How To Market Your Online Casino

To create your own casino game, you'll need to examine the existing competitors, identify what makes those games work, and apply that formula to your game. Decide on a game genre. Will it be a card game you've devised, where players can learn some strategy and become more adept, or will it be a game of pure chance.

• Pick Your Bank. Before you start wagering real money in an online casino, research the various online banking methods and make sure that you use a reliable one. This is very important. Various payment options include credit cards, debit cards, online payments, pre-pay cards, and money transfers.
• Choose a payment system provider. When you start an online gaming business, you need to make an agreement with a payment system provider, so you and your players can quickly and easily make transactions. For convenience purposes, it’s advisable that you provide players with multiple payment options.

Just like its rivals for consumers’ disposable income, America’s $90-billion-a-year gaming and casino industry is significantly driven by database marketing. But gaming customers are very different in one major respect.

While adult patrons of a hit movie, for example, know they will spend about $8 to $10 on a ticket, perhaps buy soda and popcorn and then head home, some casino customers lose huge sums of money while a few others might actually make a profit, especially those who are skilled at games such as blackjack.

Can casino owners more accurately identify and predict which of their regular customers will lose the most money? How often will these customers visit? How will they allocate their bets among slots and tables? By targeting those players, can casinos follow up with a more effective direct marketing campaign?

The questions inspired two Wharton faculty members and a colleague at New York University’s Stern School of Business to see if they could develop a mathematical model to identify these most lucrative customers. The three researchers — marketing professors Raghuram Iyengar and Jehoshua Eliashberg, and Sam K. Hui, a marketing professor at Stern — say that the answer is an unqualified yes. Indeed, they wonder why casinos aren’t already using these tools.

The issue for casinos “is one of attracting their best customers,” said Iyengar, noting that most casinos and slots parlors already collect some types of extensive marketing data on their customers. “Our list overlaps somewhat with their list, but the lists are not identical.” The casinos are reaching out to their customers, “but they could be doing it better.”

The study by Iyengar, Eliashberg and Hui — entitled “A Model for Gamers’ Revenue in Casinos” — develops a mathematical model which integrates gamers’ frequency of casino visits, their total wagers and the distribution of those bets at table games versus slots machines. The researchers determined if revenue from specific players was derived from “skill” or “luck,” and they were able to identify players who are highly skilled or perhaps revenue-producing high rollers.

Avoiding ‘Unattractive Customers’

In addition, the team looked at ways that demographics could provide casino owners with valuable marketing insights. The data suggested, for example, that women devote more of their spending to slot machines than to table games like blackjack, and that men have a higher level of skill at the gaming tables than women. Iyengar and Eliashberg suggested that more useful information could have been gathered if they had been given more specific demographic data. “This information would really help [casinos] target more precisely the most attractive customers, because you certainly don’t want to target the unattractive customers,” Eliashberg said. “You want to spend your money where you get the most bang for your buck.”

While the characteristics they studied are fairly unique to the gaming industry, the authors said there are other business situations in which customers can be identified and targeted based on their specific skills or unusual customer behavior. For instance, they noted that better modeling of customer behavior might help hotel managers to more intelligently market the use of mini-bars or business centers, or allow car-rental firms to target extra-cost products like GPS units or satellite radios.

But it is the sheer size of the casino industry in the United States that makes it such a strong candidate for this kind of individualized predictive modeling, more commonly known as database marketing. Americans spend more money on gaming than on trips to the cinema by a 10-1 ratio, and more money is lost during a typical casino visit than is spent in an average visit to a mall. Of the $90 billion spent on legalized gaming, according to the American Gaming Association, some $59 billion is spent in casinos as opposed to lotteries or pari-mutuel wagering.

Unique aspects of the casino industry suggest that casino operators should be developing different tools for customer relationship management than, for example, mall operators — who analyze how much customers spend on a typical visit to a store and what products they purchased. Through the use of gaming loyalty cards and other tools, casino executives have the ability to more closely track the performance of individual gamers. Access to such player-level behavior, together with mathematical modeling, can help uncover a gambler’s level of skill — an important consideration in determining the individual targets of direct marketing campaigns.

