Casino affiliates are an important part of the acquisition model that brands engage with to acquire new customers. How do they contribute to helping support not only brand reach, but player engagement too?
In this article, I’ll be sharing exactly how casino affiliates play a pivotal role in helping brands connect to players in a variety of digital customer niches.
Affiliates are essentially industry experts on a product, service, game provider, or experience and they leverage their expertise to reach customers online - everywhere - helping brands get a footprint in channels and places that their direct marketing and advertising activity may not reach.
These marketing partners use their expert knowledge to attract wider audiences and increase sales on a more consistent basis than other forms of marketing. This happens thanks to the effort they place on truly understanding their customers and building brand affinity and loyalty in the services they provide to the customers during their buyer awareness and consideration processes.
Successful affiliate marketing is not just about driving traffic from one site to another; it’s about adding value to the end user along that process.
So, What Exactly Do Affiliates Do?
Affiliate partners are online marketers, usually influencers, paid advertising or SEO experts, some are even media and Indi publishers, who work with companies to help them market, inform and educate a variety of customers about their brands and services. This can either be in the form of advertising a specific product or service, on a social media channel, in a group, on a website or in an app or it may be just be about increasing brand awareness of a certain casino in general.
They are usually given an affiliate link to promote the product they are referring which enables customers to click and make a purchase or sign up and for each successful conversion like this, the affiliate is given a referral fee.
How Do Affiliates Attract Niche Customers?
Affiliate marketers work hard to create a loyal audience through detailed and educational content creation that is specific to their niche. As outlined above, affiliate partners are often industry experts, brand influencers, or digital marketing experts who may even already have a large following, which is how they are able to gain traffic for brands by advertising their products.
Affiliate partners are usually very close and connected to their audiences too, with a strong sense of trust established between them. This allows affiliates to promote products and services easily and effectively, with their audiences already trusting what they have to say. Such customer loyalty usually transfers to the brand that the affiliate partner is promoting, helping businesses gain a wide audience of loyal customers with little effort on the part of the business.
From here, it is up to the business to provide a product or service of a good enough quality to keep customers returning to them time after time.
What Do Affiliates Offer Brands as a Service?
Affiliates offer brands a unique selling point - a loyal audience that has already been established. In terms of casino marketing, casino affiliates are often players themselves. For the most part, they have already established themselves through a blog, YouTube channel or some other platform as an expert in the gaming industry. This is something that casinos themselves cannot provide agnostically themselves, as everything they say to players will come across as an advertising or sales upsell. Casino affiliates, however, have the chance to promote particular businesses on their pages through authentic reviews of particular brands. The more credible a casino affiliate site is, the more likely the audience is to stay loyal to the brands they promote.
However, not all casino affiliates have a brand entirely based on gaming. Usually, those affiliates can be the ones who will help brands reach out to other niches, and hit audience segments they may not otherwise have access to.
If you are looking to make the most of using affiliate partners, it may be beneficial to work with more than one affiliate partner or type of affiliate partner at once. This means that you could use a casino affiliate with experience in the gaming industry to market to those consumers who are already interested in your product, while an affiliate in a different market segment may be able to help increase brand awareness.
What Value Do Affiliates Bring to Players?
Affiliates make up an important part of the marketing mix; on one hand, they can be beneficial to brands themselves. But, on the other, more important one - they can be beneficial to the players.
Casino affiliates have the experience and know-how to attract a brand’s interest groups, or niche audiences while adequately promoting a brand or product.
Players can use casino affiliates to help them spot the best games, bonuses, or service models that work for them. Additionally, they can help them find advice on the most secure or the best-rated places to play and enjoy entertainment online.
Affiliate marketing is a niche form of online marketing that supports and connects brands and players, and can help bridge the gap between the two in a way that most other forms of direct marketing are just not able to.
About Lee-Ann
With over two decades of digital marketing and affiliate management experience, Lee-Ann Johnstone is an award-winning digital marketing strategist and affiliate performance marketer. In 2019 she launched AffiliateINSIDER, a Google News-approved Publication + Agency and Training business helping brands and affiliate managers across multiple industries level up their performance through content, events and chart-topping Affiliate Marketing podcast.
She has been voted as one of the Top 10 Most Influential Women in iGaming (2019), inaugurated as a member of the prestigious forbes.com Agency Council (2020) and regularly features in many industry publications such as The Drum, PerformanceIN, GPWA, IGB Affiliate Magazine and Forbes.com to name a few.
