Building your digital marketing strategy
Before you jump on the latest and greatest trend in digital marketing, let’s do a gut-check and see if you have the basics covered.
Every day I am bombarded with emails and alerts about the newest digital marketing technology. We do have some clients who want to stay on the leading edge of communication with their customers, which is great – and fun for us. More times than not though, we end up steering clients back to a proven strategy to make sure they are getting the most bang for their marketing bucks. Conversion tracking for geofencing on competitors is awesome, but it is still in its infancy and will need time to generate significant yields.
Here is a list of must-haves for your digital marketing plan. We are going to focus primarily on mobile because for most demographics, mobile has surpassed desktop for digital use. How many of you checked your email on your phone this morning within 10 minutes of waking? Me too (more like 5 minutes).
1. Responsive Website Design (RWD): Hopefully most or all of you have updated your website to make sure that it looks good and serves up information in a readable and intuitive way, regardless of whether the visitor is on a desktop, mobile device, or tablet. If not, this should be Numero Uno on your budget list for marketing. Having a separate “mobile site” was popular 5-7 years ago, but responsive is now the way to go.
2. Email Designed for Mobile: Many of our casino clients send out offers and promotions via email on a regular basis, and if you do as well, be sure that your email templates are responsive. 42% of recipients will delete your email immediately if they cannot effectively read it on a mobile device. It’s also important to make sure that your mobile-optimized email template supports dynamic content in order to maintain a high level of personalization and include variable offers.
3. Paid Search: Viewing SEM on mobile devices is growing dramatically – up 23% YOY, a natural result of the increase in mobile usage by all age demographics. As a result, clients are increasing their SEM budgets, since 43% of site visits are attributed to mobile browsing.
4. SEO: Be sure that your website is optimized for Search on mobile devices by keeping good page speed and doing away with blocking for CSS, Javascript, and images. The Smartphone Googlebot needs to be able to see everything that users see in order to categorize. You also want to get rid of Flash content and pop-ups, which can be frustrating on mobile devices. Be concise when writing metadata content and creating URLs and titles, etc.
5. SMS: The key is to restrict your SMS messages to content that the recipient would really want to know. 49% of internet users said that they would be willing to receive texts that contain information about sales, discounts, or special promos. Another great use is for utility information. Perhaps you are expanding and have construction disruption; SMS is an excellent way to communicate to your players about the best entrance to use or best place to park today.
These are a few of the building blocks to successful mobile marketing for your casino.
