The success of casinos relies on three key aspects of search engine optimization (SEO): on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Each aspect uses various strategies to enhance visibility, gain a competitive edge, target specific demographics and geographical areas, and establish brand recognition. This article explores the challenges casinos encounter and SEO strategies that can boost your visibility, build brand awareness, and lead to conversions.

What Are the Unique Challenges Casinos Face?

SEO for casinos presents unique challenges when compared to other industries. In a highly competitive market, casinos face numerous competitors vying for the same keywords and target audience. This intense competition makes achieving top rankings on search engine results pages difficult.

Casinos differ from other industries because they cater to a specific audience interested in gambling and gaming-related content. Therefore, it is important to tailor SEO strategies to this demographic by focusing on casino games, sports betting, gambling strategies, and industry news content. Additionally, the popularity of keywords about casinos may fluctuate depending on seasonal trends, holidays, and significant events like major sports tournaments or award shows. To remain relevant, casinos must adapt their SEO techniques to take advantage of these fluctuations.

Another unique challenge is that the online gambling industry is subject to strict regulations that oversee advertising, marketing, and responsible gaming protocols. Casinos must comply with these regulations when developing their SEO strategies, which may vary depending on the jurisdiction. 

Offshore casinos may face challenges in reaching out to specific geographic areas and should, therefore, create marketing strategies tailored to particular regions or target markets. For example, this may entail using keywords specific to certain regions and offering promotions for players from Malaysia, the Philippines, Tunisia, or regions where gambling regulations are less strict to minimize legal risks and attract a larger customer base.

Search engines carefully evaluate gambling websites because of worries about legality, safety, and responsible gambling. To maintain their reputation and avoid penalties, casinos must uphold transparency, adhere to search engine rules, and avoid unethical SEO strategies.

On-Page SEO Strategies

On-page SEO refers to improving elements directly on the website to improve search engine rankings and user experience. This would include optimizing content, meta tags, headings, URL structure, and internal linking. On-page SEO also involves improving website usability, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and enhancing overall user experience. Strategies to include are:

Content Optimization

High-quality content is important for SEO because it impacts search engine rankings and user experience. Search engines consider keywords, relevance, and user experience to determine a website’s ranking on the search results page. From a search engine’s perspective, high-quality content indicates the website’s relevance and authority, increasing its chances of ranking higher. From a user’s perspective, quality content makes the website engaging and valuable, leading to a better user experience.

Optimize content with relevant keywords related to casino games, promotions, and services.

Use descriptive meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, to improve click-through rates in search results. Additionally, quality content helps generate backlinks, improves click-through rates, and strengthens a brand’s reputation, ultimately contributing to improved SEO performance.

Keyword Optimization

Casinos recognize the importance of keyword optimization to attract the right target audience. They achieve this by optimizing their content with specific terms and phrases that potential players are actively searching for. Furthermore, this strategy helps search engines understand the content of the web pages.

Casinos can improve their content to match users’ search intent to increase their chances of attracting interested visitors and getting them to participate. This can be done by emphasizing key terms related to casino games, promotions, and services.

For example, to effectively optimize a casino website for the keyword “online slots,” it is important to incorporate the keywords naturally and strategically:

• The meta tags on the homepage should contain the targeted keyword.
• Different category pages should be created for different kinds of slot games.
• Game descriptions should be improved by including relevant keywords.
• Publishing blog articles focusing on subjects related to slots.

The main goal of this optimization strategy is to attract visitors interested in playing slot games online. Ultimately, this will lead to increased interaction and income for the casino. There are several excellent tools for keyword research, such as KWFinder, Moz Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SemRush. These tools help find relevant keywords, analyse their search volume and competition, and provide valuable insights for effective keyword optimization.

Website Usability and Navigation

The usability and navigation of a website are important for SEO as they directly impact the user’s experience, indexing and crawling, site speed, and search rankings. These factors such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, and site navigation, directly influence the improvement of search rankings. Consider these points: 

• User experience: A well-structured and easily navigable website enhances the overall user experience, leading to higher engagement and a lower bounce rate. These factors are advantageous for search engines.

• Indexing and crawling: Search engines use website navigation to find and index new web pages. A user-friendly navigation system helps search engine crawlers understand the content and context of the intended page, which can ultimately impact search result rankings.

• Site Speed: A player’s ability to navigate a casino site efficiently is crucial to quickly and effortlessly accessing games or information between various site sections. But the impact of site speed extends beyond user experience; it’s also a critical factor in SEO. A slow-loading site could signal inefficiency and inconvenience to search engine algorithms, potentially lowering your casino’s ranking in search results.

Mobile-Friendly Design

A design suitable for mobile devices is extremely important for on-page SEO since it impacts several factors, including user experience, search rankings, audience reach, and page speed. Ensuring that the website offers a positive experience for mobile users leads to decreased bounce rates and increased engagement. Furthermore, Google’s mobile-first indexing prioritizes websites optimized for mobile devices, highlighting the considerable influence of mobile-friendly design on SEO rankings.

