Correct marketing can turn even the simplest and most inconspicuous casino into an industry leader, a prestigious and successful institution. However, the promotion of a gambling establishment is a difficult path that not everyone manages to overcome. In this article, Portuguese casino expert Antonio Matias and his website CasinoReal, we will present six of the most effective marketing strategies that will help you grow your gaming business and make it as effective as possible in both the short and long term.
The main goal of marketing strategies in the casino world
Gambling is a rather specific field, and marketing in it has its own peculiarities. Experienced marketers are sure that the key goal of casino promotion is to achieve an effect in the long term. That is, the creation of long-term positive relations with customers. Only those players who return to the casino again and again have the greatest lifetime value and give a serious boost to the brand.
Unfortunately, building truly strong and long-term customer relationships in the world of gambling is not so easy. Casino marketers spend an enormous amount of resources trying to convert casual guests to regular players, increase customer traffic, and retain both newcomers and long-time visitors.
We offer six effective casino marketing strategies that will help gaming establishments expand their audience and attract loyal customers. Most of these ideas are simple and inexpensive to implement.
Strategy 1: Increase your online presence
How to improve online casino discovery
You can increase the visibility of online casinos in several ways:
- Create landing pages for each of the most important casino services. Use keywords related to these services, as well as quality images, relevant captions and titles.
- Use search advertising correctly. But before you do, carefully study Google’s policy on gambling ads. For example, gambling ads on Google must be country-targeted, have a responsible gaming landing page, and never target minors. It’s also important to research the local laws for the regions you want to enter. Once you know the local rules, test your ads for keywords that are directly related to your offer.
Since the competition among casinos is so fierce, the ability to find a place online is incredibly important. Discoverability refers to how easy or difficult it is for your audience to find you online.
How to check the possibility of detecting a casino on the Internet
Imagine that you are one of your potential guests and you are looking for a casino for your vacation. How easy is it to find your facility online?
To check this, try to enter queries in different search engines, look at reviews on travel sites and search on social networks for casinos similar to yours. By noting how often your casino appears in response to search queries and how high it is in the search results, you can gain an understanding of the quality of the establishment’s presence on the Internet. It also plays a big role when players have a large selection of payment systems, for example, casinos online with multibanco, where you will see all casinos that have Multibanco payment.
Strategy 2: Organize events
Your casino is much more than just a playground. You may have a luxury hotel, cutting-edge technology, state-of-the-art entertainment facilities, an award-winning spa, a health club or fine dining restaurants that you can also offer to your guests. So when it comes to marketing your casino, you have to think about the big picture.
Casinos are often ideal venues for large events, including weddings, conferences, business meetings, group dinners and family celebrations. To attract customers who are interested in holding such events on the territory of your establishment, you need to add specific announcements, commercials or event targeting to your marketing policy.
Take a look at the best casinos in Vegas and make sure they have everything you need to host almost any event, from an elite dinner party to an explosive party or bachelorette party:
Advertising in a competitive market gives your casino the opportunity to gain a broad view of organizers who are looking for solutions for their clients in similar industries or in related markets. In this way, you will be able to earn from group business, which hides practically unlimited opportunities for attracting customers. Search advertising will make your establishment visible to event organizers, who will be happy to find new locations and partners to work with.
Strategy 3: Find a “job to be done” for your client
This strategy is based on studying the target audience and understanding their needs. However, approaches to studying your guests and their needs may be different.
A basic demographic approach to understanding the needs of casino customers
For a long time, after making decisions, marketers focused only on the demographic characteristics of the target audience. Casinos paid a lot of attention to the age of their potential guests, their income and education as general indicators of future behavior.
Certainly, such a focus is quite useful, as there are some differences in audience behavior depending on demographics. For example, according to Anderson Digital :
- Generation X and Baby Boomers typically spend 80% of their casino money on games and 20% on food and entertainment;
- millennials, or Generation Y, are 30% more likely to spend on games and 70% more likely to spend on food, entertainment and non-gaming services.
Progressive approach with definition of “work to be done”
While demographics are useful, they are definitely not the only useful information about your audience.
For example, imagine a group of women standing outside a casino. Let’s say their demographics are known: they’re all in their 25s or early 30s, have college degrees, and high-paying jobs. But will these data make it possible to understand why these women came to the casino? Perhaps they are on a business trip and have an extra hour before their next meeting or leaving town. Or they may be visiting their relatives. Or gathered to have a bachelorette party.
Demographics alone do not provide insight into guests’ pain points, their motivations, and what they expect from a casino at that particular moment.
A “tasks to be done” approach helps you learn much more deeply about the motives of guests’ behavior and, accordingly, satisfy their requests. We all have many things to do in our lives. When we buy a product, we are essentially “hiring” it to help us do a job. If it does a good job, the next time we’re faced with the same job, we’ll usually hire that product again. And if he doesn’t perform well, we fire him and look for an alternative. The word “product” can mean any product, service or service, including casino services.
Let’s say that in the example above, a group of women came to a casino for a bachelorette party. Accordingly, they “hire” the casino to create a party atmosphere, a fun and relaxed pastime, and a great mix of entertainment, games, food and drinks. Conversely, if the same women come to the casino in between work meetings, they can “hire” the casino to provide a flexible and stress-free environment, smooth logistics, fast Wi-Fi, enough places to charge their devices.