How to promote products or services that are not allowed to advertise – an example of a casino

There are some goods or services whose promotion is restricted by law. For example, gambling, lotteries or medical services. Valeryan Brunin, co-founder and Internet marketer of ilavista studio tells us about how not to violate the law, but to bring your message to a potential client, develop a correct website and return to him a potential client, using casino promotion as an example.

If you advertise a casino, there are many restrictions that need to be taken into account.

The target audience does not actively use social networks, is around the world, and the decision-making process is a long one. Having made four projects in this area, we have developed our own methodology, which I will now share.

Features of casino promotion

Limitations in advertising. The law on advertising spells out enough restrictions for gambling, which must be clearly observed. Therefore, every page of the site should be checked by lawyers. Multi-lingual target audience. As I wrote above, casino customers flock from all over the world.

Complex and time-consuming building of communication channels. First, the user has to get to the site through SEO or near-thematic advertising. Then there are two development scenarios:

• The user subscribes to a newsletter, where a customer manager works with them. Helps to pick up the tour (casinos organize game tours for foreigners), choose the right conditions.
• The user did not sign up for the newsletter, but Pixel put it in the base. Such users we “warm up” in social networks by advertising posters and events in casino restaurants.
• The process of calls and letters from the manager to potential clients, PR concerts in social networks can last from a month to six months.

Complex application processing and management: there must be a manager with “lead language.” A manager who works with a lead must have a professional grasp of game terminology, speak the language of the customer, know the mentality of the nationality and the requirements of the establishments. The manager should calculate during the conversation how valuable the client is and what discounts and conditions can be offered to him. For example, a paid flight.

Individual conditions for each player, which must be communicated through the site. Unlike e-commerce or HoReCa, where there is the same cost of a product or service for everyone, each casino is different, both in terms of “cost of play” and in terms of guests. One slot machine or gambling table may have different terms in terms of stakes, time and additional services to each customer. On the site, an experienced player will immediately pay attention to this, which means that from the correctness, simplicity and detail of the information he will decide – whether this type of casino suits him.

80% of traffic – mobile devices

Priority tasks

In order to cope with the specifics of promotion, which we wrote about above, we developed the following tasks for ourselves:

• Develop a design site that conveys the philosophy and atmosphere of the establishment to its target audience
• To develop site architecture that will allow to use advertising channels without bypassing prohibitions
• To develop a site with high SEO scores
• Make a quality website design for easy communication between the user and the establishment
• Develop functionality for user retention
• Consider adaptability: usability from phones and tablets
• Do not forget about cross-browser capability: correct work with different browsers
• Keep in mind multilingualism: the availability of a large number of languages and the convenience of adding new ones.

What solutions did we use

1. researching the target audience, making a portrait of the user, a map of the journey through the site and storytelling. Every casino has its own atmosphere and its own target audience. Each player chooses an institution according to his interests and preferences. We distinguished three types.

VIP category casinos. The main task – the emphasis on the level of the institution. Visitor of such a casino requires maximum attention to himself at each stage. It is important to show how we appreciate it. You can translate it through additional services: expensive cars (shuttle service), luxury rooms, good food and individual conditions. If there is a sense of exclusivity in these details, then the establishment itself will be on par.

Home comfort casino. We broadcast a relaxing vacation, without noise, pathos, and high prices. In these projects it is important to emphasize the types of recreation that you can get in addition to the game: bathing, hunting, concerts, sporting events, sightseeing tours.

Local casinos. Gaming clubs. Such sites broadcast: we are near your home. You can just come in after work and enjoy a quiet game at the machines, splash out your emotions and go home quietly. We’ll just distract you for 30 minutes from your business and worries.

