Description of the target audience
A communication plan in a business is a manner of connecting with the valued stakeholders by giving them an insight regarding the different products and services. A communication plan needs to be transparent in nature and should contain all the effective policies and guidelines. Here a communication plan has been designed for the METRO bank to announce the launch of two of its more branches in Greater London – one in Greenwich city and the other in Bromley. The assignment will discuss in a nutshell the promotional strategy adopted by the bank for increasing its target customer base.
In this respect, the target customers of the METRO bank are the one settled across the Greenwich and Bromley city. Initially, the target customer group may be apprehensive to invest with the bank owing to better investment options provided by surrounding local banks. Therefore, the trust within the target customer group needs to be building gradually. In this respect, most of the customers were ready to open an account with the METRO bank owing to its good repute and hassle free account opening procedures which allowed the customers to complete the account opening formalities with the bank within a day (O’Hern and Kahle 2013).
Out of the four P’s of marketing mix, one P stands for promotional mix and covers the aspects of – advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion. Advertising forms a very important part of a promotional plan. Therefore, effective advertising through television, news, audio and social media can help in reaching out to more number of target customers. The powers of print and social media could be used for building of effective public relations with its target customers (Paradi and Zhu 2013). Additionally, hosing of personal web pages can help in selling the products and services directly to the customers.
The METRO bank used advertising strategies for reaching out to its target group of customers. The various channels of advertising used by the METRO bank over here are print and social media. As commented by Messai and Jouini (2013), with more digital media inclusion there is more number of people online these days over a number of social networking sites. Therefore, the METRO bank can pitch its products and services through its social media pages by directly pasting a link over there. Some of these could contain market statistics and data comparing the performance of the bank with a few of its competitors. Thus, the customers get justify their choices with logic.
Explanation of the promotional mix theory
The promotional channel chosen by METRO bank over here is social media as a large size of audience could be connected at the same time worldwide with the use of such marketing media. Here, the communication could be modulated from an individual to large mass at the same time (Henry et al. 2013). The size of investment is less as the social networking sites could be easily availed by each and everyone with the help of any low cost Smartphone (Frias?Aceituno et al. 2014). As supported by Finch et al.(2013), the availability of social media in a number of different languages can make understanding easy for a large customer section.
The key message chosen for the communication plan is – “to inform the customers regarding the opening of branches of METRO bank in the Greenwich city and Bromley”.
The communication message was written in a manner to give the target audience an idea about the business objective of the bank. The sole objective was to open more number of branches. However, some of the other exclusive features offered through the newly opened braches will also be communicated through the message. For instance, some of the first come first serve customers would be given the facility of opening an account with as less as 5 pounds (Grubel 2014).
AIDA used to explain the METRO bank marketing theory
Here, the AIDA model has been used to evaluate the manner in which the METRO bank will achieve it promotional targets. The model have been further divided into – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
Attention – The Metro bank would like to open two more branches in the greater London
Interest – The customers will be able to open the account within a day with minimal deposit of 5 pounds.
Desire – The customers will be offered prime membership facilities based upon first cum first serve basis.
Action – in order to reach the maximum number of customers the bank will use mobile platforms so that the customers residing across the globe can access their monetary transaction at the click of a finger (Alhakimi and Alhariry 2014).
The bank plans to paste a number of links containing Google forms which contains close-ended questionnaire pertaining to employee feedback regarding the products and services availed from the bank. The responses could be used for arriving at statistically significant results which can help in addressing the service loopholes.
References
Alexander, K., 2013, June. Bank resolution and recovery in the EU: enhancing banking union?. In ERA Forum (Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 81-93). Springer-Verlag.
Alhakimi, W. and Alhariry, K., 2014. Internal Marketing as a Competitive Advantage in Banking Industry. Academic Journal of Management Sciences, 3(1), pp.15-22.
Barty, J. and Ricketts, T., 2014. Promoting competition in the UK banking industry. BBA, The Voice of Banking, pp.56-65.
Finch, D., Nadeau, J. and O’Reilly, N., 2013. The future of marketing education: A practitioner’s perspective. Journal of Marketing Education, 35(1), pp.54-67.
Frias?Aceituno, J.V., Rodríguez?Ariza, L. and Garcia?Sánchez, I.M., 2014. Explanatory factors of integrated sustainability and financial reporting. Business strategy and the environment, 23(1), pp.56-72.
Grubel, H.G., 2014. A theory of multinational banking. PSL Quarterly Review, 30(123), p.102.
Henry, J., Kok, C., Amzallag, A., Baudino, P., Cabral, I., Grodzicki, M., Gross, M., Halaj, G., Kolb, M., Leber, M. and Pancaro, C., 2013. A macro stress testing framework for assessing systemic risks in the banking sector, pp.65-77.
Klaus, P. and Nguyen, B., 2013. Exploring the role of the online customer experience in firms’ multi-channel strategy: An empirical analysis of the retail banking services sector. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 21(5), pp.429-442.
Messai, A.S. and Jouini, F., 2013. Micro and macro determinants of non-performing loans. International journal of economics and financial issues, 3(4), p.852.
O’Hern, M.S. and Kahle, L.R., 2013. The empowered customer: User-generated content and the future of marketing. Global Economics and Management Review, 18(1), pp.22-30.
Paradi, J.C. and Zhu, H., 2013. A survey on bank branch efficiency and performance research with data envelopment analysis. Omega, 41(1), pp.61-79.
Sellar, P. and Adeleye, D., 2016. Recovery planning: preparing for stress. Bank of England. Quarterly Bulletin, 56(4), p.200.
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