When developing a marketing plan for a casino resort, the marketer must address 5 core strategies. Revenue generation, expense control, brand resonance, planning and analytics as well as service / staff development must all be full thought out and planned for.

Revenue Generation

Cleary, in order to generate profits, the marketer is going to have to develop a broad strategy for generating revenue. The strategy must be broad to encompass all marketing channels and specific enough to provide direction to the team. An example may be “The property will utilize information from its business intelligence system combined with information gathered through market research to issue targeted offers to its guests. They will also create innovative special events and develop one on one relationships with its best guests through its player development program”. The example is broad and provides direction o the team.

Expense Control

Generating revenue without proper expense control is ineffective. Expense control, from a marketing perspective, can be contradictive to revenue generation. It is the marketer’s job to balance the two strategies. An example of an expense control strategy that is not in contrast with revenue generation may be “The property will utilize its database information combined with refined marketing processes to optimize its marketing spend.” This will force the team to consider expenses when developing their marketing tactics.

Brand Resonance

As we work towards building profitable revenue, we always have to be aware of the effect our tactics will have on the brand. Building brand resonance has both short and long term benefits. An example of a brand resonance strategy may be “The property will communicate with its guests as well as the public at large utilizing a multi-channel approach. The primary visuals and copy points are based on the property’s strengths as identified through market research.” Once again, it is both broad and specific.

Planning and Analytics

Properly planning and analysis of marketing tactics ensure we are staying true to the goals established by the company’s leadership. An example of a strategy that fits this need may be “The property will diligently plan its marketing efforts utilizing information from its financial and business intelligence systems as well as market research tools. It will utilize these same elements to monitor the effectiveness of its marketing efforts.” If this is adhered to, we ensure we are moving towards the company’s goal.

Repeat visitation can be driven by service levels. Having a strategy for developing service skills is critical to achieving the requisite service levels. An example this strategy may be “The property will constantly train and monitor its staff in all areas where there is guest contact to ensure its guests are receiving appropriate service levels and there is a consistent message being delivered by the entire guest service team.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

No one can go it alone it the economic times we are in especially with the explosion of competition that is going on in most jurisdictions. A good leader needs to motivate his team and get the most out of them. To do this, they need to create a win – win scenario for the company and the employee. I know it is cliché but it is true.

Expectations

A properly motivated employee knows what the desired results of their efforts are. Setting goals for people that they buy into will add to their motivation. Timelines and schedules will ensure the employee can measure their progress. It is not additive when they believe they are progressing and management believes they are behind.

Guidelines

Employees need to know the rules of the game. They need to be versed in the procedures, policies and principles they are working with. It is unfair to assign specific requirements on an employee without giving them guidance. The guidance should include both a path to success and examples of paths to failure. Part of being a leader is putting people in a position to succeed.

Resources

You wouldn’t send a soldier to war without a gun. So why would you give an employee an assignment and not give them the resources they need to be successful. If they are tasked with something they know they don’t have the resources to be successful, they will be demotivated and you will be counterproductive. If the individual fails, then so does the organization which means the leader ultimately fails?

Accountability and responsibility

Accountability results in responsibility. If you don’t hold your team accountable for their results, they will not take responsibility for them.  Conversely, when an employee knows they are going to be held accountable, they will take responsibility for the assignment. Responsibility will help to foster the desired motivation.

Rewards and Consequences

I have put this one last for a reason. Rewards and consequences are not (or at least should not) the primary drivers of motivation. They are important just not the most important. Rewards do not have to be financial and consequences do not have to include the death penalty. A quick review of the One Minute Manager would indicate that short praising and short reprimands can be very motivating.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

When casinos try and be all things to all people, they usually fail. Generally speaking it is because they get away from competing on their strengths. There is an analogy to business intelligence as well. When we built the first iteration of our business intelligence tool, we built it to answer our questions.

We could have set out to build a business intelligence tool that answered all possible questions from any marketer in any casino. Thus we could have tried to be all things to all people. By taking our approach, we were able to have a tool that is easy to use and gets us then answers we need quickly.

There is a concept of organizational wisdom. In this utopian scenario, there are strategies that are understood by everyone from the CEO to the marketing coordinators. In addition, everyone has access to information in a business intelligence tool that enables standardized reports to be analyzed in 50 different ways. When everyone is operating with the guidance of well articulated strategies and has access to information, everyone has the ability and freedom to act.