Since most players and gamers now access casino websites through smartphones, it is crucial to have a design suitable for mobile devices. This enables the site to reach a larger audience and attract more visitors. Additionally, a design compatible with mobile devices also aids in enhancing loading speeds, which is essential for both user satisfaction and search engine optimization.

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Off-Page SEO Strategies

Off-page SEO refers to the actions conducted outside of a website to boost its credibility and visibility. These actions include acquiring trustworthy backlinks from reputable websites, engaging in social media platforms, and building brand awareness.

Link Building

Link building is crucial for search engine rankings. Search engines, including Google, assess the quantity and quality of inbound links to determine a website’s relevance and authority, greatly affecting its search rankings.

High-quality backlinks are seen as positive endorsements for a website, showing that its content is valuable and credible. This improves the website’s visibility, credibility, and reputation, resulting in higher search rankings and more organic traffic.

To build links effectively in the casino industry, use different tactics like guest posting on trusted gambling websites. Also, create quality articles and guides to get backlinks from authoritative sources. Use social media platforms to engage with the audience and build influencer relationships.

Casinos can create strong backlinks to improve their website’s visibility and reputation by using niche edits, broken link building, and other strategies. This comprehensive approach helps increase search rankings and organic traffic.

Social Media Engagement

Maintain active profiles on popular social media platforms and share valuable content, promotions, and updates to engage with the casino’s audience and encourage social sharing. Participate in discussions and interact with your followers to build a loyal community around your casino brand.

Online Reputation Management:

Monitor online reviews, feedback, and mentions of the casino across various platforms.

Respond promptly and professionally to customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback to maintain a positive reputation. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials to bolster the casino’s online credibility.

Technical SEO Strategies

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its search engine visibility and user experience. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and understand the content of a website effectively. While technical SEO focuses on the backend of the website, it directly impacts search engine rankings and user experience.

Website Speed Optimization

Website speed refers to how quickly a website loads its content. Search engines like Google prioritize fast-loading websites because they provide a better user experience. Online casinos should optimize website speed by minimizing server response times, reducing page size, and leveraging browser caching techniques. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help identify areas for improvement.

Mobile-Friendliness

With most online users accessing websites from mobile devices, ensuring mobile-friendliness is critical for online casinos. Mobile-friendly websites adapt their layout and content to fit smaller screens, providing a flawless user experience across devices. Casinos can achieve mobile-friendliness through responsive web design, which adjusts the website’s layout based on the user’s device.

Schema Markup Implementation

Schema markup provides search engines with additional context about the content of a website. Online casinos can use schema markup to mark up important information such as casino events, promotions, reviews, and ratings. This helps search engines understand the content better and can improve search results, such as rich snippets and knowledge panels.

Site Structure

A well-organized site structure makes it easier for users to navigate a website and helps search engines crawl and index its pages more effectively. Online casinos should create a logical site structure with clear categories, subcategories, and internal linking. This ensures that every page on the website is easily discoverable and accessible to users and search engines.

URL Structure

Optimizing URL structure is another important aspect of technical SEO. Online casinos should use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs that provide both users and search engines with information about the page’s content. URLs should be concise, readable, and follow a logical hierarchy. Avoid using long, complex URLs with unnecessary parameters or session IDs.

The Bottom Line

SEO plays a crucial role in the casino industry, allowing operators to increase their visibility, gain a competitive advantage, and target the right audience. By implementing effective SEO strategies, casinos can enhance their online presence, attract new players, and achieve their marketing goals.

The post The Ultimate Guide to SEO Strategies for Online Casinos appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to Brett Zucker, CMO at Monotype—a company that empowers the world’s top 2000 brands with design, technology and expertise—sense-based marketing (i.e., appealing to consumers’ senses) is the best way to maximize returns during this high-volume, high-impact time of year. Namely, there are five key strategies marketers should consider, if they want to maximize yields through Dec. 25 and beyond.

