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If majority of the Ghana’s population are the youth and most of the online audience in Ghana are the youth, then there must be a flawless digital campaign that doesn’t only create awareness of the presidential candidate but converts the people to an action that will result in a win.
A political campaign may seek to achieve 2 key objectives –
- Drive the people to the polls, and
- Get their vote and that of their friends and families.
When you get these two right, you’re sure to get victory for your candidate.
One way to achieve these key objectives is to identify non-affiliated (floating) voters and serve them with convincing messages of the great interventions of your party and policies. This is an innovative results-oriented approach to your election digital campaigns. Most political parties still ‘preach to the choir’ instead of ‘winning souls’. You must differentiate your core members whom you know will definitely vote for you and make them your mouthpiece, and you must identify floating voters whom you will serve with convincing messages to convert to you.
Another way to achieve these key objectives is strategically drive your convincing and persuasive campaign messages to target gender, demography, ethnicity, Socio-Economic Classes, industries, regional geographies, etc. Typically, people vote along these lines and targeting the audience has been proven to be the new trend in effective communication. What you may tell the people of Accra to vote for you may be different from what you may tell the people of Kumasi to vote for you.
For most campaigns, your power lies in your message rather than the heavy publicity. Hence, some political parties have won elections with lesser communication budget and lower publicity than their opponents. Their message could convince the people to vote for them.
While it is good to create various campaign messages in different formats (videos, audio, images, texts, etc.) for use on different channels, it is no more enough to communicate these campaign messages across board to everyone. People have different needs and not every good message from you will address those needs. Your message should strategically appear to address their individual needs by serving them with messages that will present some value to them.
These tactics are proven, both in the business and political spheres, to be highly effective in converting persons to a cause (or take your preferred action).
None of the two top political parties have more than 50% loyal members. Therefore, if all loyal NPP members should vote for NPP and all loyal NDC members should vote for NDC, none will meet the 50% + 1 votes to qualify as the winner. The non-affiliated electorate (floating voter) is arguably the one that decides who takes power, and that is where more effort is needed to win them to your side.
Identifying these non-affiliated electorates (floating voters) and serving them with convincing messages of the great interventions of your party and policies that address their concerns is the most innovative results-oriented approach to your digital campaigns.
It is also evident that these are the people who are mostly reluctant to go to the polls on the election day as they’re not very loyal to any party. A party’s ability to encourage them to go out and vote will possibly incline them to that party.
Digital Marketing have undergone massive advancement that have made it possible to predict peoples’ behavior, interests, likes, dislikes and even political affiliations. These technologies use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools to learn about users of the internet and predict them to a high level of accuracy.
A simple online poll that asks people to indicate who they will vote for is a sure way of predicting people’s political affiliation by the handsets they are using. That way, your campaign can subsequently target all those in favour of your candidate with a unique message while you target the neutrals and the opposition with a different message.
Technology continues to impact and enhance our communication while we maximize the spend on advertising.
Author: Alex Offei Lartey, Digital Marketing Professional (lartey.alex@gmail.com) – | Opinions do not represent the views of Daily Mail GH
Email Daily Mail GH: stories@dailymailgh.com or
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