“The use of mathematical models to predict future behavior is very important [because] the most recent profitable gamer is not necessarily going to remain [the] most profitable in the future,” Eliashberg said. “You have to look at the frequency of going to a casino in general and combine it with all sorts of aspects of wagering behavior. Does the customer wager more on slot machines or at the tables? You also have to look at the skill level. You need a model for human beings.”

Iyengar and Eliashberg noted that casinos already perform broad mathematical calculations — based on aggregate behavior — in an effort to predict their overall revenues and profits. The goal of this research, they said, was to come up with a mathematical model that would measure the difference between a typical player’s theoretical and real spending relative to the player’s skill level. The use of a “formal model, which makes clear distinctions among individual gamers,” is a more effective tool than a casino operator’s “judgment based on intuition,” Eliashberg stated.

‘Share of Wallet’

The data that researchers examined came from a major U.S. casino operator with gambling facilities in a number of U.S. locations. It provided the authors with detailed information — gathered through the use of loyalty cards — on more than 1,500 customers who made a total of about 9,000 casino visits from December 2004 through April 2007. The gaming company also offered age and gender information for about 400 of those customers.

To determine the skill of the players, the authors ran through a series of complex calculations based upon factors, including the particular games the individual played, the expected take by the casino versus the actual take, and whether a gambler’s winning or losing on one visit affected behavior on the next. While the researchers noted that more work must be done to learn how a gambler’s skill improves at a game, such as blackjack, over time, they believe their model can be a powerful starting point. For example, the authors predict that this new and more detailed type of data can be combined with customer survey results to obtain much better information on so-called “share of wallet” — that is, how much of the money that a gambler budgets for the casino is actually lost on a visit.

Beyond that, they also urge additional research on casino promotional activities — such as complimentary hotel stays or cash-back awards — in order to develop a better sense of how marketing efforts affect high and low revenue gamblers differently. In addition, they note that the customized data could help operators as they weigh how to better design their casino floor space to increase revenues, such as the use of environmental cues to encourage gambling or altering the ratio of table games to slot machines.

“The behavior may change from one facility to another, but we believe this information is helpful in designing your facility in line with customer behavior,” Eliashberg said. In future research, the authors note, they would like to examine more demographic data such as relationship status, home address, profession and education level to gain even more insights into gambling habits.

According to Iyengar, the research has implications in other industries. “A sales force manager could better understand how a person makes a sale,” Iyengar said. “It might make a difference if they could figure out whether it’s the product that’s selling or whether it’s the skill level of the sales person.”

Online casino promotion is a very multidimensional endeavor, which importance cannot be underestimated. For a gaming project to generate revenues and grow actively, a literate online casino marketing strategy is required.

All operators have to realize that they can install the most advanced, interesting, and modern slot machines but it’s all useless if gamblers do not know about them.

Advertising is a way of conveying information to consumers regarding the casino, how good it is and surely better than someone else's. Although online casino marketing is in many ways similar to advertizing regular projects, it still has many peculiarities.

Peculiarities Of Online Casino Promotion — Several Things You Should Know

Operators aspiring to generate gambling traffic sufficient to carry your project forward, you’d better apply promotion instruments from Google and Bing. Features of the region, competitors, search query information are to be taken into account when it comes to promotion. This way gambling advertisement will be very efficient.

If you are not a novice in gambling you are probably aware of how tough competition is today in the gambling world. Thus, online casino promotion and gambling website monetization is not an easy task. Moreover, online casinos are not your only opponents. Those include bookmaker business, many totalizators, poker room(s), lotteries, etc.

Big investing is required if you want to enter the top ten list in terms of main keys. It will take up a lot of time to reach this goal. Therefore, it;s better to start working with low-frequency queries with a vivid themed binding.

Online Casino Marketing: Focusing On The Company Profile

Integrity as well reliability have the top priority in the gambling industry. Projects following those principles enjoy the trust of the targeted clientele. There is a great deal of influence brought on the side of the feedback from gamblers on different websites and top lists of the best online casinos in the forums. Players like to discuss certain establishments with each other. In case the majority of comments positively or neutrally toned, efficiency from advertizing campaign will increase significantly.

Negative feedback centering around fraudulence and troubles with money withdrawal interfere with effects promotional activities. That is the reason for operators who shown themselves on the damning side to correct their reputation in the first place.