• General Senses
  • Experiential Gifts Win Out—From ax throwing to aerial yoga, this year’s holiday shoppers, especially millennials and GenZ, are increasingly opting to gift experiences in place of material items. The trend makes sense as recent studies from university researchers reveal that experiential purchases tend to provide more enduring happiness. For brands in hospitality and travel, there is a natural connection to “selling” experiences to consumers. For marketers outside these channels, think about how you can make your products an experience; it may be as simple as a small tweak in messaging. For example, you’re not just selling a festive, scented holiday candle. You’re selling nostalgia, the feeling of warmth or being cozy.
• Sight:
  • Go for Authenticity—Gone are the days of stock photos. Ditch the staged photography, which can come across as cold or un-relatable, in favor of real images of real people. If, unlike CVS, you don’t have $$ to drop on refreshing packaging with untouched photos, consider other avenues, like UGC or influencer content. Both are solid alternatives that not only inspire loyalty, but it will make your brand feel more accessible and authentic. Bonus: reports show that UGC actually has the power to inspire purchase decisions (70% in fact).
  • Know When and How to Stylize Your Brand—Every brand has a complex visual identity, from the typefaces it uses, down to the color of the logo or packaging. Don’t overlook these small details that can have big impact.
• Sound:
  • Optimize SEO for Smart Speaker Shopping—22% of Gen Xers and 17% of millennials plan to use a virtual assistant for shopping this holiday season. If your customers start their shopping journey via smart speaker, you may want to overhaul your content marketing to prioritize long-tail keywords that are more conversational, or “featured snippets” that appear higher on search results. In any case, optimized SEO is the name of the game.
  • Consider Curated Playlists Consistent with Your Brand—How can you make your online shopping experience unique, if already convenient? Maybe it’s a stylized Spotify playlist shoppers can tune in to while browsing. Not only a festive and personal touch, but it just could put shoppers in the right holiday spirit to convert—not abandon—their cart.
• Touch:
  • Don’t Neglect In-Store Experiences—We hear a lot about the retail apocalypse or death to brick-and-mortar, but that’s far from the case. In fact, stats show that physical stores still play a critical role in the winding shopper journey. Want to make their in-store experience more memorable? Consider the power of in-store demos where consumers can discover and explore your product with their own two hands. This has proven especially powerful for the likes of beauty upstarts and legacy brands that are embracing experiential.

The post 5 Strategies Brands Haven’t Tapped Yet for Holiday 2018 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The two operating systems dominate the market, with figures from Q2 2018 suggesting that Android OS accounts for an 88 per cent share and iOS holds around 11.9 percent. While the likes of Microsoft and RIM once had a place in this world, they have fallen by the wayside as Google and Apple’s unstoppable creations have marched to the top.

A number of differences

While the pair are now truly out on their own in terms of their performance in the market, they are different in a number of ways. For example, as this VPNbase article on the best Android VPN services outlines, Android devices are seen as less exclusive and arguably more flexible than Apple’s iOS-based alternatives. While the site states this is a “wonderful thing”, it does also warn that this can open Android systems up to a range of risks.

On a more technical level, another key difference is how apps for the two systems are created. While iOS apps are stored on a file type known as an IPA, Android apps use the format known as APK. This issue, in particular, has caused a headache for many businesses in recent years, as this has meant it is not necessarily easy for them to quickly adapt apps for one OS to another.

However, could a major new toolkit created by developers at Google be about to change the game in this regard?

Introducing Flutter

At the start of December, Google announced the launch of its first stable release of the UI toolkit known as Flutter. The company describes the system as a way to build ‘beautiful, native experiences’ for both iOS and Android systems using a single codebase.

While this does not replace the traditional way of creating apps for the two operating systems, it is an engine that can be added to an existing app or used in a completely new one. Google said that Flutter’s set of widgets would ensure a “pixel-perfect experience” on both OSs, ensuring designers are able to achieve their vision without having to “water it down” due to any limitations.

The key benefits of Flutter were highlighted in comments from Capital One’s senior director of engineering Michael Jones, who said the service would mean the company can now think about features “not in an ‘iOS or Android-first’ fashion, but rather in a true mobile-first model”.

Exciting new development

The release of Flutter is an exciting development which could change the game for everyone involved in mobile marketing, with hopes being high that it will make it easier for developers to create apps for both iOS and Android.

While the two biggest mobile operating systems in the world have fundamental differences, Google’s new toolkit has arguably brought them closer than they have ever been before.

The post How Flutter Looks Set to Transform Android and iOS App Development appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

By Rafael Lourenco, EVP,

Now’s the time to make sure your store’s mobile experience and checkout are ready for the holidays. Shopify reports that more than half of all Thanksgiving 2017 e-commerce orders came from mobile devices, but cart abandonment is still higher on mobile than desktop. And CNP fraud attempts tend to increase during the holidays. How can you make your mobile site welcoming to holiday shoppers, but not fraudsters? Three key areas to focus on now are how quickly your store’s pages load, how convenient your mobile checkout process is, and how well your fraud program can handle holiday sales peaks.

Speed up your store’s page load times

In today’s m-commerce environment, simply having a responsive website is no longer enough. Mobile users expect the sites they visit to load almost immediately and they’re quick to abandon sites that don’t. Think with Google found that 40% of shoppers will leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load on their phones and nearly 80% won’t shop again with a store that provides a poor mobile experience. And that’s on a typical day.

On a peak sales day, like Black Friday, even major retailers face site slowdowns or even crashes due to heavy traffic. So now is the time to review your site’s performance, load times, and capacity to not only keep visitors from leaving before your pages load, but also to prevent crashes from sending customers to your competitors. To do this, you’ll need to talk with your IT team and your hosting service about how you can speed up your site and stay online even when a crowd of customers is visiting your store.

To get a quick snapshot of your store’s mobile page speed, Think with Google offers a Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator. You can use the scorecard to compare your site speed to your competitors and you can see how small improvements in speed can yield more sales.

