You have a wide audience of casino fans but in order to get them to your site, you have to promote your online casino. How do you do that? There are a number of ways to attract players to your site. Being that the online gambling industry is a competitive one, you need to practice all the marketing strategies your competitors are using.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a well-established casino or just starting with the help of Casinnovate, you’ll want to use all the power you can to stand out in this competitive market. For your casino to make it, you need to get new users and keep your regular players. To gain the players in the first place, you’ll need to create an organized and effective marketing campaign.
This is going to allow you to attract players. If you can effectively manage to do this, you’ll be rewarded with significant profit gains. The good news is there are plenty of players out there who are willing to sign up and play for real money at your casino. You just need to reach them and speak their language.
Have a Great Landing Page
A landing page is the front of your business. It is what represents all the important points of your online casino and its benefits. Your landing page will be visited by different users of search engines or for those who reacted to contextual advertising. It is therefore highly important to make it a major resource for promoting your site. Just be sure that your landing page looks attractive, has good graphics, has a clear message, and functions well. If it seems low quality, visitors may get suspicious that it’s not legit and if this happens, you miss out. The landing page may well be the first impression. Use very few, but powerful words and make it stand out.
SEO Strategies to Promote an Online Casino
Content truly is king and an important part of your online casino marketing strategy. If you want to rank high for the online casino that you are, you’ll want to integrate SEO strategies. This is the process of planning out what keywords you’ll use, as well as outlining and implementing steps all in the name of improving your rank in search engines.
Using keywords properly will help Google index you properly and with time, you’ll move higher up in the rankings. Writing blogs or articles that are connected to your casino will help people find you in the sea of online casinos out there.
Here are the steps involved:
Create a list of keywords
This may take some analysis. There are plenty of tools out there to help you figure out what keywords you should integrate into your content.
Analyze your competition on page 1 of Google
If they have made it to the top with keywords you think are relevant, see what they’ve done and really study it. Then create something that is different or if you can, create something better.
Add a Hook Into Your Content
The “hook” is the thing you put in your content that makes other sites want to link back. To best improve rankings in a search engine, you need to get yourself backlinks. You might try teaming up with HARO (Help a reporter out). The site connects experts in the field to reporters from high authority sources.
Your content can be a source with your “hook” that is then backlinked to a well-known site. These are white hat marketing strategies so there’s no risk of being penalized by Google. If a big news site includes your link, you look like an authority and this does a lot for your ranking. Create “how to” posts, quizzes, infographics, and “why” articles that big sites will want to link back to.
You could also create a guide that is high quality that gives good insight into your industry. Ultimately, your “hook” will have different sites linking back to you as you’ve created a valuable source of information that people have interest in.
On Page SEO Optimization
You want to make sure that the content you have is SEO optimized when promoting an online casino. There are so many things that can be done but let’s keep this somewhat simple and focus on the basic must-do’s.
Internal links – This is where you use a link on your site for an article that will be on the same site. When you link back to one of your pages, it should answer a question or support the statement you’re linking to.
Optimizing for Semantic SEO – Finding words that are related to the target keyword. Then using it in your content. Put your keywords into Google Images. Then you want to type the same words into a normal Google search. Go down to the “Searches related to” area. This is going to give you a bunch of words that you can use in your content.
Your URLs should be short – It’s way more effective than a long URL. You can make your URL just your keyword or add one more onto it.
Affiliate Programs
Partner websites can successfully promote an online casino, doing a lot of the advertising work for you. While yes, you will be paying them and giving them a percentage of your earnings, you’re avoiding the hefty bill you’d get for hiring an ad agency. All said and done, you want your online casino to be visited and that is going to take serious marketing skills. Affiliate programs will often have some excellent advertisers working in the background. You need them and when they bring people to your site, you give them a cut of the revenue. Affiliate programs quite simply connect gamblers to casinos.
There are a few types of functions with affiliate programs:
Cost Per Action
These results will be immediate so the affiliate site will get a commission when the user subscribes to you. For example, if a player registers at your casino or puts down their first deposit, you’ll pay the affiliate site that brought them to you.
Revenue Share
The affiliate sites you work with will get a share of your revenue. On average, you’ll be giving an affiliate program 20%-40% of your earnings. Affiliates are going to get income from you whenever you get income for players they sent your way.
Mixed Model
This is where both affiliate options above are mixed together. Here, an affiliate is going to get an initial share of your income from the players they bring you. They also get revenue from the players they sent your way from any further gambling activities that make you money.
SMM (Advertising in social networks)
Create groups and communities on social networks and interact with them. It’s important to engage with your target audience. This gives you street credit and also allows you to be reviewed and talked about so people know you’re legit. In the online gambling world, you’re not going to see gains with a Facebook page per se. You’ll need to get a little more creative.
