Campaigns of political parties in India have used various digital technologies for more than a decade; in the process, they developed highly sophisticated tools and techniques that came under use in every successive election cycle. However, the recent elections in India, as well as the United States of America, marked a critical turning point, as party candidates, political committees, and other interest groups took advantage of the significant breakthroughs in data-driven marketing techniques.
Electoral politics has now completely assimilated into the spontaneously growing, global commercialized digital marketing and its ecosystem. Digital Marketing has hugely transformed how corporations advertise or market their products & service and persuade consumers in their favour.
The campaigns, technologies, strategies, and tools of digital marketing in politics are far more complex and reaching than anything normal people have seen before. Even now technologies are getting updated and further innovations are already underway. Because most political digital campaigns operate below the radar, its hard for the public to understand its importance.
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Digital Politics
Political organizations use digital marketing in complex ways and spend lots of money to turn the tides in their favour. Their political campaigns now drive higher engagements and success due to latest digital technologies.
Over the course of years, Internet along with social media have been utilized for various social and political causes. These mediums help political parties in influencing people’s opinions, persuading masses, groups and organizations, spread propaganda, and many more. Digital marketing and the Internet extend the possibilities for these activities and thus, offer a huge leverage for political parties.
The major example of how digital marketing can steer elections, is of Donald Trump when he won the US Presidential election in 2016. During one of his addresses to the public, his first statement was, ‘social media helped me win!’ Even Google claimed that Trump “won 2016’s election in the search.”
The win of Donald Trump was very surprising, as many had thought Hillary Clinton would emerge victorious. Although Trump was famous on social media due to his controversial lifestyle, and his TV show ‘The Apprentice’; digital marketing helped his presence become so compelling that it won him the presidency.
Similar breakthrough campaigns were the result of many of India’s political leaders’ win. For e.g. Narendra Modi in elections of 2014 and 2019, Arvind Kejriwal in 2020 and CPI(M) in 2016 and 2020.
Also Read: How to create Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategies in 2021
Rise of Biden Power due to digital marketing
The current President of America, Joe Biden also utilized digital marketing and social media avenues to generate momentum to his favour.
Joe Biden’s Democratic party is the major rival of The Republicans, much of their social media propaganda is based on how Trump exploits blacks, democracy and American citizens. Due to the recent killing of George Floyd and inability of the USA to battle CoVid-19, Democrats had various reasons to counter Trump. Citizens and celebrities attacked Trump on grounds of racial injustice, lies, gay rights and misogyny. Hashtags like #nomoretrump, #notrumpers, #bidenharrisfor2020 were widely used on Twitter and Instagram. Democrats partnered with influential celebrities like Lady Gaga, Anne Hathaway, Eminem and Halsey to advocate Joe Biden. Various news channels like The Guardian, CNN and Vox reported in favour of him too. The movie ‘Borat subsequent movie’ was an elaborate effort to project Trump in a bad light.
While Republicans were more digitally active as compared to The Democrats. Biden had a website where one can contribute to his campaign. The website had pro-Democrats graphics which people could post on their social media. Also, Biden’s team had hired a firm to assist with influencer outreach, and had developed a formula for working with these influencers: He sat at home, often in front of a plant-filled backdrop and a window, while the influencer asked him open-ended questions that allowed Biden to talk about any given topic. These conducted interviews were often put up on Instagram Live, Facebook and YouTube to gain maximum viewership.
His primary goal was to be as simple while engaging with influencers. He chose those people for interview who had certain credibility with particular audiences, and getting those people’s audiences thinking about him. Prompts like “what your administration plans on doing to support working families in regards to child care” allowed Biden to connect with audiences on a personal level. Topics of dialogue included Biden’s approach to leadership, and his plans for police reform and combating systematic racism.
For instance, to boost the kid care components of his “Build Back Better” campaign, Biden chatted on Facebook Live and YouTube with two parenting influencers who are fashionable moms and online parenting communities: Elle Walker, a YouTuber with a channel called WhatsUpMoms, and Dulce Candy, wonder vlogger with over 2 million subscribers on YouTube. “Biden was extremely well-suited to talk to them, not only due to his policy rollout but because he understood what it had been wish to be one parent himself,” says Christian Tom, the head of digital partnerships for Biden’s campaign. “Some of the above influencers, whom Biden spoke to have faced this in their own lives.
