Do you know the best way to stand out as a brand in a crowded market? Dmitry shares his top tips and tricks.
As a business owner, you know how challenging it can be to make your brand shine in today's noisy landscape, especially in iGaming. The secret to driving sustainable growth lies in crafting a strong, authentic brand identity that resonates with your target audience.
Investing in a brand-building approach delivers real, measurable results. By including the right blend of emotion and strategy, you can forge deep connections with customers. Imagine them eagerly anticipating your next move, rather than passively scrolling past your ads. By using storytelling and laser-focused positioning you will rise above the noise and claim your place as an industry leader.
0:00 Brand marketing’s importance in iGaming
3:40 Risks of short-term focus over long-term brand building
6:05 Standout brand marketing examples
9:36 Using “share of search” to measure brand impact
13:15 Advice on balancing brand and performance marketing
16:21 Key takeaways
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Welcome to “15 Minute Mastery,” the ultimate show for iGaming professionals, hosted by industry veteran Dmitry Belianin. With over 17 years of experience, Dmitry brings unparalleled insights and wisdom from top industry experts in just 15 minutes. Each episode delivers actionable strategies from all iGaming verticals to improve your personal and business performance. As the founder of Belianin, Dmitry also shares his expertise in nurturing high-potential iGaming startups. Subscribe to “15 Minute Mastery” for concise, high-value content and stay ahead in the competitive world of iGaming.
To try to give you a very easy to understand one sentence answer, it's going to be like you need to start slowly investing into brand. If you start by rushing straight into 50/50 brand against performance, marketing kind of a mix, then you will end up paying a lot for the user acquisition. You're listening to 15-minute mastering, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the EI-powered data analytics platform Blasque and supported by Ted Juven affiliate and media company already media. Voila starts the leading casino partnership program in the next dotted world's iGaming community. Hello and welcome back to 15-minute mastery. This week, Dimitri's jumping into the hot seat for the first in a series of episodes because we've received several questions for him to answer. Today, we're diving into a topic Dimitri has so much experience with. He's going to share unique insights on how to better utilize brand marketing to grow your business. So, let's dive in. Dimitri, you've mentioned that operators are picked on performance marketing. Can you set the scene by discussing why this is so prevalent in iGaming? Hey, John, first of all, it's such a great feeling to be on the other side of the screen, not being a host this time, but to be the one who is bringing in the knowledge and I really like this. I really like this thing, so probably we're going to do a few more. So, yeah, coming back to your question in regards to performance marketing. So, if you think about the iGaming as an industry and I think any similar industry, which is a very, I'd say, customer-driven industries where you can understand the behavior and everything and your revenue was importantly very closely tied to the user behavior. So, performance marketing is a set of action which is bringing you the user in a very calculated manner. So, as long as you understand the behavior of your audience, let's say how many deposits on average a person makes throughout a day, a week, a month, you know how much money a person is spending within your product, then you can understand how much time it's going to take for you to pay back the acquisition of that user. So, performance marketing, essentially, when done properly and calculated properly makes you understand the payback period, which is probably almost impossible to do without a proper preparation and a lot of reports and benchmarking on the brand market inside. So, I think the first reason is probably because it's so easy to understand, it's so easy to calculate and it's so easy to control. So, iGaming industry became a very, I'd say, performance driven particularly for that reason and second is because you will start seeing results fast. I think one of the problems of iGaming right now is that the industry is very short-term thinking, like everyone wants to make money now, not thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow. And this is another reason why performance marketing is doing such a great job and not many people either understand what the brand marketing is or don't even understand how to properly calculate and measure the impact of it. Yes, so this is obviously a topic you've spoken a lot about within the newsletter within your LinkedIn. What are some of the longer-term consequences that you're observing when brands have this short-term focus and they're not building for the future with brand marketing? Right. So, if you think about the final, which I think pretty much the same final in any industry in the world, you think about the very top, which is brand awareness, then you've got consideration, loyalty, and this final could look slightly different based on how many steps inside of this user journey or funnel you want to be adding. But the thing is affiliate marketing is one of the examples of performance marketing sits right in the consideration stage. So, what is happening is you don't build the top of the funnel means your organic traffic is not growing, right? You will be getting some organic views and obviously getting some people retaining over the time coming back, looking for your brand on Google and other search engines. But what happens is you only see it in the very middle of the funnel and you only target those whose user behavior is properly attached to that stage. One of the things which will happen overnight is let's say you stopped spending money today, tomorrow you will stop getting traffic. And this is one of the biggest problems of many organic brands and especially the brands which are so heavily reliant on certain performance marketing channels. So, let's say right now is a time of turbulence in US with the upcoming elections and the Facebook is becoming tighter, targeting is becoming worse, and those operators who are heavily reliant on Facebook are now experiencing issues. The traffic is falling down the quality of traffic is going down, et cetera. So, I would say that if you don't think long-term and if you're not diversifying your even performance marketing mix, then your falling into the trap of your traffic might be gone tomorrow and with heavily reliant on performance marketing, the more money you spend, the more users you will essentially get and the performance marketing as also we know is always capped. What it means that you won't be able to buy 10,000 first-time depositors with the same price and the same conversion as you bought your first thousand. So, it's very hard to scale, it's very hard to get the same quality over the time and it's heavily reliant on just like channels and their performance. And if it's gone tomorrow, then your business is gone tomorrow. Yeah, that's really interesting. So, to focus it more on what good brand marketing looks like, I've known you for a long time now and I know you have such a sharp eye for building a brand, how to build an emotional connection with the audience and give a brand some soul. What are the examples of by gaming companies that you really like within the market that have built that really emotionally compelling brand? That's a great question. I think when it comes down to brand marketing, I think historically either UK or US-based companies were the strongest. I think somehow this is where the creative side of like human mind was the strongest, like historically, not just in eye gaming but overall in all the industries. I think I'm a big fan of what broke, speedy power and most of the brands within the FATA group were doing for a very long time poker stars are a great example of building the proper connection and write brand attributes with its audience. I think these guys were doing a great job, I mean they're still doing a great job. And most importantly, they not only being able to build a kick-ass brand marketing campaigns and targeting the proper audience and proper attributes, but they found a set of very unique and synergical brand ambassadors such as Cristiano, you know, such as Ronaldo, such as Neymar and many others to be able to uncover the marketing campaigns and to deliver them in a proper manner. But what I'm seeing recently is a sleeping giant of brand advertising in my opinion was battery 65 hours. It's like everyone knows battery 65 as a brand, right? Everyone knows its colors, everyone knows the font, the product who can feel, et cetera. But for most of the people, it was very hard to distinguish the brand from its product because battery 65 product was so historically good for so many years that the people when asked like, what do you like about the battery 65? None of them were saying I like the brand, I feel attached to the brand. Most of them were saying the product is good, you know, the odds are good. The life employee bearing is also good. So what I think is changing now, the new breed of marketeers and probably the new way how battery 65 started approaching the brand is changing the way the brand communicates and the way brand positions itself. So I really like the new generation of advertising they've built recently. I really like the bold move they've done with the sponsoring of Champions League this year. So I think these guys have done properly going to be the biggest brand worldwide for sure. Yeah, it clearly has a massive impact. I've seen it my whole life growing up around the sports betting industry. And there's certain brands that can just capture that emotion in the market. Just to go back a little bit, you spoke about the apprehension a lot of brands have with investing into brand marketing. And it seems that a lot of that is based on fear. They're not able to accurately measure the results. One concept you speak a lot about is share of search. And I know that's a tool that Blask uses to help operators measure their brand marketing effort. So you speak a little bit about share of search, how that works, and how that will really help operators measure the impact of their brand marketing. Right, so I think to answer this question you need to go a little bit back in time. So when you think about the marketing when it was invented, market deals were treated like resorts. So back in early or guilty days, back in very early marketing days when the market was invented, market deals were locked in their rooms, brewing some magic, and then doing something, and then tomorrow the business got sales. So I don't think this approach works any longer, and especially for brand marketing as well. So one of the key metrics was obviously, so you mentioned share of search, but the one which was earlier, which was called share of voice. And to be able to measure share of voice properly, you need to go very deep inside of the marketing mix to be able to identify all the marketing channels, run very complex research and service, and work with very expensive brand marketing and research agencies. So I think in nowadays era most of the interactions of a consumer are happening online. And Google, being one of the most dominant search engines in the world, is giving you a perfect example of a metric share of voice which has been kind of rebuilt into something which is called share of search now. And Mark Ritzen and Liz Benet, one of the smartest marketers on the planet, came up with a very extensive research on how this metric works in all the industries they've kind of studied, whether it's automotive, soft drinks, cell phones, and others. And they found that share of search is very closely correlated with the share of the market, and the brand marketing investment can be, and the shifts of market trust can be properly measured with the share of search metric. So what Blask is doing is going one step beyond by not just utilizing share of search, but also embed in tens of other little channels to be able to fully uncover what share of search is and to try to be able to give you a tool to measure your brand marketing efforts, as you mentioned. So I think share of search and probably your brand attributes are probably two most crucial ways on how to measure the impact of your brand advertising campaigns. Share of search can be done by anyone, you can do this. Like through Google trends, you can do this through Google keyboard planner, but like you mentioned Blask, so the idea behind the tool was making everyone's life easier and to be able to give you a very nice and handy way in how to track your brand marketing effectiveness and obviously your market share. So clearly both performance and brand marketing have their place in the marketing midst. How do you advise operators to strike the right balance between the two? Are there any rules of thumb for budget allocation? Well, that's a good question and I think this is one of the most popular questions of all times. I'm getting asked a lot and to answer this probably I need to write a book one day, but the thing is it's closely tied to many factors. First one is your current brand size. Second is the dynamics of the market you're operating in. Is this market new, is this market established? Questions about how many competitors you got? How dominant are the existing biggest brands in the market? What are the market shares and many, many things like this? But to try to give you a very easy to understand kind of one sentence answer, it's going to be like you need to start slowly investing into brand. If you start by rushing straight into 50/50 brand against performance marketing kind of a mix, then you will end up paying a lot for the user acquisition. And the momentum you build with investment into brand marketing is still going to take some time, probably three to six months based on the markets in its dynamics and the size of the market, etc. So I would say that you need to start building your brand marketing gradually, starting with around 10 to 20% of your total marketing spend per month, going all the way up to like 30 or 40, I'd say in the months, number three to six, and then based on the market dynamics and based on your brand dynamics, how well you're doing with your brand attributes, how well you start your brand marketing campaigns, etc. You will see your market share and brand equity will start slowly growing in the specific market. So I'd say essentially based on your position in the market, you need to strike somewhere in the middle. So 40 to 50% of total marketing spend should be invested into brand, and you will slowly start seeing the uplift of organic searches, you will start slowly see the amount of organic first-time depositors. You will see a whole file dramatically improved from conversion, from click to registration, registration to first-time depositors, obviously the retention rate because people will start seeing you from so many different places. So I think the more you advance into the market, I think I also mentioned this earlier that performance marketing will always be capped. So there is no way you can invest the same amount of performance marketing spent every single month. So I think you need to strike somewhere in the middle, but start slowly and steady building the brand marketing spent from 10% going all the way up to 50, probably somewhere around first year or maybe months 18. But do this very carefully, do this in a performance-driven manner in terms of, you know, you need to understand the performance of all these investments and track your brand attributes to see whether your brand marketing campaigns are doing the right impact. DEMA, that is absolutely awesome. I know this is a subject we could probably talk to you about for 10 hours more, but we're going to have to wrap it up there. But this is the topic the Dimitri dives into a lot in the 15-minute newsletter. So if you want more insights on that, you can find the link in the description. But for today, we'll call that a wrap and thanks again to Dimitri. You've shared some absolute nuggets there. Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone. Cheers. [BLANK_AUDIO]