Reduce mobile cart abandonment

More people turn to their phones when it’s time to buy than ever before, which is why m-commerce is projected to have a CAGR of 24% between now and 2023. Despite this trend, the cart abandonment rate hovers around 75%, in part because many consumers give up when it’s time to check out. Review your shopping and checkout processes now to ensure they’re as friction-free as possible for mobile users.

Mobile shoppers tend to shy away from data entry on small screens whenever possible, and many are accustomed to 1-Click checkout on Amazon, which requires no data entry at all. To keep these shoppers from leaving your site and making their purchases from a competitor with a more convenient checkout process, eliminate customer registration requirements and focus on the must-have data—billing, shipping, and payment information.

Avoid holiday fraudsters and fraud-related bottlenecks

Retail e-commerce fraud is still rising, according to the 2018 LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud report, and the cost of fraud is higher for digital and physical goods sold through the mobile channel than for other retail channels. The report found that each dollar of m-commerce fraud costs digital-goods merchants $3.29 on average, compared to $2.78 per dollar of fraud for physical goods and $2.54 for retailers without a mobile channel.

Meanwhile, false declines ranged from 18% to 28% of orders, with digital goods retailers at the higher end of the range. These rejections of good orders are costly over the long-term, because many falsely declined customers won’t return. These facts are concerning year-round, but holiday sales peaks can make false declines increase if merchants don’t have enough capacity to manually review flagged orders. Overwhelmed retailers may be forced to choose between slower order screening, more completed fraud, or more false positives.

Take a look at your historical fraud rates by channel, including peak-season rates, to see how often your mobile channel has been targeted compared to your other channels. It’s also wise to review your false decline rates to see if they’ve spiked during past holiday seasons. If your mobile channel has been heavily targeted by fraudsters or has had more false declines or completed fraud during previous sales peaks, it’s time to upgrade your fraud prevention program and consider outsourcing your manual fraud review. Having outside experts take on this task during sales peaks can keep order decisions on pace while preventing fraud and reducing false declines.

By making your store easy to use on mobile devices, keeping your checkout process simple, and bolstering your peak-season fraud protection program, you can engage the growing number of consumers who prefer to shop on mobile, during the holidays and beyond. You’ll also be in a better position to fight fraud and keep your good customers year-round.

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Rafael Lourenco is Executive Vice President at ClearSale, a Card-Not-Present fraud prevention operation that protects e-commerce merchants against chargebacks. The company’s flagship product, Total Guaranteed Protection, is an end-to-end outsourced fraud detection solution for online retailers. Follow on twitter at @ClearSaleUS or visit http://clear.sale/

The post How Ready Is Your Mobile Channel for the 2018 Holiday Shopping Season? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by By Merilee Kern, MBA.

Nobody starts out automatically caring about your products or services. They care about how you can make a difference in their lives.  No matter the context, all relationships begin with a “handshake moment,” whether literally or figuratively—those first few introductory moments that reveal a great deal about the character of the person standing before you. Why should company interactions with current and prospective customers or clients be any different?

Sure, “content marketing” has been a crucial ingredient impelling the evolution of traditional marketing into today’s more personalized approach, bridging the gap between cookie-cutter TV, radio, and print mass marketing to highly customized digital and social media-driven communications. Even so, today’s more personalized digital communications have plenty of challenges, all too often falling on “deaf ears” and “blind eyes” amid a marketplace becoming highly desensitized to the glut of advertising and marketing messages its exposed to any given hour of any given day…year in and year out.

So, how can brands can make and maintain meaningful connections and create a lifetime value with customers in ways that’ll set them apart in a “noisy,” increasingly jaded and discriminating marketplace? How can businesses tell an authentic story so as to foster maximized marketplace engagement and breed brand loyalty?  According to Kevin Lund, author of the new book, “Conversation Marketing: How to be Relevant and Engage Your Customer by Speaking Human,” the proverbial key to the Kingdom is for companies, no matter their size and scope, to simply “speak human.”

In this new book  Lund, who’s CEO of T3 Custom—itself a content marketing firm helping brands learn to “speak human” and supercharge ROI reportedly by as much as16-times, provides an in-depth analysis of what’s required to succeed in today’s modern marketing era, which he’s aptly coined the “Conversation Age.” Specifically, he details key principles critical for driving the more evolved conversation marketing approach, which can help companies amplify results on multiple fronts.

According to Lund, “Those who are wildly successful at conversation marketing understand the strategy is not simply about propagating online content and sharing through social media accounts. Rather, it’s a disciplined approach to communicating with a target audience in a way that tells a simple, human story that will educate, inform, entertain and, most importantly, compel customers in a way that fully captures mind–and-market share through messaging that truly resonates. Companies must stop talking ‘at’ their customers and, instead, connect with them by simply speaking human. And, it’s far beyond that initial ‘handshake moment—it’s through a constant stream of congenial engagements with each individual consumer, or the marketplace at large, based on trust and performance.”

