The objective of this report is to explore social media strategies such as competitive mapping, creative process, customer targeting and tactics, with means of implementing them into DIB’s social media strategies events and campaigns, the goal is to improve performance on all aspects, including raising brand awareness, values, sales of products and services, client/customer targeting via analyzing of DIB’s social media presence, through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn.

·      Competitive Mapping

·      Creative Process  

·      Customer Target Processing

·      Tactics

·      General Analysis Of Media Platforms 

·      Media Content and Engagement Observations + Summary  

Competitive Mapping

Competition mapping, or competitive analysis, is a tool used to analyze an organization's competitors. Companies use these to help them strategically provide better products and services. Competition mapping is a helpful tool when companies are launching a new product or service. Businesses can also use it when creating a new marketing or social media strategy. It aids marketing and social media departments in analyzing the market and what they have to offer, with or without improvements.  The goal is to develop strategies to market their products over the competitors. In the process developing stronger areas of improvement and overall increasing features and quality.

Focused marketing efforts can effectively showcase your value and Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to target audience, while also being able to fix any sudden potential issues and make rapid adjustments to prevent unexpected situations as well as learn more about the relationship between your customers, competitors, and products. It’s an overview on the opportunities and threats in the market, in the context of a bank; criteria would be price (, including interest rates on loans and deposits, fees for account maintenance, and charges for other services quality features, market share and innovation like technological advancements and innovations adopted by banks, such as mobile banking apps, online banking services, blockchain technology, and AI-driven customer service

Information used in competitive mapping can come from a variety of sources, including market research, customer feedback, industry reports, and competitor analysis. Highlighting the sole purpose of competitive mapping which helps DIB assess both the position of the company and its competitors, being rivaling banks.

Competitive maps are not static; they need to be updated regularly to reflect changes in the market conditions, competitor strategies, and changing customer preferences. Among the many changes that will be reflected is evaluating the market share of different banks, including their presence in various geographical areas, customer segments, and product categories. An example that DIB can implement is managing regulatory compliance and risk, including approaches to financial risks, operational risks, and cybersecurity.

Drawing the position map in its simplest form shows the relationship between the primary benefit that a product provides consumer versus the prices of all the products in a given market (whether it is retail or wholesale)

How would DIB apply competitive mapping to outdo their competitors?

Farther into competitive mapping, DIB’s competitors in question are: ADIB, Emirates NBD and FAB. After DIB collects data on the competitive analysis, visual representations created by DIB can showcase visual competitive landscape between each bank. This might take the form of charts, graphs, infographics. For example, a two-dimensional grid could plot competitors based on market share and customer satisfaction. By examining the competitive map, DIB can identify areas and their strong or weak points compared to its competitors. It can see which competitors are leading in certain areas and identify gaps in the market that it might take and adapt into their own.  Via this analysis, DIB can develop targeted strategies to enhance its competitive position by improving product selections and features, enhancing customer service, adopting new technologies, expanding into new markets, or adjusting pricing strategies. Incidentally, competitors will also adjust their strategies in timely response. Competitive mapping is not a one-time activity.  Regular updates may reflect changes in the market and among competitors. This ongoing analysis helps DIB stay ahead of trends and maintain or improve its competitive edge.

Creative Process and Customer Target Processing

Creating a social media presence for a bank is part of the long-term creative process which aims to increasing brand awareness, in essence this contributes to DIB’s branding, image and reputation among potential customers, outside their customer base, people who may have accounts with other banks, including employees of other banks as well. The goal is to establish communication and a relationship between current, and new potential consumers through active and engaging creative process, enabling customers to feel part, and be encouraged to share their opinions and ideas, to emphasize overall contribution to bank’s success across their media channels.

The creative process is the act of solving problems through innovation. It is a systematic approach which finds new ways of looking at old concepts. This can be executed by an individual or a team for personal, educational, or business purposes.

The creative process requires, preparation which is the first stage, it starts by gathering information and data such as resources and ideas. This can be done through brainstorming. Then the second stage which is incubation, which is a fancy way to describe maintaining ideas in a brainstorm friendly environment where all opinions and ideas are open. Without any pressure or stress. Leading up to the third stage being illumination, this is when the work from the first two stages is brought together, and one can begin developing a plan or action to initiate a more concrete idea for the end results.