I recently sat through a business intelligence demo where the presenter claimed there were nearly 300 prebuilt reports. I have doing analysis work in the casino industry for 24 years and couldn’t imagine 300 hundred separate ways of looking at our business. When I finally got to play around with it, I found they had a few reports that were filtered many different ways.

In order to look at the world in different ways, you had to constantly shift from one report to another. It was terribly inefficient. When we built our reports, we built the filtering capabilities into each report. This enables the analysis of the report to be done without having to leave the report itself.

Being able to visualize your information is one of the most powerful aspects of a business intelligence system. Once again, it doesn’t make sense to have to leave a report to analyze it and then create and use visualization tools such as maps or graphs. Embedding the key visualization options directly into the reports along with the analysis options makes the tool easy to use and gets the user to the answers they need very quickly.

When you are considering business intelligence options for your casino, ask yourself is it easy to use and does it answer my questions. The more members of the organization that can use it easily the greater the potential that new ideas will be forthcoming. If only a marketing or financial analyst can use it, then everyone will be basing their input off of the analyses created by one or two people.

 George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

As marketers, we have a choice. We can be proactive or reactive. In order to be proactive, we need a very clear picture of the current situation. Emotion can cloud that picture. The one thing that can take emotion out of the picture is facts.

Facts come from a variety of sources. You can get your facts about the actions of your customers from your player tracking system and use of a business intelligence tool can turn those facts into information. You can also get facts from market research. This source will give you information regarding the attitudes of your customers and the broader market. Employee opinion surveys also provide valuable information.

The skilled marketer not only has this information but he also uses it in his decision making process. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, for instance, will enable you to proactively devise strategies and tactics to effectively compete. This can be true even if the competitor is larger and better financed.

The alternative is to attempt to monitor the competitors’ action with internal resources. That brings emotion politics and preconceived notions into the decision making. It means that you are working with only a basic understanding your customers’ performance while on your casino floor.

An old time casino boss once told me if you wait for the guest to ask for a comp you have pissed away an opportunity. I asked him “what am I suppose to do offer it before he asked”. He said that was exactly the point. If you give them something they didn’t ask for, you are proactively providing for a desire of your guest. If you wait for them to ask, you are simply fulfilling a request. At the end of the day, we are comping the guest. The perception of the guest is completely different.

When I worked at the Tropicana in Atlantic City, we had a strategy of being aggressively friendly. It meant we were supposed to look for opportunities to interject ourselves to provide service even if the guest didn’t ask for it. An example is when someone is wondering around reading signs they may be lost. Instead of waiting, we would approach them and offer our assistance.

In terms of competing with others in the market, we can proactively attack competitors weaknesses but only if their weaknesses line up with one of our strengths. If we both have equal food prices but the guests perceive us as having better food quality, we can roll out a series of messages geared around that issue. If the competitor mimics our efforts, it will not ring true with the guest and therefore fail. We were proactive and they were reactive.

If we are going to win the marketing war, we have to get to the battlefield first. If the competitors are reacting to us, we determine the terms of the fight. We, of course, will only choose to fight where we are strong and they are weak. When those are the terms, we will win every time.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

There are right ways and wrong ways to execute effective direct mail programs. Segmentation, offer structure, messaging and image selection, format and alignment with other aspects of the marketing plan all have an effect on the profitability of direct mail campaigns.

Segmentation

Well informed segmentation is facilitated by the information gleaned from quality business intelligence. It involves factors such as lifecycle, geography, game preference and worth. Having a thorough understanding of each of these components is required in order to be able to effectively segment the database.

Offer Structure

Offer structure is impacted by the segmentation scheme, market research and the financial constraints (such as tax structure) of the property. It is the most visible component the direct mail program to the guest and the competition. It is also the most over emphasized aspect of the casino marketing program. It is important but it is not the only thing marketers should concern themselves with.

Messaging

Messaging is controlled by the market research. Understanding why your guests choose you and why they sometimes choose your competitors will guide the marketer through the message creation process. Developing messages without a comprehensive understanding of the attitudes of your guests and the market in general creates opportunities for poorly targeted messages. Ultimately, the marketer needs to deliver message that drive visitation where the offer becomes a secondary driver.

Format

There are a variety of formats that can be used. Self-mailers, letters and postcards are options. You can print either digital or offset. You can use variable text or variable image printing. The costs of these options vary greatly and are affected by quantities. The important point is to monitor your print cost per response.

