Untapped Opportunities in Digital Marketing Strategies for Standard Chartered Bank in Cote d'Ivoire

This article discusses the untapped opportunities in digital marketing strategies for Standard Chartered Bank in Cote d'Ivoire. It explores the importance of understanding the target market, reaching potential customers, identifying online influencers, analyzing competitors, and continuous analysis of customer feedback. By leveraging these opportunities, the bank can enhance its marketing efforts and stay ahead in the competitive banking sector.

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Strategic marketing
Student
Date
Institution

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Introduction
As the number of consumers managing their lives digitally continues to rise, financial institutions
are finding new ways to reach them through digital marketing strategies. Research from Dootson
& Beatson, (2016), indicates that most of the leading financial organizations are increasingly
investing and adopting digital marketing strategies that are capable of supporting personalized
messaging. In 2018, the standard chartered bank successfully piloted its first phase project of the
digital-only retail banks in Cote d’Ivoire. The adoption of the digital marketing channel by the
bank was to make sure that the organization aligned with the customer lifestyle. Through the use
of advanced analytics and modern marketing technologies to the target customers and
personalize experience (Standard Digital, 2019). Besides, being the first bank to become digital
in Africa, the organization has made it easier for its consumer as they can get all the bank
services by downloading the standard chartered mobile application from Google play store. New
customers can carry out all their banking services from their mobile phones. However, Standard
Chartered bank in Cote d'Ivoire is experiencing untapped opportunities due to the late adoption
of digital marketing strategies. Some of these untapped opportunities include:
1. Understanding the target market
Pushing goods and services to prospective consumers may give incitement to the organization
sales for a short period. However, this effect will wear off in the long run. Alternatively, it is
good to understand and know the target market and then develop and modify the firm’s goods
and services. This will effectively boost the consumer’s response. Standard Chartered bank in
Cote d'Ivoire is missing this opportunity of keeping abreast with the latest trends, choice of the
consumers and fashion. For instance, with the aid of digital marketing analytics, firms are able
to determine the percentage usage of different products and services by their customers and their

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opinion regarding the organization's services and products. Firms are able to acquire more
information on the type of topics being discussed by their customers concerning different types
of product (Kumar, et al., 2016). With this information, Standard chartered bank in Cote
d’Ivoire will be able to categorize its product and services users into separate target groups,
hence designing customized offers or solution for consumers depending on their needs and
preferences.
2. Getting to know potential customers
There is a lot of information available in the digital marketing platforms. This helps the firms
with a chance to reach out to the public who are in need of the firm's products or services. In this
case, Standard chartered bank in Cote d’Ivoire will have an opportunity to convert a potential
prospect rather than sending emails to anonymous prospects (Jelfs & Thomson, 2016). The
organization can use an online monitoring tool to determine these prospective consumers and
easily connect with them before its competitors. Organizations that are operating under the
digital marketing strategies get help from the social media debates of the prospects on online
forums. As a result, firms are able to determine which prospects are likely to respond to a certain
or particular offer hence making it easier for the organization to target them accordingly (Killian
& McManus, 2015).
3. Identifying online influencers
Online influencers refer to a group of people who have an enormous number of followers and
they are ever active on social media platforms. Besides, they can easily manipulate the views
and moods of their followers as they enjoy a lot of influence amongst their followers. For
instance, Bradley Leimer is a good social media marketing influencer for the banking industry in

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the virtual media space (Padmaavathy & Adalarasu, 2016). Leimer is categorized among the top
twenty online influencers. Among his post disapproving the Intuit’s Mint com, he managed to
influence his social media follower's views and sentiments against the organization through
adopting social media banking and digital marketing for the banking sector. However, a positive
review from such influencer can make the Standard Chartered bank in Cote d'Ivoire perform
better and be more effective than when it uses expensive advertisements (Müller, 2018).
4. Analyzing the organization's competitors
Organizations today are striving so hard to outdo each other in persuading the customers. As a
result, a lot of money is spent to track down customers activities. Before the adoption of the
digital marketing strategies, organizations used to hire ghost shoppers to not only determine the
views of customers regarding their services and products but also to have a clue concerning the
performance of their competitors and their offerings to the customers. Recently, with the advent
of digital marketing strategies monitoring has become less tedious. Firms can track online
activities regarding their brands through the use of digital marketing platforms. They can also
monitor their competitors’ online activities. With the help of digital marketing strategies, the
Standard Chartered bank in Cote d'Ivoire is having untapped opportunity to track down its most
talked about competitors. Once an organization gets to know its target market, it can further drill
down into customers opinions surrounding them and what the consumer is talking about that is
regarding a new offer, customer service, interest rates, a new branch among others. With this
kind of information, the Standard Chartered bank in Cote d'Ivoire will be able to design new
digital marketing strategies to match its business competitors and stay ahead in the race of
marketing using the social media platforms in the banking sector.

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5. Continuous analysis of the customer feedback
Information concerning what your customers think of your products and services is vital for
surviving in any competitive market. Through digital marketing platforms such as social media
clients post countless opinions, feedbacks and reviews about organization’s goods and services,
without even being consulted. This aids businesses to gather more information and understand
the sentiments and opinions regarding them (Tao, 2018). The Standard Chartered bank in Cote
d'Ivoire is experiencing this untapped opportunity of using this information to design new and or
improve existing services and products. For instance, Barclay's bank in 2012 launched a mobile
banking app which was used by its clients to send and receive money from other people by the
use of their mobile phone number. However, the organization optimized the application to suit
the demands of its consumers. This was as a result of the analysis the bank did from the
customers’ feedbacks through the use of digital marketing strategies (Barclays, 2012).
Conclusion
We can conclude that organization with digital marketing strategies create awareness and
promote their brands to their consumers and even hard to reach customers. They also use these
digital marketing channels to enter into a new market, know their competitors and build
customer trust through their availability in every digital marketing platform. These are some of
the untapped opportunities that the Standard Chartered bank in Cote d'Ivoire is experiencing.

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Reference
Barclays, 2012. Barclays launches mobile banking app. [Online]
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Dootson, P. & Beatson, A., 2016. Financial institutions using social media–do consumers
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Killian, G. & McManus, K., 2015. A marketing communications approach for the digital era:
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Tao, F. C. J., 2018. Digital twin-driven product design, manufacturing and service with big data.
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