How egaming can learn from Donald Trump's victory
Strategic insight agency Opinium's research director, Steve Looney, discusses why operators must take a more holistic view of data collection
Top line political polling has come under fire after seemingly unexpected victories for Donald Trump, Brexit and the UK’s Conservative Party at the most recent general election.
But scratch under the surface slightly and it’s clear that all three of those successful campaigns went deeper with their data collection and harnessed the power of taking a holistic view of their ‘customers’ to deliver a winning sales message.
In the recent US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump’s team simply knew far more about the ‘customers’ they needed to convert to win the election than Hillary Clinton’s team, and targeted these groups with laser focus to ensure their message was received and action was taken.
While the egaming industry has made some encouraging progress on the data collection front in recent years, there is still a great deal of inefficient marketing spend as a direct result of a failure to truly understand customers.
In such a highly competitive industry like egaming, the victors will be those who truly understand their customers.
Free spins and deposit bonuses are common and have their place, but what if an operator could incentivise players to deposit or bet with offers that appeal to them personally? It could be a voucher to their favourite coffee shop or department store, which would be much more powerful than another convoluted deposit bonus.
Pop-up poll
One way companies like Opinium do this is by utilising highly targeted ‘pop-up’ online communities, which ask respondents a short series of qualitative questions around a specific topic.
As the number of landline phones spirals downwards towards nil, the very nature of polling and data collection has fundamentally changed. Rather than a long drawn out conversation with a consumer that inevitably interrupts dinner time, sophisticated mobile techniques are now employed to deliver a wealth of valuable data to companies about their target markets.
A highly flexible mobile polling solution, pop-up online communities instantly report their views on a myriad of topics and the resulting data can help operators understand the effectiveness of everything from website content to advertising. Respondents can be profiled to give operators a deep understanding of their lifestyles, media consumption and even their instant opinions of new games or website concepts.
After Hillary Clinton was defeated despite winning the popular vote and being ahead in the national polls, not to mention Brexit, many decried that data is dead. But it’s clear that Trump’s team, with tactics borrowed from the UK’s Brexit campaign groups, understood that it is how data is used that counts.
Underneath the surface, Trump and Co. saw a rising level of resentment from voters in key swing states in the Midwest’s so called ‘rust belt’ and set out to convert these key groups into Trump voters. Targeting them with highly tailored online and mobile advertising and promoted social media content, these voters quite clearly felt that Trump understood them on a personal level and turned out on polling day to back him in their droves.
The egaming industry can learn a lot from the way successful political campaigns collect and use data to target and convert players. The technology is available, but it is not being used.
Knowledge is power and operators who harness the power of data to best understand their target consumers will be the last ones standing in this ultra-competitive industry.