A good example of this is when Play Fortuna created a promotional strategy with Stream Race. Stream Race is responsible for putting together massive tournaments. In the tournaments they collaborated together on, they have YouTubers streaming as they compete against each other in slots.
Participants would get bonus points along the way. They were competing to be placed in the top 10, which put them in contention to win a new car. People watching could support the streamers, commenting and liking along the way. Participants would follow affiliate links and sign up to the online casino that gives them the bonuses. As this was all live streamed, any onlookers would see the casino name, which is of course great advertising.
When Play Fortuna did this, they also received a lot of attention in gaming news. This resulted in constant expansion of new players and Play Fortuna shot up to the top in the online gambling world.
External Marketing
Getting your target audience to your landing page will take some external marketing. The most common is Google advertisements for gaming websites. It’s a well-known strategy because it works. You will pay out a lot of money but this is the big opportunity to market your casino and gain more players.
Google ads gives you a massive audience that is precisely targeted. You can reach players all over the world, the choice is yours when you set it up. You can choose to create a banner in your Google ad campaign. That way when the potential players are looking for something related to what you’re advertising, your casino banner will pop up.
CRM Marketing
CRM stands for customer relationship management. Within this framework, you’re using methods to manage and analyze interactions with players you already have as well as past or potential players.
Push notifications
A push notification is when those small messages pop up on your device. They can be sent anytime, and the user doesn’t need to be in the app or on the site to get them. When you integrate helpful information into the push notifications, you can engage with players. It is a popular way to communicate with players and send them important information.
You can move player through the sales funnel and promote offers like free spins and special bonuses at your casino. This gets players enthusiastic about playing more. Promoting your casino also means keeping the players you have engaged. Through push notifications, you’re able to do this.
You can stay in touch and send your players notifications on great bonuses and tournament invites through email. When a player signs up, they will have to input their email address. If they opt-in for email notifications, you can keep them engaged. You’ll want to let them know the benefits of signing up for emails like free giveaways, free spins, and other promotions that will come their way via email.
SMS Newsletters for Mobile Devices
An SMS is going to be a short message that keeps you engaged with your players. It goes through on people’s phones as opposed to them getting an email. It is just one more avenue you can take to get that direct interaction with your current players to keep them coming back to your casino.
Offers and Bonuses
Every casino out there is offering a bonus of sorts to get people playing at their casino as well as keeping them at the casino. Players are looking for a welcome offer they can’t refuse. This is known as acquisition marketing where you’re acquiring new players through an offer. When they sign up, they get free spins and perhaps a match bonus. These are standard offers that lure players in.
There are retention bonuses you can offer as well. In retention marketing, you’ll be offering players bonuses that keep them playing with you. This might come in a weekly bonus offer or perhaps you’re giving them tailored bonuses on random based on what they’ve been playing. VIP programs can come into play here. The more players engage at your casino, the higher up they go in the VIP levels. As they go higher, they’re offered bigger prizes. You can offer free games, free spins, and daily bonuses to get new players and keep your current players engaged.
Promote Most Popular Games
No matter what casino software you’re using, there is going to be a game they have created that is extremely popular. It is the game that can draw players in because it is well loved. These are often a new release. You can promote the games you believe to be most popular however you want.
A good example of a casino leveraging their games is PokerStars. The slot, Millionaire’s Island was a big hit because it was possible to hit the big jackpot with just a 0.50 spin. This offer got some good media and went viral on the internet when a student from Uruguay won $1.5 million after playing for 3 minutes. This brought on a rush of new players who became regular players.
Transparency
Being an honest casino goes a very long way. While you do have great competition out there, nobody is ever going to fault you for being completely transparent. If the players you have think you’ve been dishonest, you can bet they’re going to post this somewhere online. Then all your marketing efforts have been lost.
Through transparency, a player will have all the information they need with no surprises. It’s important to say what you mean and back it up. Not only are you going to gain accolades from the gambling world, but you avoid nasty reviews that claim your dishonest and non-legit. Players all communicate, and you will be talked about and rated. Be the trustworthy source they can come to.
Conclusion
Yes, there’s a lot of competition out there in the online gambling world. There is also a massive market of players willing to play for real money. There are companies that make it easy to set up your own casino with all the best casino software providers. Then it’s up to you to attract people to your site. To tap into your target market, you’re going to need a lot of marketing tricks up your sleeve. Knowing who your target audience is and speaking to them is important. Utilizing the marketing funnel is an efficient way of getting players interested in your casino.
Using all the methods to keep your players are equally important. Let gamblers know when new games are coming out, make them offers they can’t refuse, and keep them posted on what is new and happening in the gambling world. Treat each player as though they are your VIP clients because they are. When your players are happy, they’re going to leave good reviews and that is going to send more players your way. To promote an online casino, you need to use the tools that are available because you can guarantee that your competition is.