Fourth stage is evaluation this is where one weighs the success of the stages and whether it is ready for implementation or if changes were to be made and finally implementation is when all the stages containing ideas, plans and evaluations all come together, and one can finish the project and publish it.

Creative process sets the stage for customer target processing, explores demographic information of the consumer, such as their age, gender, income, preferences, and financial challenges they may be facing in other banks, DIB’s goal should aim to address those financial challenges and doubts a customer may have to simplify this in a more clear and concise way.  DIB’s social media platforms extend from Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram to X. Each media platform must tailor to certain content, LinkedIn being more professional whereas Instagram is more casual.  Examples of how DIB can engage with audience is through prompt responses to comments, messages, and reviews, this will build a community and encourage a sense of individuality and involvement. Attention to detail is crucial such as monitoring related keywords on search, about the bank, to understand public perception better.

DIB’s creative process must ensure all social media activities comply with financial regulatory requirements including privacy and sharia law compliance to what DIB can or can’t post on their social media pages. Since it is an Islamic bank, there may be walkarounds certain posts and ideas that have to be excluded from standard norms.  Additionally, a good example for DIB’s compliance is assuring security practices, which helps inform DIB customers about cybersecurity practices to protect their financial information within DIB and around the world for purchases, investments and running accounts with a bank.

One of the relevant ways that DIB manages its creative processing is creating thumbnails, sketches of drawings and artwork that are done in planning stage, aimed for designated campaigns, events and overall social media involvement to DIB’s products and services. An example of this is in DIB’s Instagram page, in the highlights section through DIB active, as such when DIB promoted the Dubai 30X30 initiative, a month where the public to exercise for 30 minutes for 30 days, one of DIB’s creative processing was a video story of a concept art camel character running in sport attire. The use of animals and colorful abstract here is a strategy that DIB uses to particularly Gen Z and maybe millennials, this form of creative brings a simple approach while maintaining the sharia law compliance like choosing animals or characters that aren’t offensive to cultures or backgrounds of other countries, while maintaining characteristics such as modesty.

In terms of customer targeting, this is the process of focusing on groups of customers and identifying specific ones to help focus and engage them with relevant content, support, and product recommendations. This is based on research and data acquiring of their individual behaviors, characteristics, and preferences. There are two main goals for customer targeting, one pushes marketing efforts to sell a product and the other is to the same but instead targeted for expressing a brand message and linking it to one of many DIB’s long term value goals.

A past example of customer targeting in DIB featured Facebook, now known as Meta, provided customer data such as age, gender and geographical location. This enabled DIB to to have a straightforward and more direct approach to utilize customer data and more easily attract customers due to the lack of privacy concern at the time, which changed eventually as customer data concerns raised privacy regulations, so the bank’s approach was changed. As a result, another form of customer targeting had to be implemented, known as like for like, which is simply done indirectly due to the companies being more secured with their data.  The same being for banks as customer Data is paramount, coincidentally DIB shares certain insights with Instagram and Facebook which is indirect and is an extra step to enable Meta to showcase DIB ads to set audience after insights were shared. DIB applied the like-to-like method with auto finance, the process is simply where DIB picks a company, and asks to target their followers, to set up posts and ads for them about DIB’s auto financing, in hopes of allowing DIB to promote their products ahead of competition.

The concept of Like to like, is gathering customer information and using it to expand customer base and increase sales. This will help DIB identify what’s important to customers and keeping up with needs and wants to promote better future promotions.  The aim was to find out the most popular preferred and purchased cars in the country, being UAE. It’s worth noting there was a limitation as they couldn’t pin point specific areas within the country due to extra privacy but nonetheless, the results showed that Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen were the top 3 cars preferred for auto financing, DIB  increased their auto finance applications and proved to be a successful advertisement campaign which was goal oriented, having roughly a 13% increase for finances initiated by customers in DIB in 2023.

