The Digital Marketing Strategy of BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party)

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Political marketing campaigns are no longer restricted to old marketing means in India. It has surely joined the digital spectrum and the result of digital political campaigns are meaningful. Probably you may have not observed this, but it can’t be ignored.

Here in this blog post, I’m going to explore the marketing strategies behind BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party) that helped them in reaching out to more people and achieving success.

Please note, we do not have any kind of connection with any political parties in India or abroad.

The reason I’m writing this article is, I think there are some certain things you need to know about marketing or I’ll say, successful marketing. This article will reveal some unknown or less known facts about digital marketing that was adopted by BJP and helped them to stand out.

Nowadays, almost every party has dived into the digital spectrum. I’ve seen, on every popular social media, there are political parties present. Each party is working hard to reach out to more people via social media, the aim is to appeal to their voters and trying to get support for the upcoming elections.

In the context of Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), this party is the only one who had made the most out of social media from the very starting i.e., 2014 Lok Sabha Elections. BJP explored their mission and vision to most of the people through popular social media platforms.

There are solid reasons and great advantages of using social media. In today’s modern age, people prefer to exchange information and communicate digitally with the community. A few reasons are:

• You can appeal to your audience from the comfort of your home.
• You can showcase yourself and reach out to more people (that too targeted) in comparatively no time.
• E-Boards, E-Prints, and other stuff for ads are cheaper.
• According to World Bank Stats, 34.45% (2017) of the Indian population has access to the internet. Numbers are increasing with a greater slope.

Hence, in this kind of online environment, there is a huge opportunity for political parties to stand out and make the most out of social media. You can easily communicate with them and give them updates regularly in an effective manner.

Political Campaigning on Digital Media

Mr. Narendra Modi and his Party BJP was the first party that stepped into digital marketing and took advantage, unlike all the other parties in India. They had started their online marketing and campaigns in the past 2014 during and before Lok Sabha elections.

If we talk about the worldwide instead of India, Barack Obama was the first person who marked the first online footprints of digital marketing of politics into this world during 2008 US Presidential elections.

Obama used Twitter and Facebook to share his views and opinions, he primarily used these platforms to interact with potential voters. Reports suggested that it was Obama’s team that handled everything on social media. They created psychometric profiles of particular voters and used to appeal to voters with relevant content.

The result was before everyone, it gave Barack Obama an iconic victory. The point is simple, digital marketing for politics is so powerful and needed to achieve success in elections.

Because of all these reasons, I thought to write the digital strategy BJP used, it’s digital marketing lead them to victory and made the party with the most visible digital success in India.

Digital Marketing Strategies and Tactics

You know what, there is a difference in between the strategies and tactics. A strategy is basically the game plan that helps to match specific purposes. While tactics are the means to accomplish that plan. Let’s consider a simple example, in a war, the goal would be to win, the strategy would be dividing and conquer and the tactic could be engaging in guerilla warfare.

So, before we go ahead, I think you should know or aware of the marketing goals of BJP. This will help you understand the digital marketing strategy behind BJP even better. The following section is discussing the same.

Digital Marketing Objectives of BJP

Let’s put yourself in the party’s shoes first. Now, think what would be your goals when you’re thinking about creating and executing a digital marketing strategy?

1. Build a Solid Brand Name for the Party

Elections are quite a sensitive case, so, it is required to build a strong relationship that could be trusted by mass. It’s only possible if you have a big brand name, people trust brand names. Also, a solid brand name helps in developing an emotional and memorable connection between parties and people.

2. Create Plenty of Excitement Before the Real Polling

Elections are not a small event; they are big events with bigger outcomes that requires consistent interest and participation with masses. Just building an emotional and strong connection with potential voters is not enough at all. You need to put some extra efforts to make them feel important, excitement and engagement needs to be maintained to retain the enthusiasm and momentum growing.

3. Mobilize People to Show Reaction

Along with creating interests, it’s also important to inflame a response and reaction of sorts. That benefits to consistently test their attitudes and at the same time support it to inspire others in the form of social proof.