Think it’s complicated to be an adept conversation marketer and speak human to your constituents? Think again! Below are eight of Lund’s tactical strategies from the new book that can help companies large and small become more engaging and relevant with customers, and the marketplace at large:

1. Earn Attention

To gain attention in today’s crowded marketplace, it’s prudent to do the opposite of what most everyone else is doing. That means don’t deliver clichéd, boring content that’s written for robots—search engines or otherwise—and for generic consumption. It’s unsustainable for you and your brand as well as frustratingly futile for the audience you’re trying to reach. Instead, speak human by engaging your audience with eye-level language in order to gain their attention and set your brand apart. Learn to use language that educates and entertains the audience.

Earning attention starts with asking yourself what you and your company are passionate about and conveying that genuinely in that all-important “handshake moment” of first contact—online or otherwise. Assume you’re meeting the person on the other side of the screen for the first time. Think of what you can say that’s new, memorable, a standout, and jargon-free. Also, understand and adapt to your audience. You wouldn’t talk the same way to an aging Baby Boomer as you would to a teenager.

2. Tell a Story

How do you hold someone’s attention long enough to break down a topic and engender his or her trust, but also in a way that’s unforgettable and leaves that person feeling more knowledgeable than before? The answer lies in good storytelling.

Good conversations are filled with good stories and anecdotes. But be mindful that the hero of the story isn’t your company or its products, but rather how your product or service will have a positive impact in your customers’ lives. If you can elicit an emotional response, you’re onto something.  Some standout companies have figured this out. Apple’s story, for example, isn’t about devices. It’s about innovation and how our lives are being changed for the better with Apple technology in them. Learn how to make your story short, to the point, and easy to share online.

3. Stay Humble

Being humble begins with letting go of ego—that instinctual part of the psyche that screams for a marketer to make too much noise about products or services and brag about themselves. Sigmund Freud developed a psychoanalytic theory of personality he coined the “id,” and marketers often tap into their own ids by telling the world how great their company and its products are, and how great a potential customer will be for buying them. The id operates based on the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification of needs.

In conversation marketing, speaking human dictates that your customer’s needs, not your own, are top priority. Your audience wants to know what you can do for them, and that means stop talking about yourself and drop the megaphone. Instead, embrace a different approach that thoughtfully and humbly explains why you do what you do and why it can make a difference in someone’s life instead of focusing on your bottom line. Stop beating them over the heads with the fabulous features and benefits of your products. Instead, tell stories that inspire and resonate with their own life experiences.

4. Pick Your Party

Equally important to the “how” of your conversation is the “where.” It should all fit seamlessly together and feel natural and organic in that moment.  Part of learning how to talk to your audience and engage them in any form of conversation is deciding where to talk to them in the first place.

This means doing the footwork to learn where your potential customers gather, and meeting them on their own ground. Where do your potential customers hang out on social media? What are they saying, and what challenges are they discussing that you can compellingly weigh-in on? Easily available research tools can help you join the right conversation at the right time and in the right place with consistency.

5. Be Relevant (on a Molecular Level)

True listening is about far more than hearing words. It’s also about fully understanding the message and concepts being imparted—whether they’re needs, wants, desires, or even complaints. Being relevant means making sure you’re talking about topics that are of sure interest to your audience, and that’s often achieved by addressing their pain points. Before a marketer can aptly communicate and speak to such pain points, however, he or she must first hear what the prospect, customer or marketplace has to say. It can be dangerous, expensive and ultimately futile for companies to presume to inherently know what should be said in conversation marketing.

6. Start the Conversation 

How do you gain audience attention in a way that prevents you from just being part of the noise? It’s no longer a question of whether you should insert yourself into the world of content marketing. It’s a matter of when you’re going to start talking, what you’re going to say, and how you’re going to say it. One good approach is to base that initial conversation on your unique value proposition for the given audience.

It’s important to always remember that your target audience doesn’t care about you. They care what you can do for them. If you’ve done your research, you’ll be familiar with their pain points and better prepared to offer answers that address their needs. Don’t be a “me-too” marketer who dishes out the same information as everyone else. Instead, develop a unique angle with a thought-provoking headline that sparks attention—even better if it disrupts conventional thinking. In addition, know your topic inside out before communicating, and make sure any other people handling your communications are experts in the field. You don’t want to risk sounding trite or inaccurate.

7.  Stop Talking

Unlike a monologue, a conversation is a two-way endeavor. Knowing when to stop talking is as important as knowing what to say and when to say it. It’s the only way to truly get a sense of what your audience (or your potential customer) is thinking in reaction to what you’ve offered, and whether to stay the course in your strategy or tweak it on-the-fly. Once you hear preliminary reaction, you can respond to questions and concerns before moving ahead or otherwise course-correct as needed. Also bear in mind that what your audience isn’t saying can be just as impactful as what they do convey.

Once your message is out, take a step back and “read the room.” That could mean monitoring online response to your blog post or using various tools to learn which of your resources are drawing attention. Are people engaged? Are they adding to the conversation? What should you do if the feedback is bad? Don’t consider a negative response or lack of response necessarily a failure. Instead, see it as an opportunity to adjust, make changes, and perhaps find ways to better meet your audience’s needs.