Alignment

Alignment ensures that direct mail efforts are not only consistent with other marketing plan elements but also that it is used to support and reinforce those other efforts. Direct mail pieces can be used to support special event calendars and entertainment schedules. Facility, equipment and amenity changes/additions must all be supported by direct mail.

Conclusion

Fully utilizing direct mail means paying attention to all five components. Economic conditions and competitive pressures require us to optimize all of our marketing efforts. If the proper attention is not paid to each aspect of direct mail, overall marketing results will be sub-optimal.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

It seems to me that it is very difficult for an IT department to effectively build a business intelligence tool for their casino. In order to build an effective tool, you have to begin with the end in mind.  The only way to do that is have experience in analysis and the functional area you are responsible for.It is analogous to having a blueprint to build a house.You need an architect.

If you are responsible for marketing, you have to be familiar with the factors that go into building direct mail, special events and player development programs. Issues such as lifecycle, game preference, geographical considerations and worth must be defined. Assignment criteria, production goals and incentive plans must be understood before you can begin to design an effective tool.

Analysis skills are required in order to ultimately design the objects that will give the user information in the format they need it in order to make their decisions. The people who are going to build the business intelligence tool must rely on the knowledge of the marketer and the skill of the analyst in order to structure the underlying database and the OLAP cubes correctly.

The alternative is that a programmer grabs all possible data and organizes it in a way that facilitates all possible formats. While that provides ultimate flexibility, it does not make for an easy to use system that can be adopted by users of all skill levels. It generally means you will have the tool being used by skilled analysts. They will then distribute analyses that reflect how they viewed the world. It also is expensive to build functionality that will not be used by the end user.

This scenario defeats the primary benefit of business intelligence. The object of good business intelligence is to allow as many members of the organization to have access to the information as possible. That is not to say the analyst doesn’t have a role. They do. They can be the power user who creates new formats and allows those formats to be filtered as the user sees fit.

Properly built business intelligence answers the questions operators or marketers need to know. It does have to answer the questions of today and tomorrow. The key is to build scalability into the initial roll out. Building and adding to the initial cubes is not free. It is, however, cost efficient because it yields a product that matches the business need.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors.

It is completely unproductive to compete where your competitor is strong. Even if you have strengths in the same areas, it will be expensive to try and win a fight where you have common strengths. We need to win the battle for market share without fighting at all.

Sun Tzu points out that it is not great leadership to win 100 fights. A great general finds a way to win without fighting at all. The first step in taking this approach to winning the marketing war is to understand yourself as well as the competitors.

A three pronged approach will yield the most comprehensive results. You must take a look internally and compile an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. The key to this process is to be honest.

Next, you must compile comprehensive market research. Customer satisfaction studies and AAU studies are required in order to get a full picture of your customers and the broader market has of your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of the competition.

 Finally, having an independent third party look at your internal program,s practices and procedures can yield enlightening results. They can look at your internal efforts without being clouded by internal politics. They take no ownership of the status quo. A good leader will take their observations and use them to improve the team.

Once you understand the strengths and weaknesses of you and the competitors, you can find areas where you are strong and they are weak. That is where you can win without fighting. It is the basis for your position in the market. You can defend this position without draining your financial and human resources.

Your competitor, if he is smart, will not even try and fight you in an area where he is weak. That is where efficiency comes in. It is a lot less costly to attract customers when you are competing on factors that your competitor chooses not to engage in. This can only be done when you identify factors that are demanded by your guests and unmet by competitors.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

It is much easier to defend a position then it is to take a position away from some who already has it. In order to get there first you have to do the research. You have to ask all potential customers in your trade area what they want from the casinos they visit. You then have to ask what needs are being met by competitors. You then have the basis to begin to take a position.

Once you identify unmet needs you begin to build the products, amenities and services desired by the market and are not being met. The developers of the Borgata, in Atlantic City, realized that there was demand for high-end casino resorts in Atlantic City and that demand was not being met.

Some operators in the market have attempted to build some capacity to compete with that product. They have not been successful in unseating the position Borgata has taken.  Revel may try to take that position away and they may ultimately be successful. It will take two things. First, it will be expensive both from a capital investment standpoint. Second, it will take tremendous execution by the management team.

Getting there first takes hard work. Having one strength is not enough. You have to build strengths on top of strengths. It takes constant monitoring of market demands and customer perceptions. Correcting problems before they snowball is critical to maintain your products and a given position. Constantly improving your products and ensuring they remain in demand by the guests is imperative when defending a position.

