Footprints in the Market | Influencing iGaming is back with Episode 7 of Season 3. This week, Digital Footprints Managing Director Sharon McFarlane sat down with InPlaySoft Marketing Director Dan Stone for a chat about building trust, balancing speed and reliability, future trends and more!
Marketing as a B2B Brand
In the iGaming industry of yesteryear, marketing as a B2B brand was a lot more straightforward. Now, with the ever-increasing number of competitors, it’s a different ballgame entirely. Having the best product isn’t enough; brands have to ensure that their marketing strategy is aligned with their goals and values if they want to stand out from the crowd.
Dan said: “It’s such a competitive market. You can’t just go out and say: ‘We’ve got this platform, we think it’s great, let’s promote it. And if we build it, they will come.’ They don’t. So we took a step back and said: ‘What do we do? And why do we do it?’
“And that’s really important, for any marketer, to take a moment every few months and just stop and just think about that, because in an industry that’s very fast-moving, you have to reset sometimes and realign and make sure that you’re still going in the right direction and that what you’re doing still aligns with your beliefs and with your audience’s wants and needs.”
Balancing Speed and Reliability
Modern iGaming products need to be fast, responsive and dynamic. However, they also need to be absolutely reliable, with the strictest security capabilities and able to adapt to a shifting regulatory landscape. This can be a difficult balance to strike, and delivering the message that your product can be both fast and reliable is just as tricky.
Dan said: “We’ve been very successfully growing our customer base based on honest conversations and honest demonstrations as well. It’s not just glossy sales pitches. We take the time to understand what customer needs are and actually listen to them. We actually do listen to what they want and why. And then we can direct the demonstration accordingly.
“There’s also the social proof element. So, if our customers are happy, then we can introduce them. We can say: ‘This is why these other customers are happy with us, why they joined us and why they’re still with us and will be indefinitely, hopefully.’ Because word of mouth is massively important in marketing.”
Future iGaming Trends
The iGaming industry has always been at the forefront of technology, and there’s never been a more exciting time to be involved in the space. With new technological developments coming all the time, predicting what might be ahead can be difficult.
Dan said: “I think AI is going to be a bit of a game changer. There have been other big statements like this before, and bubbles have burst, and people have had egg on their faces. But with AI, it just feels a little bit different. Even from a marketing perspective, the impact on traditional SEO, we’ve had to shift things and try get our head around them.
“From a wider industry perspective, I think it’s going to have a massive impact. Think of the huge resource base that a lot of companies in this industry have, whether it’s platform tech, whether it’s games tech, it’s development and AI, like it or not, is already impacting tech development. I think that will have a major impact, and I think the clever companies will be starting to look at that already.”
Dan and Sharon also discussed:
Geo Marketing Strategies (jump to 18.09)
Attending the Right Conferences (jump to 25.38)
Advice for New Marketers (jump to 34.49)
A huge thanks to Dan Stone for taking part! Watch this space for next week’s episode of Footprints in the Market | Influencing iGaming.
