There are few industries that can rival the success of the online poker and casino ones in the modern day. They are essentially a license to print money at this point and almost everyone involved in them is making serious cash.
The evidence of that is annual revenue of around $70 billion and the reason for it is partly the quality of the games but also skilful marketing. It does not matter how good your games are if you cannot get people to visit the sites in the first place.
Most companies would love to achieve the sort of turnover that the casino and poker ones are enjoying, so it is worth taking a look at the promotional strategies they utilize to see what lessons can be learned.
Keep reading to find out the marketing secrets.
Table of Contents
A Smart SEO Strategy
Many businesses know something about search engine optimization (SEO), but that is not the same as having a coherent strategy. It is a particularly crucial marketing tool for companies that are entirely digital – like casino and poker sites.
SEO marketing is all about ensuring that your site ranks highly in relevant internet searches. Top online casinos employ people to create blogs and articles featuring keywords that are designed to boost internet search rankings.
These must be high quality and informative pieces though, not cheap or badly written articles spammed with the words in question. Such articles tend to be flagged up by Google and other search engines.
The industry has mastered improving its SEO to direct more people to the sites and other sectors can learn from the example. Try SEMrush or Moz for more info about SEO.
Provide Guides and Tips
Having drawn people in, casinos and poker sites then reinforce this by featuring helpful content. For example, playing a poker game online for the very first time can be daunting – it is a complex and sophisticated game – so many sites feature how-to-play guides and tips.
That keeps new visitors engaged and prevents them from feeling that the game is too difficult for them to master, making them more likely to give it a try. Other companies that offer services or products that are complicated for laypeople to understand – for instance in the tech industry – could learn from this strategy.
Push Promotions and Bonuses
The gambling industry is very good at winning new customers and rewarding long-term ones through promotions and bonuses. For example, a new player who signs up to play casino games will almost always encounter a no deposit bonus. That provides them with a stake to gamble with before they deposit any money of their own.
It makes sound business sense because people are hooked by the free money and will start to play. Poker and other casino games are exciting and a sizeable number will keep playing with their own money afterwards, especially if they get the buzz of that first win.
The loyalty schemes these sites deploy to retain customers are just as important though. They are a way of keeping hold of those who have already signed up in what is a competitive industry with lots of rival sites hoping to lure them away.
Anyone can learn these lessons about customer attraction and retention and start providing some perks to both their new and longstanding clients.
Understand Social Proof
The concept of ‘social proof’ in marketing refers to the tendency that the public has to place more faith in other consumers than in a brand itself. That does not have to be a negative for companies though, as casino and poker sites have shown.
It just means that building the reputation of your brand is partly down to the public. If you visit online poker or casino sites you will often find reviews from satisfied customers on display, including video ones. These sites also develop their social proof marketing through referral schemes that see happy customers encourage others to sign up.
It does not have to be difficult and the rewards can be tremendous.
Provide Feel-Good Feedback Loops
If your site creates user experiences that make people feel better, they will want to come back and have those experiences again. That is known as a positive feedback loop, and it is a promotional strategy that casino and poker sites exploit.
They have an advantage in that winning money will create that loop, but people do not always win. The sites compensate them through promotions that they can redeem to boost their moods.
A positive feedback loop means that the customer keeps coming back, so every industry should strive to create them.
All of these strategies have made the casino industry into a stunning success story and other industries can emulate them.