8. Ditch the Checklist

Before every takeoff, airline crews verbally work through an extensive checklist. There’s a detailed set of tasks to cover before the plane can even push back from the gate. However, in an ebb and flow conversation marketing context, this adherence to a certain protocol can pose limitations. Indeed, one problem with simply sticking to a checklist is that a content marketing strategy will never evolve with the times or differentiate itself in any way from what everyone else is doing.

Successful marketers endeavor to open new horizons. They take a step back and ask bigger questions about themselves and their companies’ ultimate goals, as well as what sort of new challenges their audience or customers might face over time–how to aptly adjust when needed.

Lund also suggests finding sources of inspiration. “Explore some of the successful content marketing plans that showed passion, ditched the tired old language, zeroed in on what customers needed, and started a real conversation with the market,” he urges. “Then scrutinize your own strategy and see where it might be lacking, so that you can continually refine your own checklist.”

The post Speak Human: 8 Conversation Marketing Hacks, Game-Changers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post to MMW from Shawn Arora, the founder of LaunchSpark, a Toronto-based explainer video agency with a focus on ROI.

The consumption of social media has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. Instagram, the mobile social network that Facebook acquired for one billion dollars in 2012 is now worth hundred times more. In terms of monthly active users too, this social media platform has grown from 500 million in June 2016 to one billion two years later.

This dramatic rise in social media consumption has contributed to the growth of a new breed of influencers and micro-influencers. These are social media users with a large following of users who are interested in specific niches.

For instance, a pastry maker who posts pictures of their desserts is bound to gather a following of users interested in pastries. Similarly, a gym instructor posting videos of their training sessions is likely to gain a following of fitness enthusiasts. Using these users to promote your bakery or fitness equipment is a great way to not only reach a targeted audience, but also win the trust of these prospective customers.

At the outset, influencers are much like celebrities who endorse brands in exchange for money. But as the industry has grown, we are witnessing a noticeable evolution in the way the industry works.

Size is not everything

One of the most noticeable evolution in this space is the follower size commanded by an influencer. Traditionally, influencer or celebrity based endorsements have relied on the overall authority commanded by the endorser. Not surprisingly then, the highest paid athletes or celebrities are often those with the biggest following. Their endorsement carries more value than one made by a low ranking celebrity.

With influencer marketing however, the focus is not on the number of followers, but how niche the following is. Marketers routinely advise their clients to seek influencers with less than 5000 followers or so.

There are two reasons why this is the case. Firstly, such influencers have a high percentage of followers that meet a brand’s target group. Consequently, your campaign is likely to reach a larger chunk of users who are prospective customers. Compare this with a celebrity like Kim Kardashian who enjoys several millions of followers who do not all fall into the same demographic.

Secondly, such influencers also offer better ROI. This is because at a low follower count, influencers tend to be less demanding and offer a more thorough review of your product. This is likely to bring greater exposure to your brand and consequently higher conversions.

Focus on conversions, not branding

Influencer marketing is essentially the social media equivalent of celebrity advertising. The focus in its early days was brand building and media exposure. Not surprisingly then, some of the biggest social media influencers were also those who were media celebrities. However, the objective of influencer marketing has seen a significant shift in recent times.

Like most other forms of digital advertising, influencer marketing today is highly monitored for conversions. One ‘Psychology of Following’ study of over 4000 consumers published by Olapic shows that over 31% of these respondents had purchased a product based on a social media influencer post. This also follows the pattern of other similar studies in the past that showed that an overwhelmingly large number of users rely on social media recommendations while making a purchase.

Focusing on conversions is a better way to gauge the success or failure of an influencer marketing campaign. This is particularly vital for micro-influencer campaigns where brand exposure and visbility is not of much consequence. Measuring the conversion rate also enables a marketer to benchmark an influencer marketing campaign vis-a-vis other forms of digital marketing like paid advertising.

Personalized campaigns

Traditional endorsement campaigns that had branding as their sole objective did not deviate much from their core messaging. But with modern micro-influencing campaigns, marketers have begun experimenting with both influencers and the message that they want to market.

For instance, brands may hire several micro-influencers, each with their own niche following, and market various products and offers to these distinct audiences. There are a few advantages to this strategy. If you are launching a new line or are not sure about the most effective positioning statement for your brand, it makes sense to experiment with different ideas in silos to measure and identify the best path forward for the product.

More importantly, the turnaround time to measure conversion rate is pretty short with micro-influencers. Brand building can take several months, if not years. Small businesses with bootstrapped budgets may have well depleted their marketing budget before they can realize the ROI from their campaigns.

While these changes have made marketing using influencers much more palatable to the bootstrapped marketer, this is not to say that traditional influencer campaigns do not have a place in the industry today. Even on social media, celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez continue to be the biggest influencers. They continue to be popular for brand building campaigns and for those products that do not need a niche audience group.

But at the same time, such campaigns are increasingly being used by startups and small businesses to market their wares and build a following for their brand and business.