It's a separate topic to discuss, so there's no point in considering it in detail. We here analyze what online casino promotion implies.

How To Build An Effective Marketing Strategy: 7 Working Tools

Online casino marketing is made up of a variety of technologies, which you can use to successfully popularize the project. Below we discuss the main promotion tools, which allow increasing gambling traffic and gambling website monetization.

1. Social media

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A standard method to announce oneself to target your audience is via personal accounts in social media. We recommend you have own accounts in each known service. In this respect, you should maintain direct contact with your audience and do everything you can to attract the players. So if you are not sure how to promote online gambling website the right way you’d better start with social media. You will contribute to recognition of your brand greatly.

You can announce everything that happens in the establishment, or just publish important gambling news on your page. The goal is to develop comfortable environment for people with common interests to discuss a certain topic, game strategies, recommend interesting videoslots to each other, etc. If the work with the visitors in social media is done correctly gambling website monetization will bring a lot more profits.

2. SEO Promotion Of Online Casinos

How to promote online casino? Make sure that your resource is in the list of top ten target requests. This way you will increase casino traffic monetization and consequently the amount of visitors.

The SEO concept implies:

• working on internal optimization(working with text, using keys, creating a website map, internal relink, etc.);
• popularization of the resource for search engines(developing as many external references as possible — pages of other websites featuring links to your resource);
• ongoing work on maintaining and improving the obtained results.

Using SEO online casino promotion as a promotional instrument you can generate casino traffic monetization, while spending minimal money. SEO can boast efficient growth of attendance and opportunities for adequate evaluation of the resource performance.

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3. Emailing

Emailing can actually help you make very good results for relatively small money. But you can't turn this service into spam. Letters should be sent only to interested users who have subscribed to emailing and voluntarily provided their addresses.

Writing a letter should also be approached with particular care. You should better trust this to a professional copywriter. Although you can just describe anything you deem appropriate in these letters.

4. CRM system

CRM means Customer relationship management. In this case we players are implied. This is a multi-level structure that is analyzing user needs. Using this instrument you can successfully identify new development paths and simplify the managing processes greatly.

CRM enables you to:

• to automate relations with the clients;
• get the relevant information on the customer base at any time;
• quickly serve a user to increase his or her loyalty;
• control employee performance.

Today's online casino marketing cannot do without CRM because this system allows automatizing most processes. The collected and analyzed data allows creating new development strategies of a gambling project.

5. Partner Programs

Gambling advertising would be incomplete without partner programs. Operators can buy gambling traffic from specialized companies. Payment is credited for each attracted customer. The procedure is as follows: owners of gaming website place a banner on the resource serving as a link to casino site. Operators pay their partner money for each transition or registration with a deposit.

There are many different partner programs today. An operator is only required to register a project on appropriate website, select the most suitable variant of collaboration(in terms of price-quality ratio) and start working. When choosing a partner, you should consider a great many of parameters, the main ones being quality and attendance. If you buy gambling traffic you will be able to speed up the development of your project.

6. Loyalty Programs

After you bring a new player to resource, your target is to retain his interest. The steady increase in the quantity of visitors allows the project to start bringing stable income. But sooner or later, you should start taking steps to hold your customers' interest. Special programs are designed to build relationships with gamblers.

Access to such programs should be made available to every user who has completed the registration, confirmed the identity and deposited to the game account. A player will receive many bonuses, take part in advertising campaigns, and so on. In addition, operators can create a special program that will exchange bonus points for money.

All of the above has a positive impact on the final choice players make. Quality service will allow you to acquire a great number of loyal gamblers.

7. Newsfeed

You have to actively maintain newsfeed announcing all events regarding the casino. You can use a separate section and your accounts in social network to post a link to casino website. There’s a myriad of material to create content, so you can easily find something to work with.

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Gambling Advertising: Conclusion

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We discussed here just a small fraction of the tasks to be accomplished within the framework of promotion. If this matter is a dark forest to you, it’s better to seek assistance with Casino Market. The company has been in the gaming industry for years and has a great deal of experience. Don't waste any time! While you will try to understand the subtleties of marketing, the competitors will lure your target audience away.