Reaching New Worldwide Customers

It’s time to see the whole world as our potential customer base instead of just looking to a specific location or group.

As human beings we have similar needs, but there are small differences due to the location and culture where we live in. The same goes for people that enjoy gambling. The motivation/desire to gamble might be different depending on the location where the customer lives.

For instance, I have been told that Chinese love to gamble and sometimes they just play by their instincts verses playing with strategies and a plan. The same happens with some specific games. For example in some parts of Europe, people go to a casino to play cards as opposed to going there to play slot machines. There are some specific places where people go just to play slots, that are much the same as arcades in the UK.
It is important that you understand all of these culture factors if you are thinking of promoting your portal site to non-English players.

To start with, you will need to make sure that your translated website content has been localized for a specific location or region. For example; if you are trying to reach Spanish customers living in Mexico but translation was done by someone from Spain, then most likely you will not get high costumer conversion from your traffic.

Here are some specific examples of regional differences. Slots games are known as “tragaperras” and in south and Central America are known as “tragamonedas”. You will also need to make sure that your website has been marketed for the country search engine so country specific searchers can find you.

Burstin Marketing Group can help you in this area as well. Please, send us an email with your question and will be happy to assist you.

Will Recession affect the online gambling business?

Everyone is making their own predictions on how the global economic recession will affect the online gambling business.
Many of us are quite concerned that regular casino players will start cutting their gambling budget and playing less. Regular casino players or gamblers are actually known as people who see this entertainment as a very important activity in their lives. Therefore, they will be around even at bad times. Now for how long, we don’t know.

As an affiliate we want our customers to keep playing and contributing to our affiliate income. However, we don’t want those spenders to disappear all of a sudden because they lost everything. After all, we count on the income that was generated month after month from those players.

It is important that our customer base doesn’t feel that recession will affect their entertainment, and as an affiliate/operator we will continue to bring them good deals in the bad times so they can continue with their favourite home entertainment, and of course keep contributing to the income to your affiliate account. Players will increasingly become bonus hunters; don’t forget, if you don’t work on retention, the hunters will be off looking for the next deal.

Marketing Predictions

I've read the below 2009 predictions at a popular online marketing forum.

1. Potential search deal likely between Yahoo! and Microsoft.
2. Net Neutrality should become an important mainstream issue.
3. Performance-driven advertising should continue to rise.
4. Challenges in monetizing video advertising should persist.
5. Mobile usage should continue its strong growth momentum, but mobile advertising will likely be challenging this year.
6. Amazon's low pricing strategy should continue to bring value seeking customers.
7. Possible bankruptcies in brick-and-mortar retail should create opportunities for ecommerce companies.
8. CPMs should remain under pressure.
9. Consolidation activities could potentially resume during 2H'09.
10. Promotional activity in the OTA space should increase.

Predictions provided by JPMorgan.

Social Marketing

We have observed that some gambling operators and affiliates have started to add different web 2.0 tools to increase more website popularity and of course increase sales as well.

Facebook has been used a lot by Poker Rooms and Poker Affiliates who have been creating rooms and inviting people to try the games and be part of groups. They have also been promoting their affiliate portals with special offers provided exclusively by the casino operator a great way to interact with and expose your brand to people that are interested in playing online games, and best of all it’s free.
A great way to interact and exposed your brand with people that are interested on playing online games and free to advertise.

Website Evaluation Tools

January 2009