Key takeaways
- The key to marketing to millennials is that marketing alone won’t succeed. Millennials will not be influenced by great 1-to-many brand marketing.
- Instead, you need to create more value, more entertainment for the money, than their alternatives (which are not only casino products, but any form of entertainment).
- You also need to provide a simple, compelling experience across platforms, allowing your users to have a unifed experience wherever and whenever they want.
Marketing social casino to millennials
I am speaking next week at EiG on marketing to millennials and wanted to share the key lessons you can apply to create a social casino offering more competitive for millennials. This is an issue that has caused consternation in the land based and online casino space for the past several years, as younger people are less likely to participate in traditional casino gaming. Rather than wringing your hands about the situation, there are several keys to staying relevant with the millennial demographic:
- Marketing is two way. Rather than focus on delivering a message to potential millennial consumers, you need to build a conversation. One to many advertising is largely ignored by millennials, if they are even watching your ads on television or have not deployed ad-blocking software online, they are probably tuning out the advertising. Thus, to introduce potential customers to your product or game, you need to engage them in conversations. You can start the conversation on a blog or social media (Twitter, Facebook, Medium, etc.) but the key is to have conversations with as many potential customers as you can, not try to deliver a message to them. Engage with them, even when they do not agree or like what you are saying, continue the conversation while listening to your potential customers. You can only build relationships with millennials if you talk with them, not talk at them.
- You can’t trick them. Much marketing, especially promotions, has been centered around convincing people to do what they do not want to do or should not do. This strategy, a mistake with millennials, takes two directions. First is the traditional grocery store trick, 5 for the price of 4, to get consumers who only want to buy one or two of an item to buy more than they need. The second is promotions with such convoluted T&Cs that the user never sees the benefit of the promotion. While these tactics have traditionally worked, it fails dramatically with millennials. They are more sophisticated in understanding why a company is proposing a certain promotion and are cynical enough to dissect the promotion to understand its actual benefits. Moreover, they have information readily available (it’s called Google) to find the offers that will benefit them and not fall for the ones that only benefit the company making the offer.
- Provide value. Since promotion won’t drive usage, you need to provide more value to users than alternatives (which may be other casino games, but also eSports, television, etc). Thus, if they are going to spend $5 or $500 in your product, they need to get more entertainment value from that expenditure than they would from an alternative (and there are many alternatives). Thus, your pricing needs to be about delivering value, not by getting as much from the player as quickly as you can.
- Create a simple digital cross-platform experience. Marketing and product are not two separate silos with millennials. You need to build a product that will appeal to them as marketing expertise will not make up for a sub-optimal product. For millennials, the key is creating a product that works across platform, or is platform agnostic, so they can use it on their laptop, their smartphone, their tablet, whenever and however they want. The experience needs to be consistent across all of these platforms (don’t ask them to set up separate accounts). It also needs to be simple, they are not going to spend an hour learning how to play, or even 5 minutes, they need to be able to start using the product immediately and enjoy it immediately.
Only great experiences will succeed
The key to succeeding with millennials is providing them with a great experience, not a great marketing campaign. They will not respond to marketing that does not deliver value, but if you give them a better experience than their alternatives they will respond accordingly.
The Business of Social Games and Casino 