4. Disburse Region-Wise Personalized Content Digitally

This is last but not the least, digital marketing is a cost-effective, agile, and efficient way to connect with masses in order to share your vision and mission, your tailored content that appeals to your potential voters. Relying on digital could help you to reach out to the maximum number of people more frequently, talking to them in the language they appreciate results in increased chances of your victory.

Now, when you have an understanding of the basic goals of political parties behind digital marketing, let’s go ahead and check out the strategy BJP used.

The Digital Marketing Strategy of BJP

In order to analyze the digital marketing strategy of BJP deeply, I walked through the various blog posts and observed the fan pages and their online actions and presence on every popular social media platform.

A glimpse of their actions from my observations are as follows:

1. Start Early, Build Momentum & Advance

BJP was clever and smart, they were paying attention carefully and regularly to reach out to maximum potential voters, engaging with them and gradually turning them into brand evangelists. Everything from scratch was well-planned. They start gradually and then build momentum and finally amplify everything during the time close to the elections.

Social media is all about consistency, either it’s me or you or even a political party, it’s very important to remain consistent in talking and connecting with the community after regular intervals and treat them well. You have to convert a random person to your voter.

Basically, you’re converting a vote in favor of your party. There is a rule called AIDA that needs to be followed, every potential voter is required to move through the stages of this funnel.

• Attention: Attention towards the party’s operations, Knowledge about its political program, Guiding philosophies and key leaders,
• Interest: Interests in their exercises,
• Desire: Desire for securing the valid decision, and
• Action: Action in terms of voting for their candidates.

The fact is, BJP started timely, this is why they got success, they took great advantage. If we talk about last elections, Mr. Modi had a clear advantage of using digital social media platforms at first.

To give you a better understanding, look when other major parties started using digital marketing in mid-2015, Mr. Modi was already having over 16 million followers combined on Facebook and Twitter.

Recently, Mr. Modi on Facebook has crossed over 43 Million followers and on Twitter, the number of followers is more than 47.5 Million.

If we talk about the content, it’s slightly different, like it is targeted for the different set of audiences who use these platforms regularly.

The consistency and timely initiatives have a great impact till the date.

2. Target Everyone, However in a Separated Way

There are a number of people with different-different tastes. Not everyone has the same taste, so it is necessary to serve what people like. You have to consider each and everything about the fundamentals of digital marketing, serve different for a different set of a group of people. Be precise and analyze the interests of your audience, then create content accordingly.

Targeting and approaching people with relevant and tailored content is something BJP has done wisely. BJP digital team is good at doing this task so precisely, just like Obama did.

BJP digital team first looked for the people who can vote them, breaking it down, they look for the people who have an 18+ age including men and women of all the groups without concerning their income, but they must be the citizens of India. Also, they must possess a voter ID card.

If we further classify them, it includes first-time voters, repeat voters, thinkers, influencers, observers, and so on. BJP’s strategy was to find out the motivation behind individuals so they can vote for BJP/ Luckily, NJP succeed, they sent customized emails and messages, served content based on the user interests.

3. Nourish Affection & Loyalty

Along with consistency and reaching out to all the targeted audience in a personalized manner, the communication plan of BJP is to make a bond emotionally with the masses so that people could connect strongly with your party.

Everyone knows the power of emotions, but a very few know how to make use of them. BJP’s Digital team understands the power of emotions very well, and the results they drive proved so.

It is important to understand that any decision ultimately depends on feelings and smart marketers. People make choices for the solutions, where they think they’ll have the solution to their problem(s).

What BJP did effectively? It helped individuals to take their decision to vote, show them the brighter side, make promises them for a happy life, and lot more. This catch the audience emotionally and hence made them helpless to vote for BJP.

4. Bring Attention to the Party’s Achievement

To be honest with you at this point, people wish to know more about a person or party only if they have achieved at least something. People love to know about you only if you’re something, no-one wants to know about nothing. But take care you have to be loyal at the same time, don’t just count your fake achievements.