Sun Tzu made the point centuries ago that it was resource exhausting to attacked walled cities. You need to create walls around your position. Those walls are constructed on a foundation of research. Once you understand the demands of the market, you must create high quality products and services that meet that demand.

High quality products and services is the half way point in the positioning. You then have to let the market know that you have what they want. Sometimes you may have to convince them that they really do want what you have and the competitors don’t. Utilizing all of the channels available to you can get messages in front of potential customers.

George is a Principal in Strategic Gaming Advisors

When deciding where we are going to get increased revenue from, we need to consider that we are more than likely going to have to go to war to get it. The economic conditions and exploding expansion of supply have created a difficult competitive environment in virtually every jurisdiction in the country including Las Vegas.

Where the money is

The famous bank robber Willie Sutton said “I rob banks because that is where the money is”. We have two choices when it comes to growing revenue. We can attempt to engage in activities that grow the market or we can try and steal market share. If we are going to grab market share, we are going to have to try and steal it from the properties that already have it. Why? “Because that is where the money is?

Do the research

The driving issue is do I have the resources to be successful. The best way to find out is to ask the customers (current and potential). We can ask them what they think we do well and then attack our competitors on our strengths. We could also ask the customers what our competitor does poorly and then take steps to ensure that we have strength where they are weak. The only way to get that information is through effective market research. If we work off of management perception, we run the risk of having misread the market.

Take on the market leader

The other mistake we could make is to try and take market share from a smaller competitor as opposed to the market leader. Even if we were successful at taking 20% of their business, we may not be able to move our needle. Taking on the market leader carries risk with it. We mitigate that risk by having an honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses as well as those of our competitors.

Be strong where they are weak

If the strengths and weakness were laid out in a four square box, the upper left would include areas where the market leader and us share strengths. He bottom right is where we share weaknesses. The lower left is where the leader is strong and we are weak. The upper right is where we are strong and they are weak. The upper right is where we will take on the market leader. This battle is tilted in our favor when we have created strengths in areas demanded by the market.

Conclusion

 In your market research, ask why people choose the casino they choose. Compare that to where your competitor is weak. Create strengths in that area and you have a position that would be difficult for the market leader to compete. This position will not appeal to everyone. That is ok because you are not trying to be all things to all people.

George is a Principle in Strategic Gaming Advisors

by Peter Arceo

If you’re planning to spend money to develop a mobile application for your business, I suggest you consider the following before you make that investment.  I call it an investment because it should generate some sort of return for your dollar.

Bad Or No Strategy
You must review your current strategy and see how this mobile application will fit into it.  In today’s economic environment, every dollar spent is important and should be generating revenue for your business.  Some common mistakes businesses make with mobile application projects:

1. Oftentimes people want to invest in new technology because, well it’s NEW, therefore it must be good!  Right?  Wrong!  Investing in new media technology isn’t always good for your business.
2. Total cost of ownership isn’t always considered.  A software developer will approach a business and offer to develop the application for what seems to be a reasonable price.
3. No clear strategy.  This is a big one that can drain your marketing budget.

How To Avoid Those Pitfalls
Before you invest in developing a mobile application, you must answer the following questions:

1. Will this application give me a competitive advantage?  How?
2. What is the value proposition for my customer(s)?
3. How will I make my customers aware of the application?
4. What is my goal(s) for developing this application?
5. What is the impact to the brand?
6. What are my measure(s) of success?  What is my time frame for achieving these results?  How will I measure them?
7. How will I integrate this into my existing marketing strategy?
8. What resources are required to execute this strategic plan?
9. After the application is developed, who is going to maintain it?  Who will fix it if there are bugs?  Some software development quotes only cover the development of the application with a few phases of QA.  Be sure you understand what you’re getting yourself into and analyze the long term cost implications.
10. If this project fails, what is my exit strategy?  Are there costs for exiting the market?  Not all costs are hard dollar costs.  In some circumstances the cost could be damage done to your brand because you failed in the public eye.

Once you’ve answered all of those questions, you will be better prepared to analyze the feasibility of implementing a mobile application project into your Marketing Strategy.  It will give you insights into your business and you should flush out as many potential issues as possible before you start your project.  If you still feel like you have a solid plan, go for it.

Peter is a Principal Partner with Strategic Gaming Advisors