Consistency, creativity, and compliance with relevant regulations are key factors in successful casino advertising. And it is of crucial importance to advertise an online casino to attract new clients because, you know, they are the locomotive of this business. In this article, we’re observing the strategies and approaches for the effective promotion of gambling establishments.
Understanding Casino Advertising
Advertising of houses of gambling is one part of three in general that together make the complex and holistic picture of promoting a gaming venue:
- Advertising.
- Marketing
- Promotions (a.k.a. promos).
They are all different and shan’t be confused with one another. Yet, all three work in togetherness in practice.
- Advertising. These are specific activities and strategies that’re used to promote products, services, and other offerings of a gambling establishment through various communication channels, which can be both online and offline. The major goal is to capture the audience’s attention and persuade potential gamblers to consider visiting the casino and start playing there. Casino advertisement involves creating and distributing free and paid messages in textual, audio, visual, and other formats to a target audience with the goal of generating people’s interest, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving player engagement. Channels and commercial surfaces for advertising online casino can be:
- Online ads
- Billboards of various formats and sizes
- TV and radio commercials
- Social media campaigns
- Affiliate marketing
- Collaboration with influencers
- Live streams and others.
- Marketing. It includes a broader range of activities aimed at creating and implementing strategies to attract, retain, and engage customers within the casino venue. It includes various elements, such as market research, branding, customer relationship management, loyalty programs, content creation, and advertising. It’s a comprehensive approach that takes into account the entire customer journey, from attracting new players to nurturing long-term relationships with existing ones. It includes the deep exploration of customer preferences, analysis of market trends, and coming up with strategies to optimize the casino’s performance in general.
- Promotion. It refers to short-term initiatives or campaigns designed to create immediate interest and encourage immediate action from gamblers. They are short-lived (they can be from hours to days, weeks, or months but in any case, they will have a specific end date). Promos involve such offerings as bonus money, discounts, free spins, contests, free play, physical gifts, or other giveaways to attract the attention of people. They are frequently used as an infotainment basis for marketing and advertising campaigns of a house of gambling, letting people know what’s happening in this venue right now and what they’re entitled to expect from it.
Key Elements of Successful Casino Advertising
To successfully do the process of casino advertise, one shall embrace a complex approach that consists of multiple interconnected elements.
First of all, it’s necessary to identify target audiences for ad campaigns to understand the profile of gamesters of the gambling establishment, their preferences, levels of income, psychology, age, social and employment profile, gather data from available sources (including big data that’s sold by corporations such as Google and Facebook, which is also a basis for further ad campaigns’ setup and fine-tuning).
After the portrait of a target audience is shaped, it’s necessary to craft compelling messages and visuals to engage potential gamesters. Also, the gaming venue’s product must correspond to the client profile in the number of available games, their kinds, minimum and maximum limits of bets, wagers, account replenishments, interface language, payment options, VIP ladder climbing toughness, and other things to make a synergy of the product with the online casino advertising offer.
Online Casino Advertising Strategies
Among the most important casino advertising strategies, there are:
- Correct geo-targeting to make sure the gaming venue gets only relevant audiences and is closed for those irrelevant.
- Eye-catching ads in a casino advertising campaign. They must click with the soul vibes of potential gamesters that shall come to the gambling venue.
- Advertise casino with available and trustworthy social testimonials as proof of its credibility.
- Include effective affiliate marketing because it is responsible for a very significant share of advertising for online casinos, sometimes comparable with the rest of the efforts collectively.
- SEO. The correct textual and technical part of SEO promotion is effective in the long run while it is one of the least expensive parts of casino advertise. Optimize a website of a gambling establishment from the technical point of view (so it loads fast, does not show errors, is optimal across multiple devices, and is useful for visitors) and then optimize the textual part of the SEO and keep it timely refreshed for natural high ranking in the search results.
- Campaigning. Periodic events to raise the interest of audiences in a house of gambling are a crucial part of the work of advertising agency casinos and when advertising is done in-house. They are complex events, which might include such elements as email campaigning, various ads online and offline, the creation of landing and pre-landing pages, Google ads, SMM, and others.
- Influencer collaboration. It is a significant and efficient casino advertisement method. Choose influencers wisely because they must completely align with one’s target audience and its interests and also not be one of the fake influencers with a puffed-up number of subscribers (a lot of people out there use black methods of pumping up their followers by using bots). These guys attract new gamesters to gambling establishments via their social media using affiliate links. Generally, they are closely intertwined with affiliate marketing. But they might be not only your direct workers or devoted affiliates — it is also expedient to use individual contractors with a large subscriber base from time to time just to place a casino’s ad in their feeds.