BJP highlighted actual facts and their achievements over the last few years to appeal to the audience that too with a reason. They design their communication carefully to showcase their progress, they show what they did in the last 5 years. At the same time, their communication was designed in such a way that they show what other parties failed to achieve and used that as an advantage.

6. Make your presence everywhere and be remembered & visible

In today’s time, a single person has a number of choices, so you have to give them a suitable reason for choosing you. With social media and digitalization, it’s quite easy to grow your online presence and make yourself visible almost everywhere digitally with an effective cost.

The interesting thing about BJP is, they have not left any significant channel untapped. Being available on every popular platform helps to build trust and secures a strong spot in the memory.  In order to take advantage, BJP has a digital holistic media presence. It may be creating websites, creating pages of several social media channels, they are present almost everywhere.

In India, there is a huge number of Indian citizens available on Facebook and WhatsApp. In fact, WhatsApp is one of their game-changing moves.

7. Ensure Maximum Reach & Engagement

In this online ecosystem, the normal approach is not that effective, you’re required to engage with people in a proper way. BJP did so by investing in advertisements by targeting a relevant and different set of groups of people. Customized messaging with the right kind of profile is an essential part of digital marketing.

BJP is investing a big amount on paid promotions on various platforms, I can’t share or tell you the exact amount they have invested in advertising since it’s difficult to count at this point because elections are close and they are spending continuously. As published in economic times, BJP leaders spent around 20% to 25% of all the expenses on digital campaigns.

Now, elections are over and once again BJP won.

8. Integrate Online Marketing with Offline Efforts

BJP is smart, really smart! They do not just rely on digital campaigns and advertisements. At the end and in between they use to advertise and run campaigns in offline mode also. They make extra efforts offline and worked hard towards meeting with influencers and masses to turning them into BJP loyalist.

I hope now you know and have a better understanding of the party’s goals and marketing strategies. Let’s check out the actual tactics BJP used.

The Digital Marketing Tactics of BJP

In this section, I’m going to share with you the different tactics used by BJP’s digital marketing team. I’ll try to show you the real case examples to illustrate my opinions on the execution of their strategy.

1. Multiple Social Media Pages

The Digital Marketing Team of BJP has been working minutely communicating with masses. They have differentiated all the voter groups and have created a tailored content basis on their interests. Then they uploaded the content on different pages to appeal to their voters.

From all the different pages, a few were created a long time back while others were new, fresh and created for specific purposes. All these pages are for certain purpose work towards a common goal.

Some of the interesting and impactful pages on Facebook are:

My Gov India (Official)

This page was created in March 2015, that time BJP was in power. The objective of the page is to build trust in the work carried out by their party by invoking characteristics of dependability and glassiness.

This page targets all the citizens of India, all age groups and demographics. The content on this page highlights the achievements of the BJP in a positive manner like how they transforming India into a better India. Content is like, how they are building homes, helping people by providing them smokeless fuel for cooking and so on,

My First Vote for Modi (Unverified)

[Note: This page is not verified, which means there is no surety that this page is an official page or a page created by fans of BJP.]

The page is created in 2019 by targeting first-time voters. The content on this page is something required to convince the first-time voter to vote for Mr. Modi. Breaking it down further, content on this page highlights the achievements of BJP for the youth and first-time voters. The fact is that there are over 10 crore first-time voters in India, they can’t be ignored.

They use to talk about positive developments in the near future, about the opportunities for youth and first-time voters age groups, ensuring them for a brighter career, entrepreneurship with made in India, availability of cheap data is a few to mention.

Apart from this, they also highlight the drawbacks of other parties, their failures, and also how BJP visibly overcame those failures.

Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat (Unverified)

This page was created in back January 2019, this page is all about filling the people on India with an empowering feeling. It might also be considered as the electronic version of the radio show ‘Mann Ki Baat’.

The page is designed to concern the issues of the individuals, it makes them feel like someone is there to listen to them, it makes feel individuals that they are important. Which in turn, connects them with the party and they may share their views here.

