The Digital Marketing Strategy of BJP

[Doha]

The Digital Marketing Strategy of BJP

In order to arrive at the digital marketing strategy of BJP, my team and I closely followed their online footprints and observed their actions across the different digital channels.

A snippet of their revealed action plan from our study is described below:

1. Start Early, Build Momentum & Expedite
The BJP has been paying careful attention to regularly reaching out to the voting population, engaging with them and slowly turning them into brand evangelists. Their approach to delivering communication is very well planned; right with starting in good time to slowly building momentum to amplifying pace as the elections come closer.

When it comes to digital media, even for a political party, it is very important to be consistent in communication sequence and timing and treat it as a typical sales funnel.

The conversion in this case is measured as a vote in favor of the party. Each potential voter needs to be moved through the stages of a funnel the AIDA:

Attention towards the party's actions, Awareness about its political agenda, Guiding ideologies and key leaders,
Interest in their activities,
Desire for making the right decision and Action in terms of voting for their candidates.

As a fact, it has been their timely and early action that has been giving them a sizeable advantage. If we talk about the last elections, Mr. Modi had a clear advantage by being the first mover in the digital space.

When major political personalities started taking digital medium seriously by Mid-2015, Mr. Modi already had 16 million followers combined on Twitter and Facebook.

As of now, Mr. Modi has 43 million followers on Facebook and 46.8 million followers on Twitter.

The kind of content that is being posted on Twitter and Facebook are slightly different, probably targeted at different sets of audiences who use these platforms frequently.

This timely intervention and consistency has been showing its visible impact even up to present day.

2. Target Everyone, But In A Segmented Manner
Even when marketing a political party on digital mediums, the importance of relying on fundamentals remains unaltered. Any good digital marketing plan takes into account the psyche of the target group minutely and carefully caters to the needs and aspirations of that group.

Understanding and targeting the different target persona with a tailored approach is something that BJP's digital team has been doing minutely and religiously, just like Obama did.

As a party contesting for seats in the general elections, their target audience primarily includes everyone who is a citizen of India with a voter's ID card. Breaking it down, it includes the entire demography of 18+ including both men and women across all income groups.

If we segment it further, it includes first time voters, repeat voters, thinkers and influencers, observers, the marginal communities to mention a few.

The BJP's strategy is to pay special care and cater to the motivations of each of these different groups and segments by delivering different and customized messaging, appropriate to each of them.

3. Nurture Attachment & Loyalty
Along with consistently reaching out to all the target individuals with the right customization, the communication plan of BJP has been heavily banking on channelizing the emotions of the masses in order to build a very strong connect with their party.

Their digital marketing team very well understands the role of emotions in guiding the voting behavior, and their digital campaigns demonstrate that fact very well.

It is important to understand here that any decision ultimately is made out feelings and smart marketers tap that with expertise. While rationality might be the first step of decision making for many, the final call for almost all is always based on a their perception of they think they will end up feeling when they make the choice.

In that regard, the fear of taking the wrong decision, aspiration of seeing a better India, a brighter flourishing future for themselves, experiencing the ego boost and happiness from making right political choices are some of the dominant emotions that BJP's digital marketing strategy has been playing with in order to influence their audiences.

4. Bring Attention To The Party's Achievements
In addition to attempting at roping in loyalty with powerful emotional play, the BJP has also been neatly and concisely highlighting actual facts about the party's achievements over their last tenure to appeal with a cause.

Their communication has also been carefully designed to showcase their progressive ideologies. It brings to light, the tangible and measurable progress that they have made over the last 5 years. At the same time, the communication plan systematically reminds the masses of what the previous government failed to achieve, and have projected that as a comparative advantage.

6. Be Present Everywhere To Be Visible & Remembered
With digital, it is possible to be present everywhere at a fairly low marginal cost, and in that respect, the BJP leaves no significant channel untapped. Being perpetually visible and omnipresent helps to build trust and secures a strong spot in the memory.

In order to take advantage of that, the BJP has a holistic digital media presence. Whether it is about owning websites or creating pages in the different social media channels, they are simply everywhere their target audience possibly hangs out.

Their prime focus lies on leveraging the family: Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, as 95 percent of the social app usage in India is clustered there as per the Omidyar Network report (December 2017). They're also quite strong on Twitter. In my opinion, being present on Whatsapp is one of their game changing moves, and I'll share details on that in the next section.

7. Ensure Maximum Reach & Engagement
With the clutter that prevails in the online ecosystem, organic reach is not enough to reach out to everyone. Engaging in proper paid advertisements with the right kind of profiling is essential to communicate with the different kind of target groups with customized messaging.

In that regard, the party is investing heavily with a big sized budget in paid promotions across the different platforms. While the exact numbers on the total BJP online advertising spends will be difficult to share at this point, as the ongoing expenditure is only increasing as the polls come nearer, the estimates from the month of February 2019 can give you an idea.

As published in the Economic Times, BJP leaders involved in election-related publicity hinted that social media spending will account for 20-25% of the party's total ad spend by the time campaigning is over.

8. Integrate Online Marketing With Offline Efforts
Finally, the BJP recognizes the importance of an integrating marketing campaign. They don't rely on digital marketing as an end, but as a means to the end. Their online efforts are well in sync with their offline efforts, and work collaboratively towards influencing the masses to turning into staunch BJP loyalists.

Now, with an understanding of the party's goals and accompanying strategies, let's move on to studying the actual tactics deployed by their digital marketing team.

The Digital Marketing Tactics of BJP
In the following section, I have looked into the different tactics employed by their digital marketing team to execute their revealed digital marketing strategy across the various aspects.

I've also shared real case examples to demonstrate my views on their execution illustratively.

1. Multiple Social Media Pages
The Digital Marketing team of BJP has been working carefully towards profiling their audience minutely. They've identified all the different types of voter groups and have created multiple well thought out pages to appeal to the various voter segments.

While some of the pages are generic to the party and have been created a long time back, others are freshly made for specific focus groups, and to execute innovative campaigns.

Each of the pages under the BJP umbrella demonstrates immense thought clarity, and the nomenclature signifies a kind of collaborative virtue towards a common goal.

Source: Digital Deepak