Sascon 2011 / Gaming Market Focus

Last week I was involved in a few sessions at SASCon talking about different ways in which Social Media and SEO can be used by companies in order to increase their online sales.

The following slides are from a session that I did with Nick Garner from Unibet on the subject of online gaming.  Nick talked about the importance of the user experience post conversion and how presenting customers with a great product will encourage them to be advocates of that brand in the future and lead to increased sales from Word of Mouth marketing.

I covered the traffic acquisition aspect of gaming, although rather than focusing on the idea of ranking for terms like casino or poker, I concentrated  more on the idea of becoming more targeted in the approach to SEO to deliver traffic at specific times and from specific demographics.

These are the slides I spoke from:

Key Points

I wanted to get away from the idea of gaming SEO being all about relentless link acquisition, and to talk about it from a marketing perspective, so the basic theme was as follows:
By knowing who your best customers are in terms of who buys from your, rather than who buys in general, it becomes possible to know more about them – the kinds of places where they go, the kind of content they like, and the type of emotional triggers that will work best to push them towards conversion.
Beyond the who, knowing the when and the where is also highly important.  I talked about how you need to get deeper into your analytics than just knowing when you get the peak in traffic.  You need to understand the peak in interest for your specific market.  Not just when they visit, but when they are more likely to register or play a game.

I also covered the idea of creating a time targeted SEO content strategy to take advantage of the freshness of the Google Caffeine index whereby you focus attention on times when your customers are at their most active – think sporting events / payday etc.

If you want a nutshell summary, then I’d suggest:

Talk to your customers in the right place, with the right message, at the right time.