Nearly 1.6 billion people across the planet gamble every year, making it one of the most popular pastimes in the world.
In the UK alone the annual revenues of gambling companies sit at just above £15 billion.
Understandably, the online market is incredibly saturated with over 600 different providers all vying to grab the attention of potential customers. With so many competitors to contend with, it can be difficult for an individual online casino to stand out.
How Online Casinos Utilize Affiliate Marketing
Radio and television adverts are one guaranteed way of attracting new customers, but they can be expensive to run and are often heavily regulated.
One cheap, easy, and reliable way to reach large numbers of customers is affiliate marketing.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a cheaper alternative to traditional advertising.
Traditionally companies looking to market their services would approach a major publication such as a newspaper or a TV station to buy advertising space. The onus would be on the company itself to design and produce their own advert, which for a large fee, the publication would run.
The benefit of these advertising campaigns was that they provided guaranteed views for the advertising company. However, due to their wide reach, they were often super expensive and not always reaching the target market. For example, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one American company paid $1.18 million for a 30-second advert.
The modern alternative to this is affiliate marketing, whereby a company pays a social media influencer, blogger, or YouTuber to market their product on their website or platform. This type of marketing has many benefits:
- It is often for a much smaller fee
- It guarantees that your business gets in front of the perfect audience for your brand
- Both the affiliate and the company can earn money
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing works by hiring a third party to direct customers to your site. It’s especially popular with casinos as it works really well and allows casinos to work with a number of different affiliates to extend their audience. The process usually goes like this:
- The affiliate marketer is first registered with the merchant affiliate program and then receives access to marketing materials, such as banners and a special affiliate code that is their affiliate ID identifier.
- The affiliate then reviews the merchant’s products or services on their blog or website while inserting in the text links to the merchant’s website. These are embedded with his/her affiliate ID code.
- When a visitor to the affiliate’s website clicks on one of these links, they are then sent to the merchant’s website. The merchant identifies the affiliate ID and thus, if the user is purchasing a product or service on the merchant’s website, then the affiliate account is credited with the predetermined commission.
It is also sometimes called “revShare” = revenue share. The big advantage for the merchant is that it is a pay per proven results method of marketing (performance-based), where all the expenses for obtaining results are on the affiliate marketer’s shoulders
Other less nuanced examples of affiliate marketing are YouTubers or Instagram stars directing their followers to their ‘new favorite’ online casino. There are many ways affiliate marketing can work and be hugely beneficial for both parties whatever method is used.
One site which has an impressive and well-rounded affiliate program is 888 Casino. They work with multiple partners, who review their sites and games then review and rate them. Once those new customers get on the site they can benefit from accessing a huge variety of games, exciting live casino environments and insightful educational content to help them improve their gambling skills, like this helpful roulette strategy guide.
Why are companies choosing affiliate marketing?
There are a number of reasons why gambling companies choose to go down the affiliate marketing route rather than buying traditional advertising. Money is the main motivator, as affiliate marketing is far cheaper than TV or radio campaigns.
However, there are other reasons to choose affiliate marketing such as…
1. Targeted Audiences
Affiliate marketing helps companies to market directly to their target audience.
Even if an online casino were to part with over a million dollars to run an advert during the World Cup Final, how could they guarantee the success of that advert?
Quite simply – they couldn’t. There is absolutely no guarantee that even 10% of the viewers would be interested in an online casino. In addition to that, there is no tangible way to measure the efficacy of this type of campaign.
Affiliate marketing allows online casinos to market their services with websites that appeal to their target audience. A well-run affiliate program with an online gambling aggregator site will appeal directly to the online casinos’ dedicated demographic.
2. The changing face of media
Traditional forms of media like newspapers and television are dying. Only a small amount of the population buys newspapers anymore, which is backed up by the falling sales figures of almost every major newspaper in the UK.
Likewise, mainstream television channels are falling in popularity with more and more people turning to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. In short, an advertising campaign on TV or in print is now about half as successful as it would have been ten years ago.
On average as a population, we are spending more time online than ever before, so a marketing campaign focused entirely online is now more productive and yields much better results.
How to become an affiliate marketer yourself?
If the idea of making money by marketing for online companies sounds good to you, then you may want to consider becoming an affiliate marketer yourself.
Fortunately, it is quite easy to enter into a partnership like this with any number of online companies. As a rule of thumb, your site or social media account will need to have a minimum of 10,000 visits a month to make it worthwhile for a company interested in affiliate marketing.
Summary
For online casinos to make as much money as possible, you should collate all the key demographic data of readers or viewers. After doing this you should have a good idea of what would be of interest to your audience.
Reach out to sites, individuals, and companies that you think would appeal to your audience. Share with them the information you have collated on your demographic and then offer to enter into an affiliate marketing scheme. It can be hugely profitable and easy for both parties to make money quickly.