Biden’s granddaughters, Finn, Maisy, Naomi, and Natalie hosted Instagram livestreams with influencers who are particularly popular with young people.
Meanwhile, the eight-year-old progressive media operation Occupy Democrats — best known for its memes and supply of political videos and news — boosted the Biden campaign with its hugely popular Facebook page. During the months of election, Biden’s official campaign page had gotten about 8.5 million interactions (reactions, shares, and comments) on posts mentioning Trump, consistent with data from the Facebook-owned tool CrowdTangle. Occupy Democrats had achieved close to 90 million interactions on posts mentioning Trump.
Biden’s online campaign also launched official Animal Crossing: New Horizons yard signs (video game). The Biden campaign is hoping to engage that large base with their new merch. He thought Animal Crossing might be a dynamic, diverse, and powerful platform that would bring communities together from across various countries. It’s an amazing opportunity for our campaign to connect Biden-Harris supporters as they create and decorate their islands,” Christian Tom, director of digital partnerships for the Biden campaign, said in a statement. As part of the Biden-Harris campaign’s plans to get maximum votes possible, the team seeded the designs with a bunch of gaming influencers who shared their gameplay with the merch throughout various streaming platforms and social media.
Also Read: How to create Social media content calendar
Ways digital marketing helps political parties in achieving their goals
- By Micro-Targeting: Digital marketing assists political parties to reach fragmented audiences and hard-to-find voters residing in remotest of areas. It also offers important messaging created around their frequently-changing content consumption and sharing habits. By formulating engaging, incredibly personalized policy updates across multiple online marketing platforms, political candidates can communicate with crucial demographic groups, such as the Gen Y to increase conversion. In blunt terms, digital marketing allows political representatives to establish their brand in their own way and engage in direct means with the voters. These direct communications can be used to pass on customized and relevant messages. Gradually these messages generate resonance and later on, turn into the strong opinions and views of the targeted voters.
- Molding youth to their ideology: Youth or to say the Gen Z is the most volatile section of the population, initially apolitical, they’re always glued to the digital marketing channels and with time develop active participation and fierce opinions on social media. Political parties aim to target the youth in their preferred domain and sculpt them according to their ideology.
- By analysing relevant data: We’re living in the age of big data. Every minute, we create a huge amount of information online which helps political analyzers predict our behaviour. Appropriate analysis of this data is used to gain insights about a region’s demographics. Political organisations can make use of these insights to steer constituencies in their way.
- Polling feature:One of the many useful features that social media marketing platforms offer is that one can conduct polls on them from time-to-time. The best part is that the results are always unbiased and not at all altered. This will uncover the flaws of the policies put forward by the political powers and their plans with which they’re going to the election. Unlike physical and exit polls conducted by various market research organizations, polls on digital platforms can put forward near accurate insights.
- Makes your Brand credible: Since we’re also living in the age of misinformation. Fake news, misinformation, half-truths, misleading campaigns can easily break the future of a political party facing the election. There exist many fake accounts circulating on the Internet, which may harm a party’s political campaign. Therefore, a political party must reach its audience before others. A well laid-out website, a verified Facebook/Instagram/Twitter handle, in-depth blogs, etc can really the ‘brand’ in motion.
- Digital Advertising: One of the most used low-cost advertisement option that can be used to engage the audience in a meaningful way. Though the word ‘sponsored’ is always mentioned on these ads, people generally overlook and scroll past that. A political party’s reach to its audience boosts incredibly through these promoted marketing materials as the algorithms of digital marketing platforms help them to reach the exact target audience.
Concluding Thoughts
Digital world including Social media was once a way to reach out towards friends living far and wide. Today, however, it’s utilized as a form of commercial advertising, connecting us with brands, celebrities and, of course, politicians and their respective parties.
So these were our few cents on how political parties use digital media marketing for their benefit. If you liked this blog, do subscribe to get our latest additions right in your mail inbox. Wondering who we are? We are Sampark Infoways, an all-round IT solutions company located in cities- Mumbai and Raipur. Our expert services include digital marketing, SEO, SMM, email marketing, growth strategizing etc. Visit our site to know more about us and our services.
