I was hoping to stimulate some creativity in the area of “Real World Marketing”, however that didn’t seem to work.:Cry:
I’m probably a little older than most of you, and was retired from the real world when I started getting into this field, which was really foreign territory for me at the time.
As a small real world company in a saturated field, we had to be very creative to get leads for the company, and have real world closers to sell those leads, and turn them into money.
There are countless creative ways to do that when you can use all of the real world advertising tools available to you.
Small affiliates can’t compete with the big boys on a national level. That’s obvious. We won’t even be able to compete in the search engines if the U.S. legalizes the industry here.
It would be foolish to try.
The creative adjustment for online casino affiliates would be to learn how to market smaller market target areas where you can do things much cheaper than in larger cities.
One example that might sound a little strange to you is buying all the commercial spots for an OLD Spaghetti Western movie on a Sunday afternoon during football season!
Not everyone likes football, and that’s when these old movies usually run, and the time is cheap.
We paid a local production company to make us one of those “FAKE Telethons” that tied all the commericials together for all the movie commercial spots. The cost for that was only 5k. A one time expense and then you own it. You just pay an 800 service to take the calls for you, and they fax or email you the results the next day.
You could use your own number, but I don’t recommend that because you need a bank of people if the call volume is high. These services do that and it’s not expensive.
We always had a small giveaway that went with the Telethon if they called the number and made an appointment. People fall all over themseves for that, BTW.
Obviously, in our industry that could be a number of things from Free Chips and a T-Shirt, or a cheap Bentley TV! :roflmao:
I did that once, BTW. Got a truckload of 1000 of them for 5 bucks apiece.
Moving on, a local NBC, CBS, or ABC affiliate will charge about 1500 to 2000 dollars for the old movie in a SMALLER city.
We never got less than about 300 appointments, often twice that from these things, and you can run them every six months in the city and get the results year after year. It’s just amazing.
Once you have the production made, it’s yours, and you just make your deals in the cities and send them a copy to run.
So, can you see how that might work for us? A poker game running while the host is maybe explaining the game, pitching a 50 dollar free chip and a Poker Stars T-Shirt, your website address embebed on the screen, etc.. Of course you will have to call the prospects when you get the list, have a special link to the casino, and have something set up with the Casino or Poker Room so you can verify the player signed up and created a real account.
That wouldn’t be too hard though.
So it’s a lead generator, but thats what we do right now, and then we rely 100% on the casinos to convert them. This just makes their job easier because they will basically convert themselves.
So would you spend 2500 bucks to give the casino or Poker Room 300 real players to work with to get real deposits from?
I think most of us would. Plus, now you are building a real world data base because YOU’VE got names, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to follow up with, and market other casinos to as well.
The possibilities are endless, but you have to know when to do these things, and where to do them. So that’s just one example of something creative you can do that I know works without fail everytime. Crazy as it may sound.
Newspaper inserts work well to in smaller cities too. The insertion charges are too high in the big cities, but not so in smaller ones! It’s just a numbers game, that’s all.
Same with inserts though, you have to know when to do it.
Many real world advertisers think you do these at times when business is typically slow.
That’s a big mistake. The biggest bang for your buck is to do them when your business is typically the best, because there are many more people in the market and you’ll get a much better response. In my old business, winter was the slow time, so spring and summer were the best, and always do these in the Sunday paper. It costs a little more than a weekday, but worth it.
In our industry, I’d say it’s just the opposite. You would do inserts in the winter, and lay off of them in the summer.
Anyway, sorry for the wind bag routine, but I wanted to give some examples of how to the little guys can capitalize and compete in the real world, if and when the U.S. were to actually legalize. As I said, I think it will eventually happen, but is still a ways off, but it’s never too soon to think about what you will need to do in order to stay competitive in an ever changing market.
As always, due respect to opposing views.
Have a great day out there. I gotta get to work on updates again!