7 Mega Online Marketing Trendsand how they affect iGaming

Understand the trends

Understand the trends in online marketing.

"Develop Advanced Commercial Strategies to Strengthen Your Online Gaming Presence"

SEO

Prediction: Social & Content Influence SEO

“For the past decade and a half, marketers have often thought of SEO, social media, and content as separate channels and segmented practices. But these barriers are crumbling. In the past 24 months, we’ve seen the overlap between search, social, and content increase at a rapid pace, spurred on by innovations from the search engines, and reinforced by the correlations of social sharing and linking/ranking behavior. In 2013, I expect to see many of the most successful marketers treat these practices not as disparate channels, but as optimizable elements of a whole.” Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

SEO is becoming a hybrid of 'social engineering' and data analysis

Prediction: Social & Content Influence SEOSearch engines use web links as 'votes'. Engines are getting better at understanding 'human signals'Faking the signals does not work as easily as it used to.

Winners: Those who get into the science of link building and match it with far better content.

Losers: Those who stay with link spamming and doing content that's ordinary.

Win by getting scientific.

Email

Prediction: Email Lives On“With such a dramatic shift toward more personal, unsolicited marketing, 2013 will see much more targeted, segmented email campaigns aimed at delivering more relevant content to recipients. We’re all after the Holy Grail of online marketing: sales-ready leads. The ability to segment email lists and personalize the content will help to maximize the effect of each email, resulting in more qualified leads.” John Bonini, Content Marketing Manager, IMPACT Branding & Design

Email gets more personal.

Prediction: Email Lives OnEmail is going from mass broadcast to niche broadcast. The better the technology and data behind it, the more relevant the messaging becomes.

Winners: Those who understand how easily email can be ignored and adopt technologies that make it useful, relevant and interesting to their readers.

Losers: Those who think the ROI doesn't add up, stay with old practices and carry on spamming, forgetting that every spam message is another fail for their brand.

Win by relevance.

Accountability in Marketing

Prediction: Marketing Becomes More Accountable for Revenue GenerationA recent Fournaise Marketing Group study found that 73% of executives don’t believe marketing drives demand and revenue. “For CMOs, the pressure is on. CEOs are paying more attention to Marketing’s contributions and are holding them more accountable for revenue generation. Because of this, we’re starting to see a shift in how marketing is measured … to quotas and SLAs that are more aligned with sales goals.” Greg Alexander, CEO, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

Quantify results

Prediction: Marketing Becomes More Accountable for Revenue GenerationMarketing technology is improving rapidly, this leads to advances in tracking, which in turn leads to expectations around accountability.So when companies are being squeezed on their bottom line and they know accountability is there, sloppy marketing with little accountability is axed.

Winners: Those who sort out their tracking, analytics and insight so they get a grip of wasteful spending.

Losers: Those who dump large budgets into marketing with no hard metrics i.e. TV. and ignore the data.

Win by loving the data

Know your customer journey

Prediction: Marketers Will Know Thy Customer“Marketing automation systems will provide more unified customer views across channels and systems. The goal of not merely importing data from multiple systems, but of integrating that data so interactions of the same individual are combined even when they take place in different channels will be increasingly realized. This is a critical capability since all analysis is based on this unified customer view.”David Raab, Analyst, Gleanster

Unify customer data

Prediction: Marketers Will Know Thy CustomerIt's progressively getting easier and cheaper to crunch large amounts of data to build insight into customer activity across what were disconnected channels i.e. email / offsite / onsite behaviour.Of course privacy concerns slow down the access to this unified view of the customer, however the pressure to make profit creates ingenious solutions to make sense of the customer.

Winners: Those who invest in the insight and technology needed to deal with customer insight head on.

Losers: The ones with deep technical debt that can't buy their way out of their existing siloed systems and who believe marketing channels are somehow not connected.

Win by understanding the customer ecosystem

Real time marketing

Prediction: "Campaigns" Fade Out, Real-Time Marketing Is In“In 2013, we’ll see many more marketers take advantage of the power of real-time communications to grow business. In 2013, buyers instantly engage with brands on their websites, talk back via social media like Twitter and Facebook, and follow breaking news in the markets they are interested. The old model of marketing built on a company timeline doesn’t work so well, but after decades of “campaigns” planned way in advance, it’s difficult for marketers to change to a mindset based on speed. Clearly, the opportunities to grow your business in 2013 and beyond mean real time is key. Success comes from engaging your buyers when they’re ready, not when it’s convenient for you.” David Meerman Scott, Best-selling Author

Win by understanding the customer ecosystem

Prediction: "Campaigns" Fade Out, Real-Time Marketing Is In'Real time' in marketing terms is 'relevant to me now'. On the theme of technology, its when you have the systems and infrastructure to respond immediately to sentiment.

Winners: Those who are responsive and give customers what they want now.

Losers: Those who don't reorganise around the immediate customer feedback.

Win by being responsive

Marketing with a human voice

Prediction: Marketing Speaks like a human

“The advent of social media has meant that the world of separate internal and external messaging has disappeared. If a customer talks to your Customer Service department, they expect the same response they’d get if they talk to marketing, or sales, or engineering. Creating a unified external face is critical. If you want to build long-term relationships, you’ve got to have a consistent, human voice - coming from all levels of your organization.”

Unify your company's voice. Be human.

Does this appeal to you?Acme iGaming is a custom iGaming development company specializing in the rapid development of highly maintainable and dynamic software to meet custom client software specifications. Acme attains rapid delivery through active management and focused teamwork coupled with the constant improvement of our internal processes and development methodology. How about 'We do iGaming Software clients love'

Winners: Speak in the same way as their customers, building a connection with them.

Losers: Carry on thinking customers are impressed with pointless company speak.

Win by listening to the customer voice.

Prediction: Marketing Speaks like a human

Gamification

Marketing gets gamified“Gamification presents a repeatable, reliable framework for increasing your social media and online marketing results. In the next year even small and medium sized companies will start to understand and utilize it’s core concepts.”

Marketing can be fun

Marketing gets gamifiedThe inner child in us loves to make things more fun and when marketeers do can this with things like achieving certain goals in registration, or refer a friend, you can achieve amazing results.

Winners: Those who think laterally about challenges like registration processes, or referring other users to an operator or learning journeys.

Losers: those who think people don't like to have fun

Win: Steer people through fun

To wrap up

Technology > Focus > Speed

Thanks!

Nick Garner CEO

SearchWorks™ / Driven By Data.Multi Language SEO, PPC, Inbound Marketing----E: nick.garner@searchworks.euM: +44 7814029751Skype: nicholashgarnerGtalk: nicholashgarner

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