Igaming localisation: best practice to drive player acquisition and lifetime value

In the most competitive of mature markets – and the newest regulated markets – one of the single best (and inexpensive) ways to drive up acquisition and long-term player value is to ensure that content is fully localised and optimised for regional audiences.

With all the time, money and effort that goes into growing a brand on the international stage, it makes sense to get localised content ‘right first time’, without spinning wheels with endless revisions or (potentially costly) imprecision when it comes to offers, bonuses, terms and conditions, and responsible gambling.

Here I’ve narrowed down our recommendations for global betting brands to three key areas:

Learn from everyone else’s mistakes

That sounds rather negative but particularly for brands entering a new market, it’s worth assessing what competitors have done well (that you can improve upon) and what they have done poorly that you can learn from.

Learning from the mistakes of others is one of the most fundamental ways to develop a localisation strategy that performs – by going beyond the baseline of quality with respect for local audiences, your brand is then set up to outperform more casual competitors.

Betting is a sector that is full of very exact terminology around games, odds and offers. As such, there’s a natural risk for overly literal translations to miss the target and for content to be misaligned to how players actually search online.

As a result, brands are losing the trust of potential players at a very early stage while opening up regulatory risk if linguistic shortcuts are taken with terms and conditions and the like.

In addition to perhaps providing a flash of guilty enjoyment, learning from the mistakes and mistranslations of others reinforces the need not to take local audiences for granted. It’d be unfair to surface cases of this here, but there’s no shortage of examples.

Safe to say, in-depth competitor analysis reveals opportunities to ‘catch up’ on market leaders, confident in the knowledge that they can be bettered.

Don’t sacrifice success in the name of speed

The gaming industry is fast-moving, but moving at excessive speed can delay the path to profitable growth.

As important as it is to apply expertise from existing markets, too many brands assume that success will come easily to them in new markets, using undifferentiated strategies.

It’s clear that in the rush to capitalise on opportunities across developing markets across North and South America, Ukraine, India and the like – as well as to navigate markets with shifting regulatory frameworks such as Sweden, Italy and Spain – even well-funded brands are making unforced errors.

Those who don’t localise using a full understanding of formal versus informal language standards, cultural meanings and even the myriad ways in which basic how-to information and casino reviews can be botched face the serious risk of turning off potential players.

Monetise more effectively by joining up the localisation, UX and SEO plans

Localisation of gaming content has two overarching purposes. The first, to establish trust with visitors and properly guide them towards making a deposit, we’ve already more or less discussed.

The second purpose is to help sites to be indexed by search engines and found by potential players. Too few brands come out of departmental silos to properly localise with SEO in mind, but the good news is that there are plentiful tools to make it straightforward.

From Google’s own platforms (including Keyword Planner) to third-party research platforms like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest, the data about what local audiences search for locally is freely available – as well as what competitors rank for across dozens of international markets.

Content, across the written word, audio, video and interactive elements, has a key role to play in guiding visitors towards profitable action while on the site, but structuring multi-lingual content to maximise search engine visibility is just as important to get them there in the first place.

If your multi-lingual content is built around player priorities, more relevant to societal and regulatory standards and supported with traditional SEO strategies such as topically relevant links and optimised site performance, then there is serious scope to compete with even the largest brands – in rankings, traffic, deposits and player value.

In summary, opportunities exist for those brands who want to commit to engaging multi-lingual audiences, but the bigger picture requires an understanding of how language and localisation relates to wider priorities from brand and compliance, to SEO and acquisition.

Martin Calvert is marketing director at international marketing agency ICS-digital. ICS-digital works across 80 languages and dozens of markets, with a core focus on igaming as well as other highly competitive sectors including finance, health, travel and e-commerce.  

ICS works with global operators, affiliates and game developers and is part of the Spotlight Sports Group alongside other leading brands such as the Racing Post and Pickswise.com.