- Live streaming. It is a sort of influencer collaboration. It is considered effective because many people love to watch as professional streamers play — in this case, they play casino games. Since most of people on Earth perceive visual information better than any other, one can advertise my online casino using this method that will effectively show the games in a gambling establishment, how they’re played, what winnings they generate, and what general gambling outcomes are. Such streamers can be paid real money or given various kinds of remuneration within the casino if they are ardent gamblers.
- Optimization of a website and app (if any) to all platforms. They must work smoothly across mobiles, laptops, tablets, and tabletop devices of various operating systems. It’s a must in the 3rd decade of the 21st century if you still don’t get it.
- Showing buzzing and engaging bonuses and loyalty programs. They are the core of the entire casino advertising approach since a huge number of people specifically hunt for great deals. The greater they are in a gambling establishment, the better.
- Targeted digital marketing. Actively use social media, Google Ads, PPC campaigns, and display networks to target specific demographics interested in gambling. Also, it is highly expedient to write engaging content for casino blogs and forums, with active links to your casino and not-so-pushy calls for gaming in it. Tailor and personify your ads based on user behavior, interests, and location to maximize their relevance.
Importance of Casino Advertising Agencies
Casino advertising agencies are important participants in the ad market. They can specifically help any gambling establishment run campaigns and generally have the entire marketing of a casino in a single hand. It becomes increasingly more relevant and effective to outsource to advertising agencies for casinos because they are specialized companies with an extensive experience in the market. They have the knowledge, dedicated teams, and tools needed to effectively plan, organize, run, adjust, review, and report on ad campaigns. Along with that, the budgets allocated to agencies are not necessarily higher than if advertising would be done in-house yet the results are nearly always more vivid.
Fruitful cooperation with an agency will contribute to the effective:
- Player acquisition
- Brand awareness and growth
- Building credibility and trust
- Improving the gambling offers and products over time thanks to an effective feedback
- Audience engagement, interaction, loyalty, and retention
- Market expansion to outrun the competitors
- Knowing and following the trends
- Adaptation to changing regulations.
Along with that, with a good agency like ours, a client will receive budget optimization, better market research and data, an omnichannel approach, regulatory compliance in different markets, constant monitoring and analysis of campaigns, better and more creative ad campaigns, global reach, and generally high expertise in the iGambling industry.
Here are some case studies showcasing successful campaigns run by casino advertising agencies:
- The LaneTerralever Agency ran the casino advertising online promotion campaign for the Jackpot Valley casino in 2020. On its opening night, over 10,000 visitors were in the casino and the media budget of the campaign was 50% lower than planned initially by the gambling establishment.
- The Web Ranking agency did advertise casino online site for the Island Casino within a multi-year campaign, reaching 117% of annual growth of marketing leads over several years, from 19% to 75% annual growth in online leads, from 8.5% to 21% growth in total traffic, and from 5.6% to 10.5% increase in the conversion rate. It also increased organic traffic by 11.5% annually and by 72% in social traffic.
- The NinjaPromo globally operating agency has a few examples of successful campaigns. For Xentrics e-sports venue, it improved traffic from social media by 25%, increased brand awareness by 170%, and generated 100 new leads. For the Bitspincasino, it increased organic traffic by 10 times and got to the number of over 175 million online impressions (in articles popularizing this casino).
Promoting Online Casinos
Most online gambling establishments today are promoted online. Only the biggest brands that work nationally or internationally also go offline in the advertising activity.
Online promotion gives these advantages of reaching a wider audience:
- Global accessibility
- Large potential for targeted and personalized reach
- Exploitation of diverse content formats
- Utilizing the absolute power of affiliate and influencer marketing
- High social media engagement
- Sheer opportunities for SEO
- Running cost-effective campaigns
- A possibility of real-time analysis and adjustment of campaigns if powerful analytical tools are used
- Possibility to promptly adjust to changes in gambling regulations
- Last but not least — it is convenient to tell potential gamesters about the casino’s bonuses, promos, spectacular games, and other intriguing attention magnets to lure ‘em in.
Maximizing CPA Advertising for Online Casinos
CPA online casino advertising is one of the most popular approaches that are used by gaming venues around the globe to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts of attracting new customers.
