Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming JUly 2015 34 F or casino marketers, promotions are one of the keys in keeping players coming through casino doors. They are designed to achieve a multitude of goals, from filling slow periods and capturing more VIP revenue to alerting customers to new casino offerings and more. At the recent Southern Gaming Summit in Biloxi, Miss., casino marketers gathered for “Steal This Promotion,” a session focused on successful promotions that build incremental revenue. Ryan Meister, director of marketing for Treasure Bay Casino, moderated the session. On the panel were Julia Carcamo, president & chief brand strategist for J Carcamo & Associates; Linda Gordon, director of marketing for SCA Gaming; and Bobby Thornton, director - promotions and entertainment for Pearl River Resort. The panelists started with the basics: What’s the best way to calculate incremental revenue? “I think a lot of that has to be a partnership with your database marketing team and your analysts if you’re lucky enough to have them,” said Ms Carcamo. “Because I know in the past we’ve developed a layering report, so it was very important to always analyze our direct marketing, as much as how many offers people are using and when they’re coming in and how they’re layering offers.” Mr Thornton added another facet to the calculation. “A big piece of [determining incremental revenue] is looking at that historical data,” he said. “So if you’re running the same kind of database program year over year, and you’re looking at running a promotion through the database and putting a promotion on top of that this year versus the prior year, you see if there was a bump or you just shifted the revenue around. Looking at prior years is very important as well.” Ms Gordon agreed with both panelists and wrapped it up adding, “It’s good to have the information; it’s even better to look at it. So if you don’t have a database manager, take the time to do that, run the reports, look at your tiers, look at your historical tiers… and most importantly, look at what your competition is doing, especially in your own market.” A successful casino promotion involves a lot of pre-event strategy and post-event analysis By Megan Clemens CASINO MARKETING HISTORY LESSON Moving on from revenue, Mr Meister posed the question marketers in the audience were waiting for: What can marketers themselves do to drive revenue today? Ms Carcamo went back to the history component. “You still look at what’s always been successful in the past, that’s always a good start. If you’re part of an organization that has multiple properties, I think you have a wealth of information and ideas that you can share as well,” she said. “A lot of our customers liked interactive pieces to the promotions,” said Mr Thornton. “So anything you can do where a customer can come up and put their hands on a promotion, get to play with something, get to play a game, tends to be a little bit more successful, as long as you follow what we found to be the key premise, which is the KISS principal. It’s ‘keep it simple stupid.’ Don’t make it too complicated. So as long as you keep the promotion simple, as long as you keep it fun and you appeal to the customer that way, you’re probably going to have a fairly successful promotion.” This interactive component Mr Thornton brought up was also a larger discussion throughout the session and for marketers today. Casinos are in the business of entertainment, and in order to have Managing the Promotional Process “So anything you can do where a customer can come up and put their hands on a promotion, get to play with something, get to play a game, tends to be a little bit more successful, as long as you follow what we found to be the key premise, which is the KISS principal. It’s ‘keep it simple stupid.’”