Due to steady growth, the gambling industry is one of the most competitive ones. In practice, it leads to meeting and overcoming the newest problems in terms of marketing and advertising. What is the situation with it in the middle of 2020?
Being an actively developing industry, online and offline casino providers are at the forefront of innovation in marketing and advertising. The coronavirus pandemic has only increased the interest in this direction as people always want to make easy money, while the bookmaking industry has met significant troubles during the total quarantine. So, people turned their look at online gambling and considerably increased the total revenue in this sphere.
However, even ignoring the COVID-19 influence, the gambling industry has had steady growth over the years and forecasts have been bright for the whole sector. For a particular entertainment provider, the situation is not so optimistic as positive predictions usually mean the growth of competitiveness. In turn, it requires applying better marketing campaigns, the usage of more innovative advertising methods, and realisation of the well-planned overall strategy.
It is interesting, that not only adverse phenomenon can be met in the sphere of online and offline casinos. The vast majority of the developed countries have already been applying new restrictions in the gambling sector. Governments of most states know what gaming addiction is, and try to implement stricter rules for responsible gaming. For gambling providers, it means severer rules during the license getting. In this case, a rethinking of the whole marketing and advertising strategy is a must for every gambling organisation.
5 major marketing challenges in the gambling industry
Legislation obstacles
That is probably the hardest issue for current marketing strategies. Moreover, the word ‘strategies’ seems to be redundant in this context as governments of diverse countries are changing requirements regularly. For instance, the UK and Spain rulers decided to restrict the usage of betting companies’ logos on the T-shirts of sports clubs as part of a more conservative advertising campaign.
The recent news about casinos also confirmed that German Association required more control over the payments of gambling providers. In practice, it can significantly influence the way an online casino tries to build its advertising campaign, which can be based around fast withdrawal methods, for example. Norway is disturbed because of increased gambling addiction during the last five years, which can lead to more severe rules of getting a license and advertising methods. That is only a shortlist of countries that may change marketing plans.
All these aspects confirm that building a long-lasting marketing campaign has become much harder nowadays, while the situation can still be changing regularly. In this case, marketing chiefs should adjust their advertising and marketing campaigns to short-term deals or include the possibility to break the cooperation due to legal changes in the country where they are promoting the brand.
Increasing ads restrictions
As it has been mentioned in the previous item, states all over the world are focused on decreasing the amount of advertising in their countries. Even though there is no clear confirmation that the increase in the number of ads leads to more cases of gambling addiction, state rulers assume that the reverse trend is even less likely. So, to avoid additional pressure on gamblers’ behaviour, governments are raising limits on the advertising amounts.
In practice, it leads to fewer legal possibilities to promote brand name and awareness. Thus, a gambling provider cannot deal with a famous sports team or organisation, use TV or radio for advertising. Of course, social media comes to the rescue, but this niche is not something breakthrough, also knowing that advertising settings can be easily set to blocking specific ads.
In such a situation, the ability to find new approaches is growing, and online casinos have already found the decision. Thus, streaming services like Twitch or Youtube don’t have such strict rules in terms of advertising (but still have).
Huge competition
It seems to be a too obvious aspect to mention for the growing industry, but still, a lot of gambling providers do not adjust their marketing campaigns, taking into account this element. Of course, new advertising strategies are not appearing every day, and it’s almost impossible to suggest something totally unique, but let’s look at the situation from another perspective.
Everybody knows what a unique selling proposition is, but not everyone uses it in the right manner. Now, a lot of online and offline entertainment providers are skipping the usage of this aspect in their promotion, turning ads to behavioural elements of their potential clients to build warmer contact. However, USP is the reliably working method that combines many positive sides of advertising in a short message.
In other words, USP should be an inevitable part of the advertising campaign, even if it seems that it doesn’t work. The potential customer has to know what are the benefits of using one service instead of another and focus on a celebrity or effective 3D promo cannot overcome its influence.
Changing habits of potential customers
Without a doubt, it is the most challenging aspect of marketing campaigns. The challenge of creating a client’s portrait or predicting a customer’s behaviour has already become a routine for marketers, but it’s almost impossible to do this task perfectly.
Even though the reason seems to be unreal to overcome (everyone is different), a lot of general trends can be highlighted. Nowadays, the situation turns to the analysis of zoomers instead of millennials, and this fact should be taken into account by marketing experts.
The analysis starts with defining the conditions that have influenced the growth of the regarded generation: what gadgets they have had, what games they have been playing, and things alike. It will lead to the next step and help to review the situation in more detail. Thus, it would be great to define the specific features like the preferable colour of the buttons at an online casino, viral video influence, the role of the humour or glamour for the behaviour of a young potential client, and so on.
Hard brand-building process
That is, actually, the sum of all the previous aspects but with one crucial detail. Every gambling company has to understand what is its general strategy in terms of acceptable human values. It can be something like ‘fair game’, ‘positive emotions’, ‘full legality’, or message alike. If we take the last aspect, it means that a company with such a target doesn’t have to use illegal ways of increasing popularity and brand awareness. Those who are promoting positive emotions have to avoid cooperation with angry streamers, and so on.
Indeed, defining the general line of the brand is the cornerstone element, which helps to build further strategy. At the same time, the owner of online casinos has to understand gambling addiction specifics to know how to better organise the business.
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