Few sectors can hold a candle to the gambling industry regarding innovation and marketing strategy. For nearly 100 years, since Las Vegas became a viable vacation destination for many people, this kickstarted a trend where innovators used the money generated to cycle back into research and development. Regardless of your industry, ensuring that you reroute at least some profit into long-term prospects is never a bad idea.
A surprising number of old, proven marketing strategies continue to help businesses thrive online, but they aren’t necessarily new ideas. They’ve just been successfully adapted for a 21st century digital audience. Now that the landscape has changed entirely in casino gaming and the focus is almost exclusively on online platforms, many of these approaches have been perfected over the years.
A fresh approach to onboarding new customers
The concept of providing a sample of service, or a “free sample”, isn’t something the iGaming industry created. This has been a common and effective tactic that businesses used long before the internet existed.
However, iGaming has been able to use this idea and bring it into the digital age, with bonus codes and promotions playing a pivotal role in spearheading the seismic shift in attitude. In time, this resulted in a sea of people making the switch from land-based to online platforms, and not only did they use these codes to their advantage, but they also explored other avenues, such as casino reviews, to get a bigger picture of what the provider had to offer and whether it is suitable for them.
Just how vital bonus codes and promotions are for iGaming providers can’t be downplayed. Many of their competitors will think of new ways and more enticing bonuses to try and attract customers away to their service instead. As the internet has created a global, 24/7 industry, it is a battle that rarely slows down.
Emphasis on new customers
It isn’t just an innovative approach to getting new customers on board that really stood out as an ingenious way of marketing in the iGaming sector. It stretched far beyond that. Many of these bonuses emphasized engaging with new people who had never used them to their site.
However, some existing customers took umbrage to this approach and felt overlooked by these companies, but their displeasure soon passed.
Many iGaming companies do offer bonuses to loyal players, but the big money comes from bringing in as many new customers as possible. Like any business, success is measured by the amount of paying customers. Although addressing brand loyalty shouldn’t be overlooked, the iGaming sector showed that getting new people on board was a better business decision.
Even though there were loyal customers who consistently brought people to their site, many casino companies would pivot their attention to new customers, and time has shown that this is an approach that has paid off.
Implementation of disruptive innovations
The iGaming industry flourished initially because it began to make inroads into the digital world long before many other companies did. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of companies that are successful today barely had an online presence. However, some of the world’s top iGaming providers had been established online for years and used this expertly to their advantage. As soon as gamers started to explore what online casino gaming had to offer, these companies were in a prime position to take advantage.
The internet itself was a disruptive innovation that was met with initial skepticism and reluctance by many people. However, in time, it has shown just how beneficial it has been to society overall, as well as the casino industry in particular. If you look at the world’s biggest companies, almost all would have struggled to be where they are without the internet.
Companies such as Meta wouldn’t exist, and even though they’re experiencing a downturn at the moment, they’re looking toward other disruptive innovations to restructure their business model so they can continue to generate immense profits. Regardless of the seismic technological changes that have emerged, the iGaming industry has implemented them.
Once smartphones and tablets became more popular, iGaming found ways to adapt. Again, when new payment methods emerged, such as Bitcoin, many people in traditional finance shied away from it and downplayed its effectiveness. However, the iGaming industry found ways to use it in their services, which has been lauded by gamers all over the world.
The power of social media
This is one area other industries have also mastered, but the iGaming sector was one of the first to explore the power of SEO marketing and social media presence. A well-thought-out, viral advertisement on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram now has the combined reach that newspapers and television had at their peak. While this might be common knowledge for people who work in marketing today, it was largely unexplored when casino companies explored this landscape 20 years ago.
Digital and social media marketing is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Social media marketing has many advantages; it’s far more cost-effective than a localized and regional advert in a newspaper, television or radio. Not only does it reach many more people, but it is cheap to design yourself and many start-ups learned quickly from the blueprint the iGaming industry laid out in a simple form. Practical, creative and to-the-point digital advertising is a lot more impactful than a dated approach involving legacy media.
The future is mobile
In 2023, this might seem to be an obvious conclusion to draw. You only need to walk around a busy town or city center to see how many people are attached to their phones in some way — whether they’re on their phones scrolling, listening to music or calling their friends. However, when iGaming first earmarked the internet as a huge potential growth area, many people didn’t see it.
While many of these people will downplay their negative attitude toward the internet, you only need to find newspaper headlines from the time that downplays the rise of technology. Conspiracists argued about how the internet would end the world as we know it and how the Y2K bug was about to bring the world to its knees. However, during this fuss and noise, iGaming companies were buying up domains and spending money researching online gambling platforms.
It wasn’t until a decade or so later that the industry began to take off. By this stage, the companies were so well adjusted in the market that there wasn’t much else they needed to do.
They then set their sights on the next significant innovation, which was mobile phone technology at that stage. Again, in the mid-2000s, although mobile phones were popular and had a lot of practical utility, people used them primarily to send text messages and make phone calls.
Some had camera capabilities, but they were primitive and low-quality, and although some connected to the internet, they had nowhere near the bandwidth and functionality they do today. The iGaming industry shifted towards mobile apps and mobile casino platforms long before they dominated the industry like they do today. They’ve become such an enormous hit that any successful marketing strategy in 2023 cannot ignore internet or smartphone platforms.
