For iGaming operators, brands and affiliates, content marketing presents an opportunity to build key relationships through the sharing of creative ideas and insights.

In this two-part blog, we’ll discuss content marketing strategies for 2019, how they can help engage and build relationships with target audiences, ways in which iGaming stakeholders can leverage technological trends in content development and more trends worth exploring. The first part is available below and part two can be accessed here.

Creating Relationship-Building Content

A content marketing plan should include an approach that extends beyond aspects like sales and retargeting. While these elements are important, a two-way relationship is much more valuable. This foundation built on trust is ultimately what establishes the value in a relationship.

Essentially, align your business goals with “people goals” through content marketing by creating, curating and repurposing content around your audience’s needs. This will help improve the consumer’s journey with your brand, effectively enhancing engagement and even encouraging collaborative content.

Collaborative content marketing is a tactic that can help your brand grow by creating new business partnerships and sharing it with a broader audience. Whether it’s pitching an expert roundup piece to your favourite brands, finding a professional to contribute with a guest blog or obtaining quotes from various industry experts, the outcome is sure to boost your traffic, increase the likeness of your brand identity and enhance your overall credibility.

After fleshing out your idea, the next step is to determine your audience’s intent. What reaction or action do you intend your piece to invoke? Answer this question by using the buyer’s journey model.

The Buyer’s Journey & Readability

The first phase of the buyer’s journey is informational. This is where you show your ability to answer a question or issue relevant to your target audience. Achieve this by creating content pieces like thought leadership articles, video tutorials, infographics and blogs.

Phase two, the navigational phase, is all about the buyer selecting a specific product, service or brand. This is where you want to develop whitepapers, webinars and landing pages.

The transactional phase is the final phase where you want to convert the buyer. Focus on case studies, sign-up pages, demos and consultations.

Having a lot of content to share is great. However, what matters most is packaging and accessibility.

Readability is a huge factor in implementing top SEO practices. For example, if writing in English but targeting an international audience for whom it may not be an official language, it’s best to use terms that are easily understood by an eighth grader. According to SEO firm Yoast, a high Flesch reading ease score is achieved with short sentences created with words containing no more than two syllables.

Nonetheless, readability should be approached on a case-by-case basis in accordance with your target audience and based on the reading level that best performs for you.

Targeting Your Audience

Whether you’re targeting a player or affiliate, each established relationship will be approached differently based on custom insights/analytics.

We Are Social recently reported that 64% of people feel that the area they live in is important to their sense of identity. This is a multi-layered statistic as it applies to countries, cities and towns. Thus, as a brand, catering to your local neighbours will foster a strong sense of community. This can be achieved through corporate social responsibility initiatives, local partnerships, networking events and more.

Placing yourself in the shoes of your audience addresses the tougher questions and challenges, relating to improvements, needs and concerns. It also means being aware of what they engage with and why, effectively handing over the microphone to your biggest fans.

Furthermore, by regularly monitoring the back-end of your web, social and campaign analytics, you can gather key data on popular topics and react accordingly. You may also determine the best times to hit publish.

This can be tricky for a brand that caters to an international audience. In general, it is beneficial to share key content at different times during the day and repackage it for every single output channel. This is where you can also explore geotargeting to maximise consumer acquisition and retention.

Globally, the market share for web usage by device places mobile in the lead, with 52% of all web pages in 2018 being served by mobile phones. These statistics alone should remind content marketing teams to develop mobile-friendly sites.

How will you tell your story on mobile? By using video? What about artificial intelligence and augmented reality?These are the topics we’ll discuss in the second and final part of this blog post, in which we’ll break down the latest iGaming tech and content marketing trends being explored in 2019. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments section.