marketing strategy – The Business of Social Games and Casino

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.

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

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

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Key takeaways

Marketing social casino to millennials

Only great experiences will succeed

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

Heavy research earns more press than knowledge curation

Quantitative research is stronger than qualitative

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

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

Key takeaways

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