The post Op-Ed: The Changing Face Of Influencer Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Keith Petri, Chief Strategy Officer, US, at Screen6

Ad tech is struggling to transition to a state of full maturity, and that’s largely due to the continued acceptance of half-truths and inadequate technological shortcuts. As an industry, we need to demand better, and we need to hold vendors accountable to the claims they make. “Cross-device” is not a term that was made up for marketing materials. It’s a legitimate need among marketers today, and the entire supply chain needs to begin treating it as such.

The truth is that cross-device is being inadequately addressed by many players within the marketing industry, and the vast majority of companies that say they’re enabling cross-device are either openly lying or seriously bending the truth. Why are industry players obscuring the truth about cross-device? Quite simply, because they can.

A Culture of Box-Checking

DSPs and SSPs know they need to be able to list “cross-device” among their capabilities. Unfortunately, most platforms right now are only doing the bare minimum to be able to check this box for their clients.

When marketers say “cross-device,” they mean they want to be able to identify an individual across their various devices and tailor their ad experiences based on knowledge of this individual. But this isn’t the idealistic definition that’s being applied to their campaigns.

Most platforms are currently hacking the concept of cross-device. Some of them do this through simple IP matching, where they tie multiple devices to a single profile based on their use of the same IP address. But IP addresses are not identifiers for individuals. Not even close. These addresses can, but rarely, represent a single device, a router or even a cell tower communication channel. Many people and devices—computers, cell phones, streaming video players, etc.—can communicate over a single IP address, even simultaneously. These addresses can’t be used to identify an individual. They can’t even reliably be used to identify a household.

Many platforms also mislead marketers when they claim to have access to certain cross-device audiences. Let’s say a platform claims to have an auto intenders segment across mobile and desktop. That’s cross-device, right? Not necessarily. It’s more likely that this given audience segment includes auto intenders on mobile and auto intenders on desktop—but they’re not the same people. The mobile audience members are entirely distinct from the individuals who are using their desktops.

DSPs and SSPs today don’t have an interest in building out true cross-device capabilities because they’re not being incentivized to do so, nor are they being penalized for not doing so. This brings us to another deficiency in the marketplace: attribution and verification providers that aren’t accurately measuring cross-device activity.

The Attribution Deficiency

Marketers are partnering with any number of attribution and verification providers today in order to understand the effect of their media spends and ensure all of their supply-chain partners are delivering what they say they’re doing. Such third-party monitoring is designed to keep DSPs and SSPs on the straight and narrow, but that’s not happening in the realm of cross-device. That’s because most verification vendors aren’t handling cross-device attribution appropriately – if at all.

Attribution and verification vendors understand that marketers today are looking for multi-touch attribution solutions that account for cross-device activity. But, like the platforms, they’re only taking bare-bones steps to check the right boxes. Most of them do, in fact, measure activity across channels, but they’re not connecting the activity on different channels and devices to an individual. They’re measuring IDs, not people. Unfortunately, every ID represents only a fraction of a given person.

The marketing industry has been talking about the need and the promise of cross-device for a long time, and rightfully so. I think we can all agree that the need to create seamless experiences for customers and prospects across their ever-multiplying devices is a topic worthy of discussion.

But here’s the problem: thanks to the amount of time we’ve spent heralding the importance of cross-device over the past five years, most advertisers have come to believe that we’ve solved for it. And we haven’t. Not by a long shot.

The post Cross-Device Isn’t As Adopted As You Think appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Indeed, with the average user engaging with their apps around 15 times a day, there is a whole world of opportunity out there, but the downside to this is that there’s also an awful lot of competing content.

That’s why it’s so important to understand the different mobile marketing techniques and how best to use them. Luckily for you, we’ve created this brief rundown of the big four to help you…

Promotional campaigns

The number one way to spread the word about deals and new content, mobile promotional campaigns should be included in your marketing plans from day dot. An integral means of sharing enticing offers, such methods are used by numerous big name brands to get easy sells, such as the Betfair free casino bonus or the latest two for one from well-known eateries out there. Although they can and should be employed as part of your ongoing lifecycle marketing, they also have a place in highlighting time-limited offers, where a sense of urgency and big flashing letters are invaluable.

Transactional campaigns

Promotional campaigns are an integral part of successful mobile marketing, but so too are their transactional counterparts. Although their branding potential is frequently overlooked, such messages can actually be very useful. The way these messages work is that they pop up following a transaction, such as a sign-up or purchase, or when a confirmation is needed. Going along with the automatic message or email sent out to confirm this action, they’re a great way to communicate your brand values and coordinate your campaigns.

On-boarding campaigns 

If you’re not already familiar with them, on-boarding campaigns are a way of welcoming customers to your company and getting them started on the right track. Although they vary greatly according to the functionality of the individual website or app, the premise behind them is simple: to introduce your brand ideals, help users get the most from your mobile content, and lay the foundations for consistent future engagement. With studies showing that 55 percent of people who are engaged with in the first week after download are retained, such campaigns really are worth pursuing.