Modi 11 (Unverified)

This page is recently created in March 2019, in the cricket season, by keeping in Mind the fanaticism of the Indian population at large. The page has grown dramatically because it remained to trend.

The content on the page appeals individuals to form their team of 11 to ensure the victory of BJP in Lok Sabha polls and Victory of World Cup 2019 of Indian Cricket Team. This is something by which you can grasp the pulse of people, and convince them most.

The nation with Namo (Unverified)

Created on June 2013, this page is quite an old and powerful one with concerns to attaining support by endorsing the popular supporters and the party’s accomplishments.

It invokes a feeling of trust strengthened by an existing extensive support system, which can force and promote new people to connect their club. It showcases influencers who have been supporting or still supporting Narendra Madi and Bhartiya Janta Party Government. In addition to that, it points a finger at the competition, while highlighting the party’s heavy points.

2. Create Content in Multiple Languages

Hindi and English are the two most used languages in India but, there are some regional languages as well in some regions of India where people prefer their local language. As mentioned, BJP targeted everyone, the way they want.

BJP take care of those people and regions where local languages are more popular and addressed them within their language. It worked best for BJP Digital team!

Along with Hindi and English, you’ll find posts in local regional languages on social media. The content might be the same but the language will vary according to the geographies, it ensured maximum connect with masses and hence more likely to win.

3. Focused Pages for Certain Regions

In order to make people feel valued, to focus them in a specialized way for certain regions, the BJP has created regional pages to interact with voters of that region with a pre-planned content.

In those pages, the major focus is to cover the major issues of that specific region by sharing the content accordingly. Moreover, content is shared in the most popular regional language of that state.

4. Working on All Content Formats

When it comes about content type, then BJP is invested in all types of content, I mean they are so ambitious and aggressive in content creation. They used almost every kind of content that works ranging from static designs to videos, live videos, memes, comic strips, infographics, etc. There is a consistency in their content like consistent colours and tones in order to ensure proper branding and delivery of clear, high impact messaging.

You’ll wonder to know; Mr. Modi also has a verified YouTube channel where he has over 2.5 Million subscribers and 268 million views till now.

BJP Digital team is considering all the factors that affect in building and breaking a brand like videos are the content that is and will remain popular for the upcoming years, so they have already started working on videos and live videos.

There is a significant storytelling approach in BJP’s communication, they gain the consideration of various focus groups and at the very time, keep it active. They move on the basis of logic and facts.

People believe when it comes about videos, there is more likely transparency there, especially in the live videos. This is why PM Narendra Modi comes live after regular intervals. Transparency is somewhere a requirement to build trust in politics.

5. Creative Use of WhatsApp

As I mentioned in this blog post above, WhatsApp marketing was the game-changing step BJP took. The tactical use of WhatsApp to advertise content deserves a noteworthy mention.

[Please note, there is no way to know, how many groups are created by BJP and how many groups are created by BBJP’s fans.]

Rarely it happens that we do not check WhatsApp, and it is a widely used platform for messaging and sharing content in India. People in India pay attention to WhatsApp messages and content, that is why promoting the brand via WhatsApp is most effective.

In the past days, BJP had created somewhere 23,000 to 25,000 groups for the purpose. It is found that personalized messages are expected to give significant results. With each WhatsApp group having an admissible limit of 256 members, there can be various groups created.

If each of the 29 states to target has 15,000 groups each, the total targeted population will add up to about 110 million citizens. If we revisit the victory numbers from the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, it was near about 170 million votes that contributed to BJP’s victory.

6. Engaging Contests for the Youth

In order to engage with the audience, contests are needed to deploy intelligently with a strategic execution framework. There have been numerous interactive quizzes and contests that are pretty planned, decorated from the contest question to the target group it is for, and the giveaway of course!

The contests in the page ‘My First Vote for Modi’ are appealing and make young voters feel excited. BJP’s digital team showcase their achievements through digital photos.