2. Development of the architecture of the project, which is suitable for promotion through contextual advertising, social networks and SEO:

• Casinos are not allowed to advertise. But at the casinos are restaurants, clubs, hotels, constantly held concerts and other entertainment events. By developing a project architecture with separate sections for these areas, we can advertise them. Do you want to eat good food? Here’s a restaurant and a top chef. Want to relax on the weekend? We have a great concert. Don’t forget, when you place ads on third-party resources, for example, about an event, it should not lead to the main site, but to the page with information only about the event
• Remember that every number, button, poster, photo report should easily put a pixel conversion without reference to the developers
• Each new page should interactively create SEO elements: unique url, title, description, keywords, h1
• Sitemap (sitemap. xml file) must be generated interactively when adding any new element to the site (eg, pages). XML-map – a file with information for search engines about the pages to be indexed. Typically, robots index pages gradually, starting with the main page. While indexed all – can take many months. To speed up this process, make a site map, which will contain links to all pages, so the system does not spend time on navigating through the levels
• There should be high-quality micromarkup site to display information correctly in search results. Markup – a page layout with additional tags and attributes, which helps search engines more clearly understand the content pages of an Internet resource. For example, a user enters the query: “Poker in Minsk. Search engine Yandex or Google will give the casino site with a title and description. At best, instead of the main page will be a page of poker services. With high-quality micromapping search engine will give the most important information on this request. Down to the price, pictures and conditions of the game
• High download speed and performance, adaptability, cross-browser, clean code and user-friendliness of the site – all of this tremendously affects the search engine results. With advertising restrictions, SEO becomes the main source of traffic that needs to be invested in and preserved
• We use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology to speed up the site and make it load as quickly as possible. This speeds up the site and has a positive effect on SEO.

3. Development of solutions for user retention. It is necessary to understand that traffic is expensive and difficult to build up quickly.

Users are highly dispersed across locations. The decision-making process is very delayed and with a high cost threshold (flight, lodging, etc.). Every user that we have paid for must be caught and fixed in the database for further communication with him without advertising costs.

On this basis, a special role in casino projects is played by subscriptions to the newsletter and personal accounts for players.

In a private office is developing a system of motivation and loyalty with the accumulation of points and bonuses. But such solutions immediately entail costs and complexity in the development. The target audience of casino sites, as we wrote above, comes mostly from cell phones. This means that in order to increase user return and use the functionality of the site, it should be as adapted as possible, and ideally it should be a mobile app.

As a result, to the cost of the site add the development of a personal account and mobile applications for Android, iOS. Then the development cost increases by 3-4 times. For example, the cost of the site with a personal account – about $ 4800. Add an application for Android – about $ 2400, an application for iOS – about $ 3850. These are average figures on the market.

A suitable solution in such a situation would be PWA (Progressive Web Applications) – a technology for creating websites that can be used as mobile applications, as well as applications for tablets and PCs. What is their point? A user goes to a site and sees a pop-up ad saying, “This site can work as an app. Would you like to install it?” If the person agrees, the app appears on their phone. It doesn’t need to be downloaded from the App Store or Play Market.

Thanks to this solution casinos got user base and free access to it through notifications, and the user – a convenient tool for communication with the establishment and online access to their bonuses.

4. Building a promotion strategy.

SEO. We write texts on casinos and related themes: cities, tourist attractions. Increase of involvement through interactive elements: for example, winning calculators, animation, virtual tour. For one casino we created a separate landing page, on which we placed the series “Once at the Opera” with Dmitry Dyuzhev.

Advertising strategy. Every number, e-mail, application forms should have conversion pixels (Yandex.Metrika, Yandex.Direct, Google Analytics, Google ads, VK, Facebook). And do not forget to “catch up” users with social media ads.

What else you should know

Since 2019, you can use casino services from the age of 21. Therefore, the site should have a pop-up window asking whether the visitor has reached this age. If not – the system should not let him pass further.

Also on the site should be placed a list of addresses of places where you can get psychological help for gambling addiction.

And remember that you should NOT:

• Create the impression that winning is guaranteed for every participant;
• Give the impression that gambling is a way to make money;
• Believe that gambling is a way to win public acclaim;
• Use images of minors;
• Condemn non-participation in gambling.