With new sites popping up every day, how do the existing casinos hold their ground and the new ones compete with established giants like Royal Vegas and Casino Tabi ? The best way to do this is to look at casino marketing trends.
Here are the top trends in casino marketing
New Types of Bonuses – Online casino bonuses are as old as the hills, but 2017 has seen a resurgence in innovative casinos.
With virtually every casino offering the standard welcome deposit match and maybe a few free spins, casinos had to find a way to differentiate themselves and stand out from the crowd.
One of the newest and most novel approaches we discovered this year was that of LeoVegas, a brand new online casino: they offered a lifetime loyal play-based bonus with no wagering requirements.
This will probably catch on and we will see more casinos offering such bonuses in the coming year. LeoVegas made quite a few waves by doing away with wagering requirements.
Virtual reality – this one is about making the transition from a spark to a slow-burning fire – is expected to engulf the online casino scene in the coming years.
This seems to be the year when most online casinos have accepted the reality that VR will change everything in the industry forever.
Sites like Slots Million offer players the opportunity to roam a virtual slot casino and play games with a VR headset.
It’s all pretty rudimentary, and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but the effort to develop VR has paid off in a big way from a marketing perspective.
Vera & John Casino has made a huge reputation for being ahead of the pack, and many companies have quickly adapted their advertising to catch on.
As more casinos jump on the VR bandwagon, the marketing power will diminish somewhat as players realize “no big deal, but most offer it now.” But for now, there are still relatively few casinos offering it.
Mobile Apps – Mobile casinos have been around for a while, but 2016 saw mobile players outnumber desktop players for the first time.
Naturally, this caused online casino marketing teams to take notice, resulting in a big year for mobile gaming.
Making mobile casino apps user-friendly, feature-rich, lightweight and compact was a huge trend in 2017, and it is expected to continue to grow along with the growth of the mobile industry.
From a marketing perspective, there has been a huge push to highlight the availability of mobile apps, with the smartest casinos understanding that players don’t always prefer to download them and offering the opportunity to play directly on flash sites as well.
Vera & John Casino still prides itself on being the best mobile casino in the world, we’ll leave that to you to judge for yourself.
Affiliate Marketing – This is not an entirely new method of marketing an online casino, but as more and more people switch to the opportunity to get involved in making money on the Internet from home, affiliate marketing has continued to play a key role in casino marketing.
Affiliates get to take home a big piece of the pie, with the best casino affiliate programs offering as much as 45% of the profits.
If you stop and think about it, it’s really like owning your own casino without the financial risk. Affiliates can earn millions of dollars a year in profits, so it’s no surprise that this tried and tested method continues to play a role.
Although it is becoming increasingly difficult for new affiliates to gain a foothold, I am confident that affiliate marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
With $40,000,000,000 spent on casino games online worldwide each year, there’s always an endless supply of entrepreneurs willing to help with the marketing efforts of the pie.
Social Media – As you may have already noticed, everyone is on the search block and 90% of people are rarely away from their phones for more than a few minutes at a time.
It is not surprising then, that the online casino market is spending record amounts of marketing on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
For example, Facebook doesn’t allow casinos to advertise without a minimum spend of $10,000 per month. This means it’s hard for the little guys to get a foothold on the social media scene, and it essentially rules out affiliates entirely, making direct links to the biggest casinos the only advertising on social media.
As a result, the social media market has had to come up with creative ways to grab social media attention. From hilarious memes to advertorials, the ways casinos are marketing themselves on social media are genius and many would never guess are being dumped.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform,