The global online gambling market is growing with every minute passing and so is the iGaming affiliate space. The affiliate cohort has turned into an important means for operators to acquire players and its significance for the industry will likely continue growing in the years to come. This is why it is particularly important for affiliates to keep up with what is new and what works best.
Listing everything that is trending in the field is simply impossible. However, there are certain trends that have distinguished themselves as leading ones over the past several years. In other words, the main trends for 2017 are rather ones that have extended into the new year from previous years.
Here are several such trends that if kept up with can help affiliates increase traffic and, in the best-case scenario, increase conversions. The good thing is that they can indeed help or at least cannot do any harm.
King Content or the Necessary Cliché
“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”
This bold prediction was made by Bill Gates some 20 years ago. Little did he know that his words would one day serve as the most accurate description possible of an ever-present and never-getting-fed-up-with trend within the affiliate marketing field.
Content, no matter in what form it is presented, should be engaging. The hard question is what makes it engaging in an era where information of different nature and quality is so easily accessed. Providing unique and informative content is a good start. But it is simply not enough; not any more. In our view, content should evoke an emotion. Not necessarily a purely positive emotion and not necessarily a purely negative one. But an emotion. In other words, if content strikes a chord with visitors, it will likely make them come back and keep coming back.
Within the context of our industry, the gambling community is an inquisitive and demanding one. Thankfully! It fancies being engaged in a good discussion. Luckily, interesting times are upon us. And although Sir Terry Pratchett (and others before him) once wrote that living in interesting times is a curse, we would dare to disagree with the genius just for this once.
Being part of the gambling industry at a time when so much is happening from a regulatory point of view and when the focus is gradually being averted from land-based to online gaming offering cannot be deemed a bad thing. And living at such an interesting time provides content creators with unlimited sources of inspiration.
Diving into the Mobile World
How many times have we heard the “Mobile is the future” prediction over the past several years? Hundreds of thousands? Close to a million? Even more?
It seems that the future is upon us. More and more consumers recognise the convenience of accessing the content they wish whenever they wish and wherever they are through their hand-held devices. There are countless studies, studies independent from one another, which affirm that smartphones generate an ever-growing percentage of overall online traffic, that more and more smartphone users prefer checking their emails on their mobile devices, that at least half of all smartphone owners reach for their smartphones upon waking up.
In other words, making your affiliate website mobile-friendly is a necessity, if not a must. Which brings us back to content. (Content will be often referred to in this article.) Filling your optimised website with quality content, making it unputdownable, i.e. so engaging that visitors simply cannot put down their mobile devices, may be a winning formula.
Fostering the Right Relationships
Affiliate marketing is a field in which it is a necessary – more than a necessary – it is essential to establish the right tone with your partners and to maintain effective and efficient relationships with them. However, this is not enough. Affiliates should also be able to establish connection with visitors.
Being part of an industry with such a high level of competition and bearing in mind the fact that competition will only grow in the years to come, fostering relationships in the right manner will certainly of be of much help.
Thinking Different(er)
While the “Content is king” tag line could be described as a little-black-dress type of cliché – one that never really loses its relevance – “The power of innovation” one is its exact opposite. It has turned into a humdrum monotonous mantra that is repeated by everyone, but relatively few have put it into good use.
Not that innovation is a bad thing. On the contrary! Innovation is good. Innovation is a necessity. Innovation is a must in a highly competitive environment. But there is a pressing need for real innovation in the iGaming affiliate space (and not only there).
Innovativeness means different things to different people. The easiest way for affiliates to show their innovative muscle is through content. Unique, more attractive, more socially oriented – countless examples can be provided here. And content is just one of the many possibilities affiliates are presented with.
- Author
Harry Evans
