Are you focusing your SEO efforts on specific sectors of various gambling markets? If you’re not, you’re missing a big opportunity to better reach, and convert, players across the gaming demographic.
A recent article on SEObook.com titled, Three Ways to Break Down a Market, provided some great tips for breaking down markets for effectively utilizing your SEO efforts. We’ve taken their concept and adapted it specifically for gaming markets. Here’s what you need to know.
Market Segments
SEOBook describes market segments as, groups of people, that include:
- Benefit Segmentation – A group that’s looking for common benefits is a good one target. In gaming, bonus hunters are a perfect example of this phenomenon.
- Demographic Segmentation – Focusing on groups with similar demographic traits can help focus your gaming SEO efforts. In the next few months we’ll see this in earnest when poker affiliates begin to chase Nevada poker players.
- Occasion Segmentation – Put a bulls eye on those once-a-year bettors who pour cash in gaming markets at World Cup or Super Bowl time. If ever there was a group to promote prop bets to, this would be the one.
- Usage Segmentation – These are folks who game in very specific intervals or gamble very specific amounts. For gaming affiliates, this may mean tailoring their marketing messages to coincide with tax refunds or end of the month pay days.
- Lifestyle Segmentation – Lifestyle markets are people with activities or common interests. A good example of this could be WSOP players, online sports communities or even social gamers.
Remember that none of these segments lives in a vacuum. You might find yourself targeting certain demographic sectors of the occasion segment if you’re feeling tightly focused.
SEOBook points out that without breaking down a market this way, testing your results can be very difficult.
Niches
Segmentation is the first slice of your markets and niches break those segments down into even tighter groups. SEOBook defines them as being based on unique needs.
In the gaming world, sites like PokerStrategy.com do a nice job of serving groups like this. The nice thing about niches is that they allow you to draw out small groups from larger, more competitive pools.
Cells
Cells are the smallest market segments you can think of and are uniquely suited to Internet marketing. These should be looked at as extremely specific opportunities. For example, if you’ve got football bettors who also consistently play in poker rooms, that’s a cell.
Tailoring bonuses and other promotions to these micro-segments can really boost conversions.
Finally
None of the market break downs described here are really possible unless you have a good handle on who your customers are, and that’s not always easy to find out.
Getting customers to fill out surveys and provide other information is a lot easier when it’s incentivized. Throw a free e-book or other promo into the mix and the job becomes a lot easier.
Are you already utilizing any of these techniques? Share your experiences in the comments section below.