An effective casino digital marketing strategy

Every casino marketer knows that targeting guests and driving interest in your casino and your brand can be tricky. It’s a crowded marketplace, and you’re not just competing with local and online casinos, you’re competing for direct bookings with OTA sites as well. It’s a lot to take on, and a lot to master. To help set you up for success, we’ve compiled a few smart tips for an effective digital marketing strategy that will help boost your confidence in the marketplace and help you optimally target future guests.

Your strategy

First things first, what is your plan? We’re living in the age of the customer, which means we need to adopt a guest-centric mindset to optimize engagement. You need to determine:

• Your audience(s)
• The types of campaign(s) you want to run
• Who in your team will be responsible for creating, maintaining, and analyzing each campaign.

Ensuring that the right team members are responsible for the right activity will help with accountability and allow you to stay on top of your goals.

Brand & personality

Every casino should have its own unique brand voice and personality. Understanding your brand and being able to communicate that personality is one of the best ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Once you’ve developed your brand voice, the next step is to ensure it’s consistently used across all your channels – from your website and marketing campaigns to blogs, social media posts and print collateral.

Creating valuable, sustainable customer relationships doesn’t stop once you get that guest through the door; it comes from building connections and listening to your guests. This is where you have the opportunity to convey your brand’s personality and create a consistent level of service and engagement both online and in person. Whatever you promise in your campaigns should be reflected in your on-property experience. Impactful, memorable, and emotional connections lead to true brand loyalty.

Defining audiences

Now you know who you are, and you know the messages and personality you want to convey, you need to know who you are trying to reach. As casino resorts tend to have multiple lines of revenue – gaming, spa, hotel, F&B, entertainment, and so on, it’s also likely you will have a variety of audiences that frequent your casino. Using a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing will prevent you from creating the personalized engagement that leads to long-term loyalty. Use your CRM and other guest data to help define your target audiences based on spend, behavior, location, and other demographics, and then create specialized campaigns for each one. Defining these key aspects of who you are will enable you to target your messaging, content, and strategy to get the most impact from each campaign.

Channels & content

Once your audiences are defined, and you know how you want your brand message to come across, the next step is determining the best way to reach those guests. There are a multitude of channels you can use to connect with potential guests, but there will always be limits around budget, timing, and resources. Don’t overstretch yourself to do everything. It’s far better to segment your activity to a smaller, more targeted audience and channel rather than pushing your team far beyond their capacity or casting too wide a net with overly general campaigns. Remember that your most valuable guests will be those who connect with and have the best experiences with your brand.

Along with the right channel, you need the right content. If resources are tight, content is something that can be outsourced; but to ensure this is done effectively, your brand voice and messaging should be clearly understood by whoever is writing your copy. As always, consistency is key, as is the importance to create clear, accurate, and engaging content. It’s also important to track engagement to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Timing your activity

Timing is key and can help create emotive connections with guests. It’s important to be aware of local area activities, upcoming events, holidays, and specialty areas to capitalize on the content people are searching for and when they are searching for it.

• Make sure to place ads and/or social media posts around certain times of year based on those events.
• Utilize programmatic advertising, AdWords, or Google Display Network to target the right kind of searches on Google or those who are searching for terms that match your brand and audience.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Last, but by no means least, you’ll need to measure your success by constantly analyzing your digital marketing performance. You need to know how your campaigns are performing and, if they are underperforming, you need to be able to pivot and make changes. The idea is to be proactive around your media mix so there are no surprises. Marketers must be mindful with their digital budgets, closely correlating performance and spending. There is less room for error and more pressure for results.

This can be done monthly if you’re running a long campaign, or quarterly if your resources are tight. Measuring your success and setting KPIs will help ensure you’re seeing return on your investment.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Are guests responding to your campaign activities?
• Have you seen a spike in direct bookings over the past quarter?
• What were their booking sources?

Being able to measure everything you do will help determine future campaigns and keep your team motivated. If you know something is working, keep doing it! But always take the opportunity to try new tactics, including A/B testing your ads with different copy, images, or event CTA buttons to discover the most engaging version.

See our latest guide to learn more on how casinos can leverage digital marketing to drive demand.

CASE STUDY

One of our online casino customers used our digital marketing services to create specific cross-channel promotions designed to drive gamers to download their online app and create more First Time Depositors (FTDs), while lowering their cost per acquisition (CPA).

The results? See for yourself, below: