What does an online casino need to succeed? It’s a puzzle with a lot of pieces, and most of them are almost identical – it’s your players, who are not easy, but need to be attracted in order to start a business and not to stop.
An effective marketing plan is an absolute necessity in the gambling industry. In this day and age, where players have virtually unlimited choices, getting attention (and keeping it) is a constant unequal battle. Operators are always having to look for new ideas to make the platform stand out.
The first part of our marketing for casinos and bookmakers focuses on attracting customers: building traffic through affiliate partnerships, optimising the site for search engines, advertising on TV, radio and social media, and digital marketing techniques.
Affiliate marketing
Casinos and sportsbooks need a constant flow of new players to thrive. Affiliates specialise in creating content that generates lots of followers. They enter into partnerships to monetise their traffic, and if the partnership is on the right terms, it’s absolutely a win-win deal.
Affiliate marketing, or affiliate marketing, is a form of performance marketing in which the affiliate company earns a commission from the traffic sent to the company, which in turn is only paid when there is a successful conversion. This allows advertisers to evaluate their marketing budgets and compare the performance of affiliates.
This type of marketing is common in many industries and is extremely popular in online gambling. The iGaming industry is a huge affiliate space with conferences and events attracting thousands of visitors each year.
There are two types of affiliate marketing for online casinos
The first is when affiliates join together to form an affiliate network. The online casino signs an agreement with the network, and banners and other advertisements start flashing on the affiliates’ online resources. Affiliates find each other on aggregator sites, which serve as a kind of online marketplace for such contracts.
The second is when affiliates join the network under the direct control of the online casino brand. Then all traffic from the affiliate network goes exclusively to one resource. This way of working with affiliates is less common, and is mostly used by large, established brands.
Internet advertising PPC
Pay Per Click or Pay Per Click are advertising results that appear at the top of search results above the organic results. Keyword research techniques for PPC work on the same principle as for organic search – choose keywords with less competition but which are a good match for your target audience. Next comes the process of keyword bidding. A common mistake many start-ups make is not to bid on their own brand (it’s as much a keyword as anything else). If a competitor wins an auction for your own brand name, their site will be in the advertised results when the player searches for you.
Display advertising
Display advertisements are the graphical and textual advertisements that appear on websites on the web. When users click on them, they are sent to a landing page, such as a page where they can register for an online casino.
There are a huge number of types of display ads: top-of-page banners, interstitial ads, and others.
Social media marketing (SMM)
The power and reach of social media marketing cannot be overstated. With marketing channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, you can show your ads to a huge audience of potential players. Social media offers targeted advertising through which advertisers can surgically pinpoint the desired audience: gender, age, geography are just a small part of the possible criteria.
While the user loads the page, there is a fierce war going on behind the scenes for their attention: advertisers bid, and the winning ad appears on the screen. Companies set limits on such bids depending on the success of the advertisement.
There are a few basic principles for advertising on social media.
The first is to follow the rules of the platform and check what their policy is regarding gambling activities. It is often necessary to confirm a license and register. Second – social media advertising is often subject to restrictions and regulations, not only of the country in which the platform itself is based, but also depending on the audience of the advertisement itself. Advertisers should keep this in mind.
Finally, thirdly, the texts must be short and catchy. The user is likely to flip endlessly feed when he sees your ad, so do not expect him to be absorbed in a long text – he just slips his eyes and goes on. Your banner or post should grab their attention in a millisecond, so it’s important that both the visual and informational components are top notch. People perceive large images of other people best.
Conventional commercials
Advertising on radio and TV is still heavily used to market the gambling industry. These forms of marketing, though, are severely limited. For example, in regulated countries, television commercials for gaming are quite often prohibited during daytime hours, sometimes even banned outright. Limitations are often aimed at discouraging underage viewing of the advertisements and against attempts to portray the gambling industry as a secure source of wealth and income.
Always follow government regulations and the laws of the countries in which you operate carefully.