Opinion: Tying together online and offline marketing
Blueclaw's head of egaming Mike Litson explains how operators can effectively combine their online and offline marketing strategies to drive customer traffic.
Offline channels are often neglected by affiliates and smaller brands simply because they don’t think they have the money to utilise it. Whilst this is often true it doesn’t mean you can’t make the most of what other companies are doing offline and integrate it as part of your online strategy.
For example, take Quicksilver’s recent advertising campaign; do you think that the slot games advertised on that advert had the same traffic figures during the campaign as they did beforehand? No. So promote the slot game in question and you’ve got a very good shot on converting the interested punters into players.
These are the sort of long tail terms that you want to promote to gain authority to your site as a whole “ keep in mind a lot of sites get over 90% of their traffic from long tail.
There are some key points to keep in mind;
- Don’t spam to promote; search engines have begun to crack down on this
- Some Campaigns last longer than others, so try to plan accordingly
- Social Media is ESSENTIAL, Google loves sites that people are talking about. Add a hook to the content page to make it shareable.
- Make sure provide quality content
Those in the sports betting sector have been taking advantage of terms that change week on week for a long time, remember, so don’t neglect it if you’re not in that niche; you just need to look elsewhere. With social media being so prominent in rankings and with Google Fresh giving priority to recent updates this gives the proactive marketeer an edge.
Ranking quickly for something you’ve just seen on the TV isn’t too hard. It is simply a case of reacting quickly and producing high quality content. Following that you should look at using social channels as well as traditional link-building methods. Social media is a marketing channel in itself, the fact is that trending topics “ they don’t happen all too often in gambling although poker player Victoria Coren was trending recently on Twitter “ and hash tags can be used to push your message to a wider audience. You should be timing this in conjunction with your “ or your competitors’ “ offline marketing to put your brand in front of even more potential customers.
Make sure that you don’t rely on the Adwords Tool entirely for keyword research, use your head and keep an eye out for tending topics. Adwords data is usually out of date. Think like a customer; if you want to play poker and just saw an advert for 888s poker cams (888 advertised this a lot) what would you search for? Okay, a lot of traffic will go to the brand but not every user will.