Skip to content Skip to navigation

The Business of Social Games and Casino

How to succeed in the mobile game space by Lloyd Melnick

marketing strategy

Marketing social casino to millennials

by Lloyd MelnickOctober 12, 2016October 9, 2016

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

slide1

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.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...
General Social Games Business Growth Social Casino Social Games MarketingEiG marketing marketing strategy Millenials
Leave a comment

How to increase traffic through content marketing

by Lloyd MelnickApril 30, 2015April 26, 2015

I came across a great blog post on how Fractl, a digital marketing agency, used content marketing to increase its referral traffic by over 6,000 percent. In the blog post, Fractl discusses several lessons that they learned, which helped them achieve this success. These lessons apply to almost any business and can help game and tech companies grow.

Don’t limit large scale campaigns with narrow-scope ideas

A mistake commonly made is creating a narrow focus for your campaign, implicitly limiting the reach. Content marketing, however, can be used in every stage of the customer journey. You also need to realize that one campaign will not impact every metric that you track but you need a diverse strategy to reach customers in different stages of their journey and thus impact more metrics.

In the blog post, there are four stages of the customer buying cycle. The best content marketing strategies focus on developing a long-term strategy that target all fours stage of the customer journey:

  • Viral campaigns. A campaign tangentially related to the brand that achieves a deep emotional reaction and thus encourages hockey stick levels of sharing and traffic.
  • Conversion-driven campaigns. These are targeted to a specific audience that is ready or almost ready to monetize.
  • Awareness campaigns. These are designed to increase exposure to the brand and attract and engage consumers who are at the top of the sales funnel.
  • On-site content. he multipurpose content is designed to build the brand and engage with the target market.

The key takeaway is that you should build your content roadmap so it touches potential users and existing customers at all parts of the customer journey. If you create a campaign focused on one niche goal, you are missing the broader opportunity.

Heavy research earns more press than knowledge curation

Fractl initially built campaigns that cast a wide net but they learned that sites that would republish their materials were primarily looking for exclusive research. They found data curation had moderate engagement while heavy research based campaigns have the highest engagement and syndication because they bring something new. This is relevant for even consumer facing games, if for example you bring new research into how people compete in casino games, it is more likely to be spread widely.

Quantitative research is stronger than qualitative

In Fractl’s research, sites and other potential influencers wanted to see more data-driven articles, infographics, and mixed-media pieces, followed closely by data visualizations, images, videos, and interactive maps. They were less enthusiastic about Press releases, interactive projects, quizzes, flipbooks, widgets, and badges. While articles might do well with qualitative results, most of the other top-ranked content formats require a type of data visualization that is most valuable when it features quantifiable results.

Gated assets create a value-add and incentivize people to give you their information

Fractl learned that there was limited value to being mentioned on other websites. Creating a white paper, eBook, list, or any other gated asset that adds value to your original research creates an incentive for people to go back to your website and continue engaging with your brand. By gating the asset, you enable your team to capture the contact’s information and further nurture them in your sales funnel.

A related suggestion is for you to save at least a quarter of your findings and then feature it in your gated asset. Make it explicit in your content marketing that there is more information for people to learn about if they click through or go to your homepage.

Learning which publishers drive the most qualified lead flow is critical to your success

It is important not focus your promotion around sites you like or you find prestigious, but to identify objectively the sites that will generate the most leads or reactivations. Fractl suggests creating audience personas to understand the optimal channels. “Audience personas are a characterization of your businesses ideal customer. Creating these personas forces you to consider what your customers value, what they hope to achieve, what they fear, and much more. By putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you can begin to get a sense for where they get their news and which blogs they might read—allowing you to improve your pitch targeting for brand awareness and conversions.”

Key takeaways

  1. Content marketing can be a strong user acquisition and reactivation channel but it takes good planning.
  2. The key is to build your content marketing strategy around the full customer experience, not just narrowly targeting acquisition or conversion.
  3. If you create gated content, it can help capture leads and drive customers to your site.