Even though customer targeting is power packed with benefits that boost sales and brand awareness, it can be challenging when trying to target purchasing preferences and choices in customer’s lifestyle. A lifestyle credit card strategy can face obstacles, particularly navigating large numbers of brands and options that customers can choose from, and for DIB to choose from as well, as per sales and demand on set brand. Since there are always new ones constantly developed and introduced across the world. It is a competitive market and expensive to keep up with, but the solution for this is using the engagement model which enables DIB to target clients or potential clients. This being a money efficient model and puts DIB in a modernized image that seeks customer satisfaction.

A counterattack to data privacy involves something known as Big Data, which as time passes is being normalized and emphasized as safe and necessary for technological advancement. Such as a form of communication between companies and customers, that usually uses the reason of “improving and bettering products and services to meet their needs and wants and remain transparent” It implies that customer data is valuable and is a step to a company’s overall success in sales and data privacy. This is now related to something called pattern targeting, an example of this is when your words are heard through enabled features on your phone or devices like your microphone, basically the words you say are fed into the system; influencing and expanding your algorithm which it works around your needs and wants, therefore making social media browsing easier as it sometimes may directly lead you to what you’re looking for, like on search engine such as google, what you say can lead you to ads, basically these ads are from companies that are willing to advertise and are connected with you with the ad shown.

Tactics:

Tactics are small plans or micro strategies that help develop an organization’s operations. They contribute to actionable plans but also support overall business strategy and can deal with technical information to help team members carry out the vision executives set for the organization. People in managerial positions may implement SMART goals to create effective business tactics which allow managers to tailor their tactics to suit specific company operations within a timeframe.

Four characteristics of tactics include adaptability, risk management and transparency. Tactics are created in as organizations constantly research and develop new products and services to maintain and increase the attention of existing customers and attract new ones. Financial growth is a broad strategy which enables reaching a larger market share but one of the strategies competitors do over others is pricing considerations which creates a problem, sometimes having lower prices than competitors may not fit a business's mode. Which is why there are many tactics that target customers psychological tendencies to create reputations of luxury.

Operational efficiency is also a goal where profits increase and costs decrease, sometimes this suggests the solution for a collaboration between all departments to come up with a sound solution, examples include hiring specialists to tackle areas of weakness, and investing in new facilities to improve work environments. This also calls for investment opportunities, such as expansion and acquiring new companies to add more to an ambitious portfolio that increases overall brand value and repertoire.

One of DIBs tactics that leveraged them to be the most followed Islamic bank on apps like LinkedIn is their range of educational content, consisting of articles that share DIB’s professional insights, experience and raise awareness on financial literacy, investment advice and life advice on challenges etc which aim to educate and engage DIB’s audience with captivating storytelling. Articles include: Grain Of Salt, Elephant In The Brain, Diamond In The Rough, Fault In Our   Stars and Hate Whisperer. Such highly regarded and respected content is published by DIB’s Group Chief Executive Officer Dr. Adnan Chilwan.

Several more tactics may include featured testimonials and success stories of customers who have benefited from the bank's sharia compliant products and services via live sessions which can also feature Q&As, webinars, or interviews with financial experts to engage with the audience in real-time, bringing forth an opportunity to organize events and contests online that encourage participation relevant to DIB’s media strategy. DIB can use this opportunity to share industry insights, trends, and forecasts related to the banking and financial sector to establish DIB’s brand as a thought leader. As they are known to be the world’s leading Islamic Financial Institution.

This could increase the number of interactive posts such polls, quizzes, and surveys to interact with your audience and a way to gather feedback. As well as pushing user-generated content to encourage customers to share their own stories or photos related to your services and feature this content on given channels. While this is good and all, a suggestion for a new tactic is retargeting, which uses ads to reach new users who have visited your website but did not complete an action, such as signing up for an account or newsletter. DIB can benefit from sponsored content by working with influencers who have a large following to get new potential customers to DIB based on geographical location, preferences, and peer to peer recommendations like word of mouth.