CPA stands for the “Cost Per Acquisition” and it is the cost of attracting one new client to a casino. A ‘client’ in this case is a person who will have registered, verified their profile, and made at least a minimal deposit. Some gambling establishments can differently define the notion of a “client”, though.
Here are the basic to-dos in CPA advertising:
- Define clear objectives
- Segment and target one’s audiences
- Leverage affiliate partnerships
- Optimize landing pages, websites, and apps
- Test advertising creatives
- Implement retargeting
- Optimize keywords and advert placements
- Utilize SMM
- Incorporate video content
- Offer compelling bonuses to everyone newly registered
- Track and analyze received data, preferably, in the real-time mode
- Stick with compliance and be fully transparent
- Do proper geo-targeting
- Make continuous learning and adaptation.
The effectiveness of the CPA approach is manifested in its measurable results and indicators, such as:
- Precise targeting by demographics, interests, behaviors, and other specificities of a client profile
- Clear results (a number of registrations, deposits made, money wagered, losses borne by one gamester, etc)
- Controlled budget (only a specific action is paid)
- Effective calculation of ROI based on specific numbers of CPA campaigns
- Great scalability and segmentation of campaigns
- A broad possibility of doing the A/B testing for further campaigns.
A well-built and well-managed CPA campaign is hard to overestimate. That’s why it is so important for online gambling establishments.
Innovative Approaches: Advertising for Online Casinos
Modern advertising campaigns become more inventive in order to reach audiences that become more sophisticated each year. That is especially true for online houses of gambling. In ad campaigns, such elements are actively used:
- Gamification of the advertising. Every mobile user should have seen already a gorgeous example of gamification — when an in-app online commercial of some mobile game starts to play, it shows its capabilities first and then a demo mode of the interface is loaded, offering a person to play immediately within an ad. An interested gamester will go to the download page and acquire this game. The same is true for real-money online gambling establishments.
- VR and AR. Virtual reality and augmented reality are increasingly broader used in the gaming-and-entertainment industry in general and in its iGambling wing in particular. Thanks to these technologies, it becomes possible, using a modern mobile phone, glasses, or mask, to make virtual tours in lobbies of gaming venues, play games with full immersion in the premises of the game and venue, engage in tournaments and other events, get access to exclusive VIP lounges, be more gamified in the idle time, view interactive promos, characters, and mascots, explore customizable gaming and venue spaces, and do a lot more exciting things.
- Video streaming and live broadcasts. When a gambler views the video stream of the game, they can fully study all its pros and cons, the process, find out its visual design, and see its real RTP and volatility. Eventually, one can effectively join a gaming process based on their experience and emotions received during live broadcasts.
Choosing the Right Advertising Strategy
During the choice of the right advertising strategy, it is important to take into account these factors:
- Correct understanding of one’s target audience and its financial potential.
- Substantial risks and limitations imposed by local legislation and regulation landscape of a particular geo where a gambling establishment will be effectively working.
- Available budget for various ad campaigns, with distribution across channels.
- Goals and objectives of campaigns, which should be set realistically and effectively monitored.
- The analysis of one’s brand, its competitors, environment, seasonality, and trends.
- Reliance on constant testing and optimization to cyclically improve the results.
- Multichannel approach in gaming and payments.
- Collecting and analyzing gamesters’ feedback.
- Relying on innovation as we described in the previous chapter.
Remember that crafting an advertising strategy is half of the success of the entire undertaking if you do it thoroughly and with high attentiveness to details.
It is possible to rely on various models and approaches during this analytical task, for instance, SWOT, PESTEL, Porter’s Five Forces, Value Chain, Ansoff Matrix, BCG Matrix, Balanced Scorecard, GE-McKinsey Analysis, Scenario Planning, or CSFs Analysis. Gently bear in mind that the strategy called the Blue Ocean Strategy is unlikely suitable for online casinos today since this ‘ocean’ is not ‘blue’ anymore for many decades across basically all markets.
Conclusion
Crafting an effective advertising strategy is a hard, demanding yet exciting task, the same as its step-by-step implementation. It can seem too formidable for a novice in this business area, the same as it is even for those companies and individuals that are involved in this business not the first day. Thus, it can always be an expedient solution to give this whole issue to industry experts, such as our advertising agency, which will make a great ad program and is able to effectively hold everything under one umbrella.
If you carefully and devotedly follow all the tips shown in this article, it becomes much easier to create your own strategy for effective advertising of a gambling establishment in any market. Remember that you should rely on facts, deep studying of the available data, and persistence in the implementation of your goals — these are the basis for great results in any area of human activity!