The content used on their fan pages are really interesting especially targeting specific groups, to name a few, there are mobile covers, badges, t-shirts with striking colors and catchy slogans. It helps to grasp people attention and youth are more likely to share such content that strengthens the party.

7. User-Generated Content

To create more interest and great engagement and also make individuals feel valued, the BJP’s content strategy has been paying attention to user-generated content types.

They understand any individual is more likely to take action for something if he/she is convinced by someone from his/her circle instead of a political figure or some outside person. This is why BJP is creating its own army and brand evangelists.

Asking for the perspective of individuals regarding the campaign ‘Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat’ or appealing them to support ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ campaign is powerful examples of dotting social media with outstanding user-generated content, and raising & advancing interest.

The latter example #MainBhiChowkidar generating a bulk amount of traction. People, politicians, and citizens are showing interest and sharing the content across the platform using a prefix ‘Chowkidar’ to their names. In fact, this is the most shared content on social media.

8. Piggybacking on the fame of Global Personalities

This is the key secret of building a brand, meeting with people with a huge fan base. If you’re with someone people know about, they feel curious to know about you as well, they are like, who is the person in the photo with this XYZ famous person.

BJP’s team highlighted their achievements and updates posts where Mr. Modi is standing with some famous personalities across the globe, to mention a few – Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sunder Pichai, and so on. This way people feel curious to know about you, who are you, what do you do? At least, you’d have a chance to leave an impression in their mind.

In the page ‘Modi 11’, they’re leveraging the fame of Dhoni to win the attention and interest in their favour. The page ‘Nation with Namo’ is all about sharing the association of powerful influencers with the Modi government to appeal to all kinds of audiences.

9. Digital Raths in Delhi NCR

This is really something innovative, although this is offline but digital at the same time because of its functionality. They offered free Wi-Fi in Delhi, which is what Kejriwal was unable to provide.

10. Sponsored a movie?

Recently a movie on PM Narendra Modi’s biopic has been made, the movie was about to release in a week prior to the elections. Now, the movie will be released on a later date, but if this movie was released before a week of the election, this will change the game into the favour of BJP.

11. Building a network of Fans

This is something that is common in the implementation of all other strategies and tactics, this is to build a network of fans. Needless to say, the bigger the network is, the better will be the results you’ll have in digital marketing.

The next important thing is to maintain that network, you ‘re required to put extra efforts offline as well in order to maintain your bigger network. A union if online and offline efforts help in achieving your biggest goal.

12. Paid Advertising Campaigns

Putting this in the last doesn’t mean that this is least important, in fact, this is the most important especially when you’re starting your journey. Maybe you have a question, does BJP invest in Ads? Yes, they do.

According to Facebook’s Ad Library Report, there were 50,000+ political ads with total spending of over 10 crores INR between February and March 30 this year, where the major part is coming from BJP and its contributors.

‘Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat’ is the top investor in Ads with almost 1 crore INR every week with more than 1200 Ads in the library. Not only on Facebook, but it might also be possible they are spending on Google Ads and YouTube Ads as well.

The movie would be able to convert many ordinary people to BJP’s fans and hence their voters. So many people are saying that the movie is sponsored by BJP, but they have said that BJP has no affiliation with the movie. This is an area of doubt for many.

Final Words to Conclude

The campaigning for the 2019 General Elections is really going to be interesting. All the parties are putting their maximum efforts to drive the results intending to convince people and voters in their favour.

Every party is investing in its own ways, own terms and conditions wishing for certain results. In which they are facing both success and failures. The thing that makes BJP different from other parties are their minutest aspects.

They understand the things on the ground level and make calculations and consider logic and facts up to sky level. BJP is doing a remarkable job; the key highlights lie in their careful attention.

Right from considering and segmenting their target audience completely and communicating with them with tailored content (graphics, videos, live videos, multiple language content, etc.), they didn’t leave any stone unturned. Their strategy is one of its kind.

The digital team of BJP really invested many efforts from tip to toe, from online to offline, but they kept the things straightforward, clear, and bold. The second major key is consistency so that people remember you easily and stay connected with you. They hit the right chords at the right time!