DIBs social media analysis in contrast to competition- observation of analytics elements including likes, comments, followers, posts (in a table)

Ps: as of 2/23/2024

Banks

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn

X

DIB

40K Followers

2219 Posts

368K Followers

345K Likes

691K Followers

35K Followers

13K Posts

ADIB

268K Followers

3919 Posts

1.7M Followers

1.7M Likes

472K Followers

140.1K Followers

26.3 Posts

Emirates NBD

140K Followers

1872 Posts

1.2M Followers

1.1M Likes

962K Followers

168K Followers

76.2K Posts

FAB

48.7K Followers

1330 Posts

2.6M Followers

2.6M Likes

896K Followers

135.3K Followers

20.3K Posts

From the table above, we can see that DIB has the most followers on LinkedIn, then Facebook, this simply means that the overall target audience judging by this are older including millennials and older, whereas followers on more casual channels like Instagram and X are lower. Those would likely target Gen Z’s, However DIB on LinkedIn is the highest followed Islamic bank in compared to the competition. DIB also has over 5M customers and 500 branches across the world.  But even in this segment the conventional banks that don’t rely on or generally use sharia law compliant and instead are more standard banks have more followers likely due to the general consensuses that more people use the standard international bank system norm.

Islamic Banks are often perceived as “Islamic exclusive banking” but DIB proves that sharia law is capable of the success of conventional un-islamic banks with large followings on professional platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook that it can attract customers from conventional banks to its sharia compliant system with constantly evolving benefits and adjustments.

General analysis of media platforms:

Data in LinkedIn tends to be more accurate and reliable, as it is a professional network where users have an incentive to present accurate information about their employment history, skills, and educational background. Data on LinkedIn is more expensive likely due to its relevance in B2B Marketing

Data in Instagram may vary in accuracy, while personal information upfront might be less detailed or reliable, visual content tends to be genuine, though sometimes filtered or curated to present a more favorable image. Instagram utilizes images, and video with captions. Generally being timely with users often posting content related to current events, daily activities and real time experiences, commonly through the Instagram stories feature. More aimed at lifestyle marketing and visual storytelling

Facebook (Meta) Offers a mix of reliable and less accurate data similar to Instagram, Meta posts like status updates w/out images, interests, group memberships, and event attendances and links can be accurate. Ideal for social connections to business advertising. Meta’s feature of including the time and place a user was in in the form of timeliness and geographical data for Facebook. Which can attempt to learn about a user’s day to day routines and places they share.

X (Twitter) Data is based on tweets, hashtags, and follows that can provide insights into trends and public opinion, the information can be biased or manipulated, X has a character limit so its more for real time updates making it the timeliest. Relevant for public relations, brand monitoring and crisis management.

Examples of DIB Content: Observations

LinkedIn

In one of the posts, a Shams credit card announcement was made, highlighting its partnership with Visa, with diverse needs and power packed benefits. A customer commented “Interested” and DIB responded with “Thank you for your interest in Dubai Islamic Bank, please visit (https://goo.gl/LQk62X) to get in touch with one of our team members” This was timely and quick, showing that DIB reads the comments and engages with them.

Facebook (Meta):

In a Facebook post about DIB NEST initiative which highlights housing financing designed to help make customers dream homes come true for their family become a reality. A customer commented to DIB, “(in Arabic, roughly translated to English) “This page is as I said, if I have any comment or suggestions you don’t give information only direct me to customer service links and contact . If the information isn’t there what’s the point? Better delete the post” So DIB responded with “Thank you for contacting Dubai Islamic Bank, we’d love to hear more from you. We ask you to write to us at https://www.dib.ae/ar/about-us/contact-us/give-feedback

This shows DIB’s ability to maintain professional through crisis management and respond to an unhappy customer in hopes of trying to fix their problem while maintaining their respectful brand image.

Instagram:

A post promoting and encouraging DIB users to send money to the Philippines with a chance of 4 lucky winners to win 8,000 dhs each. The post aims to increase number of fund transfers done through alt online, alt mobile and alt ATM from January 2 2024, to March 1 2024, T&Cs apply. This is an example of X being a latest to date on all DIB events.

In Summary, this report is a brief look into the four social media strategies; exploring their requirements and how DIB can elevate and utilize them into their strategies. By better understanding the competitive mapping landscape, the creative processing will be stronger, this gives a stronger brand impression and boost the likelihood of sales to one or several customer target segments which later give DIB an analysis on their tactics and overall media strategy performance.