sharing sites, which encourage users to regularly post new material, websites that enable the publication of photos, images and other files or those that are based on content provided by users i.e. Wikipedia (including blog sites). Contemporary, internetized election campaigns combine low costs with effectiveness because location no longer limits social contacts in the exchange of election-related information.