The Six Ps of Igaming: : The Key Factors for Successful Market Entry
Every marketer worth their salt knows the four fundamental Ps of marketing from 1960: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Later, Packaging and Positioning were added, making it six Ps.
In iGaming, there are six Ps as well: Products, Processing, People, Personalization, Presentation and Performance. And a secret 7th P.
All essential to successfully enter a new market.
The Six Ps (and a secret 7th one), in no particular order.
- Product
These days, in most markets, players already have game and even supplier preferences. While three years ago the Philippines market did not, today it does. Over half of players search for their favorite provider when they first visit your site.
Know what your prospect market demands: in most of Asia, it’s currently JILI (TaDa) and Fa Chai (and PG Soft, which you may have heard of as Pocket Games). In most of the rest of the world, it’s Pragmatic Play for slots and Evolution for live game enthusiasts (Pragmatic Play Live being a reasonable substitute... but if you want those high-rolling baccarat and blackjack players, they are looking for live options).
Even better, also have games specific to the region, as the Philippines’ BingoPlus does with its live Color Game (which has generated 40 million sign-ups in the space of two years and is still their top performing game).
Don’t have the games they want? They’ll move on to the next site.
Does your site look horrible on mobile? With over 50% of users accessing the web via mobile–get it fixed. In Asia and other developing areas of the world, more than 90% of users access websites via mobile – so much so that some operators skip desktop altogether. That too is a mistake. Some VIPs, in particular, prefer the desktop experience.
The underlying platform is less important, but players do expect search functions: filter by provider, by popularity, by Bonus Buy, or by Megaways. The really smart operators even offer search by Volatility and RTP.
Promotions remain important to players. In Asia, they look for rebates on play or cashback on losses. In other regions, deposit bonuses and free spins are preferred. Look to achieve parity (at least) with your competitors in this area.
All part of the Product you're bringing to the market.
2. Processing
No Interac in Canada, no credit cards in the US, no GCash in the Philippines, no TrueWallet in Thailand, no Pix in Brazil? Players will find someone who does.
Everyone offers mostly the same product. It’s essential. But if a site doesn’t support one of a player’s preferred deposit methods, they’re off to the next site.
While crypto players tend to go to crypto-specific sites like Stake, BC.Game, BitStarz or Duelbits or whichever platform got into their Telegram group, fiat sites can now easily add crypto as a deposit option. It may not be widely used in the market (yet!), but it doesn’t hurt to have it!
- People
This is a people business, and increasingly moving to a 1:1 experience.
As good as AI translation and intelligent chatbots are getting, they can’t beat local, native-language speakers.
A simple example: ask Google Translate what the Spanish word coche means in English, and it’ll tell you “car.” But in Central America, it means “baby stroller”, and in Argentina and Uruguay, it refers to a “train car.” So, your “win a new car” promotion can be a lot less interesting when mistranslated, especially in an SMS or other text message without an accompanying image.
4. Personalization
Slot players don’t play Baccarat. And you don’t want them to.
Sports players don’t play slots. And you do want them to.
Personalization goes beyond “Cher Pierre” or “Hej Henrik.” What are they playing? Why are you showing banners/sending emails pushing Man City vs Man U to an avid horse bettor? It’s more than a wasted opportunity; it adds to banner blindness.
Where are they in their player journey? New players want to see your welcome package, but existing players who’ve already received it don’t.
A proper CRM solution will help you automate this and also determine the most preferred (and most responsive) messaging channel, such as email, SMS, WA, TG, FBM, LINE, Zalo, Viber, etc.(varies by geo!) and even time of day to send. This is sadly lacking, even among legendary operators like 32Red, who sent me the SAME message every three days. Like I’m going to suddenly respond to their 20 Super Spins.
CRM used to stand for “Customer Relationship Management.” For me, it’s Conversion, Retention and Motivation (but that’s another article). And, of course, ALL communications need to be: Timely Authentic Relevant. Personalized.
- Presentation
Never mind “What’s in your backpack?” (Up in the Air reference). What’s on your homepage?
What games are you pushing there and in your promotions?
Focus on games you know your players are looking for. In India, Aviator has been a great choice;, in Thailand, it’s Bigger Bass Splash (as of today, it's almost constantly changing.)
Games you know are actually good games. If you have a couple of thousand games to choose from, some will be duds that don’t interest anyone particularly, but you might keep them on the site since you have infinite shelf space and maybe that one Jackie Chan fan loves RTG’s Eagle Shadow Fist. But don’t use it as your central promotion on his birthday!
Which games are “good”? Your game stats will tell you.
We can easily make any game played by the most players but look for the games with a reasonable number of players, and then check that games average spins per player. Under 50? Probably not a good slot. (But also watch out for outliers where someone wins on a crappy game and then plays a million spins on it trying to win again.)
- Performance
No one likes a slow site.
You’ve heard this all before – how page speed on mobile affects your ranking, etc. And a poorly performing site is guaranteed to perform poorly.
But there’s another aspect to performance: payouts.
The number one complaint in the world from players is that a site is slow... in paying its players. Unless you have a monopoly on the market, those days are gone.
Those are the six Ps of iGaming, with a lot of additional sub-Ps in the mix.
Since you made it this far, you get to see the 7th secret P, and probably the most important one in this article:
Planning.
When entering a new market, you need a solid plan. Project your costs and returns on investment. They won’t be right at first, but at least you have a roadmap to follow and can adjust them as you learn.
“Fail to plan, plan to fail,” Benjamin Franklin said a couple of hundred of years ago (or was it Winston Churchill? Alan Lakein?).
But, most importantly of all, since things seldomly go as planned, always have a Plan B.