Download Let Your Target Market Drive Your Marketing Plan

MARKETING
Let Your Target Market Drive Your Marketing Plan
by Linda Hill
T
o compete successfully in today’s competitive and volatile
gaming industry, casinos need to grow their customer base.
And there are only three ways to grow your business. One way
is to optimize the value of your current customer, including
growth and retention of high-end customers. Although
gaming is still the largest driver of casino profits and gamers
should be encouraged to spend more, cross-sell the complete
guest experience including extending hotel stay, entertainment, dining, golf, spas and gift shops whenever possible.
Another strategy is to increase the frequency of visits to the
casino and other amenities. This can be accomplished through
players rewards and loyalty programs, new games and fresh
entertainment. And lastly, you can grow your business by finding new customers. The critical strategic decision for finding
new customers is whether to build the gaming market or steal
market share from competing casinos.
It is usually easier to steal market share, especially in a
sluggish economy, than to build market share. If you choose
this strategy, your target audience profile should closely match
those of the casino market leader and the advertising message
would communicate benefits the leader doesn’t have. Building
new markets requires educating new customers, building
awareness, promoting trial usage, and finally, conversion to a
preference for your property.
Defining your target audience is the most important step in
all three growth strategies. The more the customer can be
understood, the better you will be able to fulfill the customer’s
needs. And since most casinos have extensive players club
databases, target audience profiles can be developed and
segmented based on casino play and other amenities. This marketing strategy calls for understanding the casino customers and
satisfying their needs better than the competition.
According to the Institute for the Study of Gambling &
Commercial Gaming, a high-end player personality profile
would include these typical fields of data:
Name and contact details
Income
Favorite game
Average bet and length of play
Frequency of visits
Cumulative losses
Theoretical losses
Comps taken, comps balance
Food and beverage preferences
Accommodation preferences
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Activities and interests (e.g. country music, boxing,
golf, hiking)
Media habits (newspaper, magazine readership, TV
viewership)
Gambling motivations (excitement, relaxation, beating
the system, etc.)
Preferred interaction/communications style and approach
Preferred host personality and communications style
Once the current customer base has been analyzed,
compare the demographic profile of your current customer to
the demographics of all casino customers. Through comparing gamer profiles to the demographics of the category, you can
determine if you need to adjust your current target focus to
realize a greater market share. Or the comparison may reveal
major differences between your player profile and the general
casino category which could, in turn, provide insight as to why
you have been successful with a particular segment.
If detailed, primary data isn’t available through your
players club database or other source, market techno-analytics
are still possible through syndicated and secondary research.
And the data available today has moved far beyond the simple
demographics of age and gender. The three most common
target audience filters used today are demographics, psychographics and life-stages.
Demographic data include objective and measurable data
about people and their lives. Census data is a common
example. Age, ethnicity, occupation, income, zip code,
number of children, marital status, gender are other examples.
Even more specific information can be measured such as how
often one visits a casino, what games are played, etc.
Psychographics is a newer discipline that can be used to
predict consumer behavior. It is the study of personality,
values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, social class, behavior and
opinions. Market research groups such as Yankelovich,
Simmons and Nielson group the profiles into categories
referred to as segments, clusters or affinity groups with catchy
names such as “movers and shakers,” “money and brains,” and
“bedrock Americans.”
Life-stage data describes where you are in terms of
marriage, children, home ownership, etc. and uses group
profile descriptors such as “empty nesters,” “grandparents,”
or “grandparents as parents.” “Life-stage is a much stronger
way of looking at demographics,” according to J. Walker
Smith, President of Yankelovich, “because age isn’t really a
predictor of everything. Knowing someone is recently
married with one child is much more telling to a marketer
than knowing whether she is 25 or 41. Similarly, it is much
more relevant to know that someone is recently an empty
nester with more discretionary income to spend at a casino
than to know that person is 55 years old.
Once you have identified your target audience, the next goal
is to find others like them. Working on the principle that
“birds of a feather flock together,” geodemography can be used
to identify other geographic areas that have market potential.
The basic assumption is that people in demographically
similar neighborhoods will tend to have similar consumption,
ownership, and lifestyle preferences. Again, there are many
companies that can use either syndicated or primary research
to perform market segmentation studies.
Now that you know who your target audience is and where
they live, the next step is to perform a market potential analysis for each market. Factors to consider are:
Proximity - Are the identified areas within a reasonable
drive market?
Competition - How many other casinos are in the area?
Cost of Media - How does the cost of media compare
to your home market or other identified markets and can
you expect a reasonable return on investment?
Share of Voice - How much advertising does the competition run and can you afford to advertise aggressively
enough to compete?
This process will help you identify those markets that offer
the most potential, at the lowest budget and the greatest return
on investment. Understanding your audience and how best to
fulfill their needs is essential to developing your marketing plan
and your creative message. The target market drives the
marketing plan. ♣
Linda Hill is Media Director for TLG Gaming, a full-service
advertising agency specializing in Native American casino
advertising and marketing. She can be reached by calling
(800) 950-7333.
October 2008
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