Digital Marketing Insights

You must have seen images of political leaders flashing on your Facebook timeline, banner ads popping up on any website that you visit, topics favouring a party or a leader trending all day on Twitter. All these activities are too mainstream to catch the attention of the target audience. But many would have missed a smartly executed digital marketing campaign by Narendra Modi using Twitter.

Many Twitterites were surprised to see a message from Narendra Modi’s account in their Twitter inbox (Direct Message). The message urged people to go out and exercise their right to vote, and was followed by a link. On clicking the link the users were directed to the following landing page.

Following are the 5 highlights of Modi’s campaign:

1)      Personalized messaging: The message started with a personal salutation to the Twitter account holder. The message encouraged the user to cast his/her vote on the voting day, but didn’t push him to vote for any particular party. The party brand elements were placed on the landing page, so there was no chance that the audience gave it a miss.

2)      Geo-targeting: Another striking factor of the campaign was its timing. The message was sent a day before the polling day, from where the user hailed. For example, if the user was from Mumbai (polling day: 24^th April), he received the message a day before, i.e. 23^rd April. This activity projects how efficiently the geo-targeting mechanism was put to use in the campaign.

3)      Influencer outreach: Not everyone was privileged to receive this personal message from NaMo’s official account. Only users who had a strong presence on the micro site saw this message in their inbox.

4)      Share it with others: The landing page had various tabs, wherein the user could share the page on various social platforms like Facebook and Twitter or could mail it to someone using Outlook and Gmail. Also there was a provision to add the polling day as a reminder to the Outlook calendar, which many working professionals would have found useful.

5)      Smart Linking: The landing page also contained links to other BJP marketing campaigns like Mission272, and tabs to social media platforms.

There are many “take-aways” for digital marketers from this particular campaign, which they can replicate for their clients or organizations.

To know what the political parties and politicians have been doing online, check out our blog on Tracking the online political chatter – March-April 2014

Abhishek Arekar

Abhishek is a part of the Ethinos search team and helps client with various search techniques.