Fractl

Like this:

Like Loading...
General Social Games Business General Tech Business GrowthAcquisition Content marketing conversions fractl Growth marketing strategy
Leave a comment
  • Home
  • About

Get my book on LTV

The definitive book on customer lifetime value, Understanding the Predictable, is now available in both print and Kindle formats on Amazon.

Understanding the Predictable delves into the world of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), a metric that shows how much each customer is worth to your business. By understanding this metric, you can predict how changes to your product will impact the value of each customer. You will also learn how to apply this simple yet powerful method of predictive analytics to optimize your marketing and user acquisition.

For more information, click here

Follow The Business of Social Games and Casino on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,373 other followers

Most Recent Posts

  • Podcasts now available
  • Lessons for gaming and tech companies from the Peter Drucker Forum
  • Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect, and Gaming
  • How to give help without micromanaging

Lloyd Melnick

This is Lloyd Melnick’s personal blog.  All views and opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity.

I am a serial builder of businesses (senior leadership on three exits worth over $700 million), successful in big (Disney, Stars Group/PokerStars, Zynga) and small companies (Merscom, Spooky Cool Labs) with over 20 years experience in the gaming and casino space.  Currently, I am the GM of VGW’s Chumba Casino and on the Board of Directors of Murka Games and Luckbox.

Topic Areas

  • Analytics (114)
  • Bayes' Theorem (8)
  • behavioral economics (8)
  • blue ocean strategy (14)
  • Crowdfunding (4)
  • General Social Games Business (457)
  • General Tech Business (194)
  • Growth (88)
  • International Issues with Social Games (50)
  • Lloyd's favorite posts (101)
  • LTV (54)
  • Machine Learning (10)
  • Mobile Platforms (37)
  • Social Casino (51)
  • Social Games Marketing (104)
  • thinking fast and slow (5)
  • Uncategorized (32)

Social

  • View CasualGame’s profile on Facebook
  • View @lloydmelnick’s profile on Twitter
  • View lloydmelnick’s profile on LinkedIn

RSS

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

Categories

  • Analytics (114)
  • Bayes' Theorem (8)
  • behavioral economics (8)
  • blue ocean strategy (14)
  • Crowdfunding (4)
  • General Social Games Business (457)
  • General Tech Business (194)
  • Growth (88)
  • International Issues with Social Games (50)
  • Lloyd's favorite posts (101)
  • LTV (54)
  • Machine Learning (10)
  • Mobile Platforms (37)
  • Social Casino (51)
  • Social Games Marketing (104)
  • thinking fast and slow (5)
  • Uncategorized (32)

Archives

  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • December 2010
April 2021
S M T W T F S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  
« Mar    

by Lloyd Melnick

All posts by Lloyd Melnick unless specified otherwise
Google+

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,373 other followers

Follow Lloyd Melnick on Quora

RSS HBR Blog

  • The Future of Meat
    Is lab-grown meat key to a more sustainable food system?
  • The Future of Substack and Amazon’s Failed Union Effort
    Is the newsletter platform Substack the new media wunderkind or a flash in the pan? What can we learn from the failed effort to unionize Amazon workers in Alabama?

RSS Techcrunch

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

RSS MIT Sloan Management Review Blog

  • Get More Ideas From the Crowd
    The rise of crowdsourcing platforms as a potential source for innovative ideas presents a challenge: How do you attract contributors to work on your particular problem?1 Past research has demonstrated the importance of well-crafted problem statements as a means to attract more innovative solutions.2 But what really goes into a problem statement that engages […]
  • Why Less Is More in Data Migration
    As the pandemic continues, companies are racing to transfer data from old, bloated IT systems to more nimble, modern setups in order to launch new online services and maintain operating systems remotely. But few of these large-scale initiatives proceed as planned or deliver promised results. Many multiyear IT data migration programs fail — often at […]
Website Powered by WordPress.com.
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    <span>%d</span> bloggers like this: