About The Company (Mashreq Bank)
Mashreq Bank is one of UAE’s leading financial institutions with a growing retail presence in the region including Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain. Mashreq Bank has 12 offices overseas in nine countries, including Europe, the United States, Asia and Africa and has been known as one of the leading financial institutions in United Arab Emirates, and it is gaining more popularity in the nation’s banking industry in the last several years. As of the year 2014, the bank has reported a significant 45% net profit increase as compared with last year. The bank’s CEO, AbdulAziz Al Gurair, said that the bank has increased its profit because of the bank’s core philosophy to uphold the business practice that is focused toward the customers, penetrating all aspects of the customer’s life. Thus, it gives good performances for the bank for many of its business divisions, whether local or international.
OBJECTIVES
Mashreq Bank has been making the impossible possible for almost 50 years. To celebrate this, they decided to come up with a social media campaign. The objective of the campaign was to increase fan interaction as well as fan growth. Mashreq Bank asked us to link the campaign to the most important event during November 2013, the announcement of who will be hosting the World Expo in 2020.
Approach
They came up with a campaign named “Nothing is Impossible”. To increase interaction to the Facebook page the bank presented the vision for Dubai in 2020, how would the city will be like in the future, in the form of attractive video presentation, They asked fans to describe their vision of Dubai in 2020. They created an application where fans could upload their story. Then asked them to be as creative as possible while describing their vision of Dubai in 2020. After all the campaign was called “Nothing is Impossible” for a reason.
After two weeks They selected three winners. The three winners were rewarded with a Samsung Galaxy smart watch and They developed their vision into an animation and posted three animated videos in the application on Facebook. Then They asked fans to vote for their favorite video. The winner would win a 10,000 AED Mashreq Millionaire Certificate. To increase fan’s participation to vote on a video, voters were rewarded with incentives as well.
Result Achieved By Mashreq
The campaign resulted in great fan growth for Mashreq Bank, with 36,761 new fans in total,with over 100,000 app visits,3000 submissions and 4000 votes. Mashreq now enjoys a huge fan base on its Facebook page with over 120,000 fans and its Twitter page continuous to attract more followers.It was also nominated for a Facebook Studio award.
Learnings
The bank only uses one single strategy to maintain audience engagement on Facebook. The strategy is to promote their services daily. By posting a different post every day, filled with interesting offers from the bank (one offer at a time), the bank is trying to attract more interest from the audience to start using their services.
Since the bank offered a wide variety of services, it is possible to draw the interest of the audience more effectively with this strategy. Moreover, along with good copywriting application, each post becomes enjoyable to read for the audience. Though essentially these posts are promotional posts, when you read the text in each post along with an interesting image, you will not feel that you are reading an advertisement. This is how clever the bank uses psychological marketing tactic in each of its post, making their Facebook marketing campaign to gain more reach over time.
The entertaining stories increased the number of shares and the application made fans more interactive on the Facebook page. The “Nothing is Impossible” campaign achieved its objective to create better brand awareness and more engagement. Interactive campaigns like this one are a great way to present a formal brand such as a financial institution in a more personal, approachable manner.
Photo Credits – Mashreq bank