Opt-in priming campaigns 

Last but not least, opt-in priming campaigns are your friend. Priming for push notifications or other permissions has been proven to vastly improve a company’s opt-in rates, so you definitely need to know how to do it. Basically, these campaigns focus on finding the very best moment to share the value of opting in with your customers, so a gentle, persuasive nudge can be delivered when they’re most receptive to it. If you need some help with working out how to do that, take a look at this link for eight essential rules of good practice plus examples.

Isn’t it time you improved your techniques and gave your mobile marketing the boost it needs?

The post Four Types of Mobile Marketing Campaign You Should Know About appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The new Augmented Reality (AR) mobile game will be available for basketball fans of all ages with special launch events planned for Las Vegas running July 12-15 and in other North American cities leading up to the 2018/19 NBA season.

ePlay is working with 7-time NBA champion, Robert Horry and a fantastically talented group of young basketball players that will be wearing the Big Shot logo throughout the summer to promote the Big Shot mobile game.

We’re told that the company also released a new website for its upcoming game series at www.BigShotAR.com.

“This is going to be a big summer for ePlay and for augmented reality,” says Trevor Doerksen, CEO of ePlay Digital. “We are advancing the state-of-art for sports and mobile technology and look forward to seeing hundreds of thousands of fans of all ages enjoying the magic that our augmented reality platform creates.”

To learn more, click here.

The post ePlay Touts Big Shot AR Beta Launch appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Jason Yim, CEO and Executive Creative Director of Trigger

Augmented and mixed reality experiences are powerful tools that can connect consumers to brands and products in meaningful ways. However, in order to achieve that meaningful connection, marketing strategists should always consider the overall customer experience when designing a campaign. More people rely on smartphones to cater their entertainment needs than ever before but still, a one-size-fits-all AR solution does not exist. After clocking more than 100k hours of mixed reality development for some of the world’s largest brand names, Trigger has identified seven different ways to integrate AR into your next marketing campaign.

1. Web AR:

Web AR is one of the fastest ways to deliver AR content to an audience because it works through a mobile web browser and does not require an app. Users are directed to a unique URL that can scan a target and launch an experience.

Advantages:

• User does not need to download an app
• Wide reach

Limitations:

• Technology is still in its infancy – limited 3D fidelity, limited recognition and tracking, less robust an experience
• Requires internet connection

2. Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) AR Content:

OEM AR content is embedded into a device’s native camera or pre-installed in an app on the device. The Google Pixel 2 is a perfect example of this.

Advantages:

• Higher performance as it is integrated directly into hardware
• User does not need to download app

Limitations:

• Closed development and publishing environment for these platforms
• Limited to a few handsets in the market

3. Social App Lens (Snap, Facebook):

Everything we do now almost always overlaps with a social platform, so placing AR content into an existing social app can be an effective way to access users already actively using those platforms.

Advantages:

• Targets large active user base
• Delivers measurable results
• Proven user behavior and content preference
• Broad reach

Limitations:

• Media buy often required
• Content size and interactive experience are limited by constraints of the platform

4. AR/MR Module in an Existing App:

If you have a large consumer base already, consider building an AR module into an existing (legacy) app. This approach enhances an existing experience and continues to take advantage of an established install base.

Advantages:

• No new app download required
• Feature set only limited by size of module and budget

Limitations:

• Technical integration with legacy app can sometimes be challenging
• Features could be limited by legacy app in terms of file size or conflicting technology

5. Dedicated AR/MR App:

Starting from scratch? Building an AR/MR app from the ground-up increases your ability to customize an experience without having to accommodate an existing app.

Advantages:

• Newer technologies are cutting development times for bespoke experiences down
• Customize the entire experience from start-to-finish

Limitations

• App install is required
• Significant app marketing and promotion is required to encourage downloads and installs

6. Ambassador-Driven Experience with Custom Hardware/Software:

This method is ideal for events and retail experiences where brand ambassadors are equipped and trained with devices to run an AR/MR experience.

Advantages:

• User does not need to download app
• Usually works best for a shorter experience with a social component

Limitations:

• Consumers cannot replicate experience at home

7. Location-Based AR/MR Installation:

Turn-key technological solutions for location-based AR/MR do not currently exist. An installation will likely require custom hardware/software.

Advantages:

• User does not need to download app
• Interaction does not have to be limited to mobile devices
• Experience can have a larger wow factor

Limitations:

• Experience can be limited to target ideal traffic flow and dwell times
• Significant commitment of time, space and money

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Yim is the CEO and Executive Creative Director of Trigger – The Mixed Reality Agency^TM with offices in the US and Denmark. Yim has led over 100,000 hours of development in AR/VR/XR, including as a Snap Lens Studio Partner and as a showcase developer for Vuforia and Google for clients including: Honda, Sony, Mattel, Disney, LEGO and more. For LEGO, he has developed mixed reality content and solutions for various product lines including LEGO Stores and the new LEGO Museum. Yim has two assigned patents in table-top AR play, with several more pending.

The post 7 Mixed Reality Technology Options for Marketers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.