What are main factors to be considered by an operator or a new business when acquiring sports bettors?

It’s important for operators to firstly define the challenge ahead of them – understand who their customer is, what their online habits are and the best way to reach them. This deep level of insight will inform their strategy, allowing them to focus on engaging customers with the right content, on the right platform and at the right time – which is the approach we take with ad:s, our omni-channel marketing performance platform.

Another consideration highlighted in our recent whitepaper is the need to determine how the cost of customer acquisition is defined. Calculating the true cost associated with acquiring customers is something that our industry struggles with, so there’s no definitive benchmark. Best practice would suggest that operators adopt a multi-touch attribution model that includes all expenditure associated with transforming an interested individual into a paying customer.

The reality is that each operator takes a different approach, making it difficult to establish a cross-sector comparisons.  

What impact does regulation and the maturity of a betting market have on these considerations?

These are two important factors for operators to consider when shaping their customer strategies. Regulation differs across markets, so it will affect how an operator sets up their business in a specific country, which in turn impacts how operators engage with their customers.

In recent years, changes in regulation have seen Italy and Spain ban betting and gambling advertising outright, which makes acquiring new customers difficult. What we see in these territories is operators switching focus to customer retention and nurturing the customer relationships they already have in place.

Market maturity will also affect an operator’s customer strategy. In established markets, like the UK, which is hyper competitive with a wide choice of brands and fewer prospective customers, we see a greater emphasis on retention and increasing the lifetime value of existing customers. This is also partly because luring customers from rivals is almost always more expensive than retention.  

This is in contrasts to new and emerging markets like the US, where there are significant customer acquisition opportunities and operators are willing to spend aggressively to gain market share and build their brands.  

What role are we starting to see paid social play in operators’ marketing strategies and what are the advantages of this approach?

In recent years, social media evolved beyond just a means of engagement to become an inexpensive and effective acquisition tool in operators’ marketing arsenal. With more than three billion people globally interacting with social media each month, we’re seeing an increasing number of operators turn to paid social media advertising because of its highly engaged audience and brand awareness potential.

However, navigating the world of paid social advertising can be difficult and having the right technology, backed by experts in the space to help businesses run this channel effectively, can be equally as challenging.

Sportradar offers the only betting industry specific paid social service, which includes end-to-end campaign management, creative delivery and measurement that goes beyond last click attribution. Most significantly is the ad:s technology we integrate deeply into social media platforms to optimise performance and ensure the right content is served to the right person at the right time. 

Similarly, how is programmatic video contributing to operators’ marketing strategies and campaigns?

Like social media, online video advertising has become hugely popular and performs well from an acquisition perspective. In fact, research shows a 97% increase in purchase intent amongst customers after a positive experience with a video advert, while prospects are 95% more likely to remember a video advert compared to display.

Programmatic video advertising takes this one step further and enables operators to be more targeted and efficient in their ad delivery. Operators are turning to the technology to reach large audiences and increase brand awareness at the start of the acquisition journey.

From a strategy perspective, operators can use programmatic video advertising to engage more deeply with fans, increase website traffic and generate tangible leads.

What’s unique about our programmatic video advertising is that we provide operators with access to 60 billion ad requests per day and more than 600 private deals curated especially for the igaming industry. Outsourcing their digital marketing function to Sportradar can save operators the time, money and difficulties associated with trying to implement programmatic marketing in-house.

How is automation increasing performance and helping to scale marketing campaigns?

Automation technology is having a transformative effect on our clients’ marketing activity, helping to reduce costs and ease operational pressures. Programmatic advertising, one aspect of our ad:s service, automates the buying of online advertising in real time, removing the need for operators to do it manually. What’s more, programmatic advertising is hyper targeted serving the right content to the right person at the right time. This level of personalisation enhances the customer experience and increases levels of purchase intent.

A development that I’m excited about is the automation of ad creative. Sportradar’s artificial intelligence driven Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) uses data to enable operators to generate thousands of personalised and dynamic creatives, which alleviates the pressure on inhouse design teams.

Critically, automation is serving to optimise performance. Sportradar uses the technology to test marketing channels and understand which are performing well by analysing clear, quantifiable touchpoints on the customer’s digital journey. We optimise campaigns while they’re still running, collecting data to automatically reroute spend into the most successful channels.