Know your customer
William Hoyle of Stickyeyes explains why a full understanding of customer demographics is crucial for bingo operators boosting their search visibility
Earlier this year, Stickyeyes took a detailed look at the UK online bingo market and found that major brands, including Sky Bingo, Cheeky Bingo and Mecca Bingo, were potentially losing as much as 56% of their annual non-brand organic traffic to smaller operators and affiliates. These new brands were surprisingly taking prominent positions for core non-brand keyword terms, substantially harming the visibility of some of the biggest brands in the market.
The state of the market
The online bingo search engine results pages are notoriously volatile, so it has never been more important for brands to have a sustainable and long-term digital strategy that is focused on delivering content to the right audiences, in the right places, at the right time.
That volatility is demonstrated when we look at the state of the market three months on from our previous research.
Although Foxy Bingo appears to have strengthened its position as the market leader, Sky Bingo appears to have increased its organic visibility by 38% in just three months. Whilst Mummies Bingo has grown by an impressive 204% over the same period to become the second most visible brand in the market.
However, there are signs that the smaller brands with lower authority may be losing some visibility, with Bingo Godz moving out of our top ten, having previously been the sixth most visible brand.
So, whatâs the next step for these established online brands in fighting back against these challengers?
Whilst some brands understand who their audiences are, many are missing opportunities to provide content that engages with those audiences at different stages of the customer journey.
The importance of understanding your audience
A stereotype has long persisted in the online bingo industry â that the bingo audience is typically female and possibly a stay-at-home mum – but how accurate is that perception? Analysis of ten of the most visible brands in the market highlights how broad the bingo audience actually is with a âtypicalâ audience type varying significantly from one brand to the next.
On average, 36% of traffic to these sites is attributed to males, while the online bingo industry as a whole receives 38% male traffic; both stats that arguably contradict the predominantly female stereotype.
Indeed, the operator MummiesBingo.com has a traffic split that belies its brand name, with 53% of its traffic coming from males. Foxy Bingo, the most visible operator in the market, has a 41% male audience (Source: Hitwise). Age is also a key factor and again, we see trends that do not necessarily fit with the traditional stereotype of a bingo player.
On average the industry has a more mature audience, with the average customer typically aged 45 or over, but in the case of Foxy Bingo, we see a fairly even split across all age groups. Notably the 18-24 group differs significantly to the industry average.
Is this insight being applied to marketing activity?
Putting these insights into practice can be a tough ask, but market leader Foxy Bingo appears to understand their customers well enough to tailor both its digital and offline strategies to their target audiences. As a result, the brand are able to leverage offline strategies into robust digital strategies.
Foxy Bingoâs partnership with Rugby League allows the brand to reach one section of its audience, while a separate sponsorship agreement with The Only Way Is Essex reaches another. This is a prime example of targeting different audience personas.
On the back of both of these partnerships, Foxy has created successful, engaging, multi-format campaigns and are consequently seeing high engagement levels and authoritative links, which will help to reinforce its market leading position.
Despite these findings, a study of the content marketing strategies and the content disseminated by bingo brands across social media suggests that many are still focusing heavily on female audiences.
Two brands in particular appear to take a slightly different route through social channels – Sky Bingo and Wink Bingo. These two brands take a more generic approach with the types of content they publish and, whilst much of their content may lean towards a female audience, there is a much stronger appeal to male demographics compared to content produced by other brands.
One fifth of Sky Bingoâs Facebook audience is male, the largest proportion of males of any of the audiences of the brands that we analysed. Wink Bingo follows with a 17% male Facebook audience, and the brand receives 22% male traffic.
However, as much as Foxy Bingo appears to achieve to a balanced gender split in its traffic (slightly more male-dominated), this isnât reflected in its social media channels. Foxy Bingoâs Facebook audiences is made up of 95% females, suggesting that the brand is not effectively directing its audiences to its social media channels.
Foxy Bingo could address this imbalance and plug some gaps in its social media audience by deploying content that is targeted to clear audience personas, encouraging a much wider demographic onto its social media channels where it can then engage these audiences longer term with content, promotions and incentives to play.
The increasing importance of understanding your personas
It is a fallacy to assume that your audiences will fall into one or a handful of very broad behaviour and demographic brackets. So, itâs essential that you consider all your audience groups, and create multiple audience personas based on an understanding of your customerâs needs, expectations and behaviour.
Donât forget that your CRM contains a wealth of information about who your customers are and, by combining this with information gleaned from Google Analytics (and other tools), youâre on the path to understanding more about what peaks your audienceâs interests and what makes them tick.
When you understand how your target audience engages with your brand and makes their purchasing decision, you can match content to each stage of the purchasing process. The way your target personas move through this purchasing process will dictate both the types of content, and the media you use to distribute it, be that owned, earned or paid.
Of course, your social channels are a great way to get your content out there, and advanced targeting is making it easier to get that content in front of the people that you want to reach. Again, there are processes you can find out more about on the Stickyeyes website. Custom audience targeting enables you to deliver an extremely targeted piece of content to the 5% of your audience that you know will deliver the best commercial return.
Essentially, donât make the mistake of guessing who your customer is and what theyâre interested in. Take time and use all the tools available to you to understand more about them. Once you fully understand them, youâre content strategy should write itself.