The case for content

In a 2017 content marketing survey, 87% of respondents claimed to employ content in their marketing mix, yet at the same time only 22% classified their content strategy as sophisticated or mature. So what happened to ‘content is king’? Well that phrase has been so overused that it now qualifies as a parody.

Initially it was an apt buzzword for demonstrating the emergence of content as an important method of acquiring and retaining customers but those stats suggest that many companies are still only paying lip-service to the idea. However, with the bookmaker marketing weapon of choice – free bets and bonuses – coming under regulatory scrutiny, is it time for gaming operators to invest further in the opportunities that content can provide?

In the service of furthering the objective of effective content marketing, let’s ditch that reductive term for good and replace the monarchy with a new republic where the value of content is relative to the thought put into delivering it. I’ll try and define that process, and scope out how a content strategy might look and the benefits it can bring, as well as explaining how and why Pinnacle is employing content.

Defining your business goals
The process of creating a content strategy, no matter how complex, starts with one very simple question: what business goals are you trying to achieve with content, and what customer problems will it solve? Gambling content has moved on from the staples such as banner advertising – where clicks are less likely than surviving a plane crash or climbing Everest. There is a veritable digital smorgasbord of options for delivering content to existing and prospective customers – with over 150 types of content – but in the rush to start an Instagram or Snapchat channel that simple question is often overlooked.

Will content achieve a measurable business goal by helping customers with a tangible problem? If the answer to that question is yes then you have a foundation for building a strategy.

Doing no more than just ticking the box marked ‘content’ will not only waste resource, it can harm your brand because poor content sends the message that you are taking your customers for granted.

Connecting content with your brand
Having a clear objective to focus on is a great first step but you also need a clear sense of your brand – values and positioning. Who are you and what is the story that you, as a business, have to tell? Where are you now and where are you going? Your content should reflect this; not literally (unless you are building a corporate site) but as an overriding framework which can be used to form a content style guide (which should sit on every writer’s desk). The gaming space is crowded and competitive, so this process may be harder than you think, but it is always worthwhile as it will promote brand loyalty and improve retention.

Personas – defining your audience
Armed with certainty of what you want to achieve, and why, along with the clarity of how your brand can inform the content you intend to produce, you then need to define your audience. The best way to do this is to talk to your customers – via focus groups, or surveys. Through them you can validate your initial objectives and start to build customer personas. Personas aggregate customers into broad groups with shared characteristics.

They are essential to ensure that your content strategy can deliver relevancy, which is utterly crucial to its success. Segment your esports bettor from your NFL junkie, and then think about their relative points of discovery, this will boost the engagement rates of your content, and in the case of email delivered content, drastically cut down opt-out rates.

The point of discovery
Once you know your message and your audience, you can start to think about where they will find your content – the point of discovery – and how you can engage/convert them into key business goals. This is where data is crucially important.

Who are your customers and how do you acquire/retain them? Does your data fit with your persona assumptions? Do you want to find more of the same or do you want to reach a new audience? If you are starting afresh, look at your competitors and your business plan.

The data about point of discovery should feed into the requirements for how content is created and delivered, but should follow the customer through their entire journey up to the goals defined at the beginning of the whole exercise.

So how do bettors find bookmakers? Well, sometimes they will use Google, and increasingly on mobile devices – no prizes there – but the Google mobile-first changes initiated in 2017 cement the landscape changes that smartphones have inspired. Accelerated Mobile Pages illustrates what Google sees as the key issues of point of discovery for mobile content.

Credit: iStock

Another key Google trend is toward the use of rich results, which essentially gives their algorithm a much better idea of what your content is, and the best way to visually represent it. This might mean highlighting a term’s definition (or using the relevant mark-up), an event listing or special focus on an article within the AMP carousel. This gives you prime positioning in results terms, driving up click-through rates, even if you aren’t position number one in the traditional results.

Canny operators are adding mark-up to events listings which make them stand out in the crowded results pages, again leading to a valuable increase in click-through rates as the presentation offers value-added information.

Standing out from the crowd
So if organic discovery is part of your marketing plan, you have to create content that clearly tells Google what it is about – through appropriate structure – but importantly engages readers so that they invest in it, by not bouncing, linking to it and sharing it. Google cares about these things and will reward you through improved rankings, bringing you more organic traffic, saving on your paid spend.

Standing out from the crowd is equally relevant if social discovery is how you think your type of customer finds you. There’s a huge range of social channels each with their own inflections but the most important factors to consider – as distinct from wooing Google – are the emotional connection you need to make and the critical importance of timing.

A great example of this for gaming brands is tapping into the torrent of feelings at 4.45pm on a Saturday afternoon, when your Twitter/Facebook/Instagram followers may be in a trough of despair or riding high on victory. Preparing content for those moments, and making the connection, is more authentic than campaigns and generates better brand loyalty.

For this to be a meaningful interaction that truly resonates, the message has to reflect your brand (back to that again) and if you are using agencies to better serve this purpose, make sure to immerse them in who you are. The risk of coming across as banter-bot may be much greater than the short-term rewards this approach might reap.

Content optimisation
In order to address these two crucial pillars of content relevancy and timing, optimisation becomes a critical factor. This means using data to understand where and when to publish content in order to catch the customer at the right point in their journey, and before your competitors do. This process should be automated with intelligent re-use of content structured in a content calendar. How much this is possible may boil down to the strength of your CMS or social media management tools, but if you want to achieve scale without employing an army of content editors it is worth thinking hard about what systems you employ or impressing this on your agency.

Where possible, you should build a reactive element into content to capitalise on fluid events – the shock result, a turn in the weather, a managerial sacking – but as paradoxical as it might seem, reactive can be planned. You can’t have a war room on standby, but think about possible scenarios in advance, do you have decent stock images, can your content editors do a little Photoshop on the fly?

And, of course, continually measure the impact of what you share and feed this into a continual process of optimisation to improve the process.

How our brand guides our strategy
Pinnacle doesn’t do bonuses; we are entirely value driven, so communicating what value means is essential to our business model, so important that education is now one of our USPs. The more bettors that understand value, the more that we feel will choose to use our services. This is a much more complex narrative then a free bet, so content marketing plays a crucial role in our marketing mix in getting that message across, but reaps rewards with more engaged and loyal customers.

Wherever bettors learn about value we aim to deliver content that illustrates our message. Sometimes it is explicit – such as odds comparison or (yes) banner advertising – but increasingly implicit, seen through the broadening scope of our Betting Resources education portal or the value-added approach of our Twitter feed. This is what works for Pinnacle, are there opportunities for your brand? Content marketing might not be the perfect fit for your business but it is certainly worth asking the question.

Mirio Mella joined Pinnacle over 10 years ago as a copywriter and since then has made it his mission to communicate the company’s unique USPs through engaging content, culminating in the launch of Betting Resources – Pinnacle’s unique educational betting portal. He is also responsible for Pinnacle’s social media, SEO and CRM.