Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2016 18 the term “public relations” has really evolved to something more akin to “media relations.” Public relations professionals also dealt with other companies and the community. Their efforts were more about developing customer and business relationships. Today’s professional is targeting media, bloggers and such to tell the company’s story. The good news is that stories told by a reputable third party always had more perceived credibility than advertising. The bad news is that this was never free. It takes time and effort, and even with the best effort, there is never a guarantee that your story will show up exactly as you envisioned. Shared is not the new free. Interestingly enough, when social media gained a strong foothold, many referred to it as free. Lo and behold, now we realize it wasn’t so free – like public and media relations, it took the investment of time and effort. And whether you handled social in-house or through an agency, we all learned that the best efforts resulted from situations where we dedicated resources to creating content that targets would want to share with their networks. Again, our stories told through third parties had a greater perceived credibility. Who among us doesn’t ask friends and family to share their experiences as references for a decision we’re trying to make? And, along the way, we learned which outlets worked best for our businesses (LinkedIn for B2B; Facebook for consumer-facing messages and so on). Finally, there is Owned media – your website, your content and for B2B businesses, things like the webinars you produce and the presentations you give. This is media you control – in tone, in message and in frequency. However, it is also media that takes more and more attention and management. We can no longer whip together a website and check it off the list. Google’s ever-evolving algorithms and consumer willingness to research requires us to constantly tend to our owned media garden. We have to feed it new content and weed it of old plus update coding and information to ensure there is a constant flow of traffic through our media. IT’S ALL MEASUREABLE Has there ever been an industry that loves to measure things as much as the casino industry? One of the reasons media efforts seem to keep their position as the first item cut from the budget is because we really haven’t been able to grasp measurement and its relationship to the revenue line. Sure we could talk about GRPs, reach and frequency for advertising and ad equivalencies for media relations, but we haven’t consistently connected the dots to actual business growth. The idea of measuring advertising equivalencies and keeping clipping books is as outdated as the landline phone. We need to look at this form of media in terms of a sales funnel. Envision your sales funnel as audiences on top, leads in the middle and customers at the bottom. As casino operators, we deal with the sales funnel all the time. Think about your foot traffic on a Saturday; you know that a good Saturday night means that you’ll have approximately X number of people come through your door to get you to a targeted revenue amount. If you fall short of that foot traffic number, your gut will tell “Today’s modern marketer understands that we have to look at media in four categories – paid, earned (or what used to be called ‘free’), shared and owned; PESO for short.” CASINO MARKETING