Adapting casino marketing to shifting player behavior

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Blog Oct 07, 2020

Christian Jabon

Executive Vice President, Business Solutions

Customers in the Covid-19 environment will naturally change their priorities and interests, which in turn impacts how they will participate and spend at casinos. This consumer shift in the “New Normal” is forcing many hotels, resorts and casinos to develop new engagement strategies and modify gaming incentives for casino marketing.

The typical questions casino marketing departments will ask are:

• How should I adjust the segmentation of my players?
• How do I reassess the lifetime value of my players?
• What is the best approach to reinvesting in my players?
• How should I market to my players without being insensitive?

To answer these questions, you should reevaluate all your players and redefine their personas, assessing the impact of the recession on their lifestyles, behaviors, and spending.

Defining new player segments for casino marketing

First, monitor your customer base and they’re reaction to news, stories and social media. You can gauge these reactions and score them along with publicly available income and unemployment information to reinforce your model. This monitoring can provide clear sentimental and financial metrics to update the player lifetime value.

Second, monitor the gaming behavior of your returning players using gaming tracking technology. Gauge their change in activity and define those shifts based on demographic profiles, geography and social media comments.

Understanding your target players’ interests, concerns and actions will help you create distinct personas. Then, you can evaluate the right amount to invest in each category to generate a ROI. You should base segments on lifestyle, income bracket, health concerns, emotions and social distancing mandates and market to them accordingly.

A player in the New Normal can be categorized based on three behavior traits:

• Stay at home: Fears social interaction and may use online gaming platforms.
• Proceed with caution: Selective about activities and reacts to safe social gatherings.
• Live and let live: Back to normal and living as if nothing ever happened.

In addition, a player can fall under four different lifestyle segments:

If you do not have a profiling mechanism in place, this process can be time-consuming and require a lot of manual work. A more efficient approach could be to rely on a marketing recommendation engine to supplement your CRM platform.

Marketing recommendation engine for player profiles

A marketing recommendation engine ensures that player profiles are updated regularly to identify new engagement and communication opportunities to drive growth. The engine uses machine learning, advanced algorithms and natural language processing to understand your players and provide you with precise business solutions to drive acquisition and engagement.

This platform is aimed at helping marketers identify the right players at the right time, the best promotion or casino event for the target audience, the optimal budget to drive incremental profit, and ultimately, the updated customer lifetime value.

Because the value of players may evolve daily, marketing recommendation engines are designed to revisit the valuation frequently. This ensures that any shifts in lifestyle, spending and behaviors are considered when recommending a specific offer for a player.

Given the current climate, a successful recommendation engine will adjust to the new normal environment. Among the considerations, defining your player and grouping them according to their current personas is key.

Modifying your gaming incentives to drive value in casino marketing

By segmenting players with common attributes and leveraging those segments as variables in the marketing recommendation engine, casino marketers can now get recommendations on offer types, events, targeted communication messages and potential response rates by location, age and worth.

More than ever, companies will need to invest in their player development experience through personalization to drive revenue. According to a study conducted by Evergage, 88% of U.S. marketers “realized a measurable lift in business results” due to personalization programs, with 53% “reporting a lift greater than 10%.”

Casino incentives can range from luxury giveaways to free play or gaming incentives or free hotel stays to discounted entertainment tickets. These offers should be generated based on your new lifetime player worth, as calculated from the above guidance in the New Normal.

By linking offers to potential and existing players based on their defined personas, casinos can lower their marketing costs, create better connections, and drive measurable value. Casinos can also get an understanding of the expected stream of discounted revenue, assign new player lifetime value and calculate a reinvestment amount that may generate incremental profit.

With a marketing recommendation engine, the opportunities to drive growth are endless, offering casino marketers creative ways to incentivize players. By investing in tools that make recommendations based on data and behavior, you can increase not only player engagement, but overall profits.

Christian Jabon, VP, Business Solutions is focused on improving business performance through the creation and delivery of business intelligence and analytics solutions for integrated resorts and financial institutions. He has over 10 years of analytical experience helping organizations make relevant business decisions involving massive amounts of data by designing intuitive reporting frameworks. Most recently, Chris was the Director of BI Business Solutions at MGM Resorts International.