The third annual boot camp for casino marketing has gone virtual and signups are taking place for the three-day event that will be broadcast from New Orleans March 1-3.
The 2021 training program offers the basic building blocks of casino marketing, as well as creating stronger engagement through gamification, social casinos, digital marketing, and a unique look at how the senses impact visitation, according to founder Julia Carcamo, president of New Orleans-based marketing agency J Carcamo & Associates. There’s also a session on financial acumen.
Throughout 2020, Carcamo said that there were some moments when she doubted the boot camp would be held this year, but casino marketers came together and realized the need for training and development of casino marketers still existed.
“This training was an eye-opener for me and it has changed how I want to move forward in my casino marketing career,” said Deirdre Fojuwaye, marketing assistant director at Yakama Nation Legends Casino, who attended the 2020 boot camp.
Carcamo said they created the boot camp as an answer to a question after attending the Casino Marketing & Technology Conference in Las Vegas. Speakers wondered what happened to all of the information shared with attendees.
“I told them, ‘What happens is that we as casino marketers go back to our daily lives. And we never really get a chance to implement all of the ideas we learned, because we have to make the dollars every day,’” Carcamo said.
“We wanted more of a teaching environment versus a panel-discussion environment. It’s a small gathering. We want to do one-on-one with everybody, versus sitting among a hundred or two hundred people in a room.”
The boot camp goal is for 12 to 16 people to participate.
When the boot camp was held in person, it was two full days. The virtual event will involve general presentations and a lot of discussions, Carcamo said.
“All the attendees will feel comfortable in the space, so they all start to share a little more and become more of a team working together, even though they represent different properties. In the end, they can say either this made total sense or we tried it and it didn’t work,” Carcamo said.
The sessions will start at 8 a.m. Pacific Time and the day will end at 1 p.m. Each session will last about an hour. With the understanding that attendees will be participating from work and have other duties to address during the day, breaks will be built in.
“We want to build a New Orleans’ flavor in our breaks, so we have a couple of things up our sleeve,” Carcamo hinted.
There’s a need for a boot camp, because many casino operators, especially regional ones, have marketing staff who need additional training, Carcamo said. “The goal is to improve their skill level for these regional casino marketers. Many markets crave more information and knowledge. These programs are great for people new to the field or trying to expand their skill base, because they want to move up in the chain.”
The 2020 agenda covered such topics as handling promotions, databases, reinvestments, branding and social media.
“This year, there’s a lot more digital, and a lot more in terms of engagement. One of the sessions is on how to keep customers here longer once they get to us. The folks at American iGaming Solutions will do a session on how your social casino can extend your marketing,” Carcamo said.
“We recognize now that people aren’t readily making these visits to us, so when they do, we want to make sure we’re acknowledging them and getting to know them better on both the front and back ends, so we can engage with them at a deeper level.”
In this era of COVID-19 and the recovery from it, Carcamo said it’s more important to understand who the best customers are and how to get them in the limited-capacity seats a casino has nowadays.
“Marketers are being forced to focus on that. Pre-COVID, we tended to spread our attention to the whole a hundred percent equally. Now we’re saying that if eighty percent of the revenue is coming from twenty percent of my database, I’m going to spend eighty percent of my time on that percent. The balance is shifting and from advertising, we definitely see a shift more in the digital space than the traditional space. Social media gave us a channel to our customers that was a lot more fluid than we had experienced before. Now, we started a social-influencer series for marketers. It has become a bigger part of the puzzle.”
Marketers are more interested today in geotargeting and over-the-top television options to serve specific ads to specific households, instead of buying the 10 p.m. news telecast, Carcamo said.
“You can serve digital ads by households. If you have a list of inactive customers and know their addresses, instead of sending them mail, you can serve an ad to them across their mobile devices. We have so much data that it makes sense for us to use it in the way we advertise now.”
The keynote speaker is Len Herstein and his discussion will be “Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success. Your Business & Life Depend on It.”
Carcamo said they are also doing webinars during the year and developing online training modules. They have a casino-advertising masterclass starting in April and are working on casino branding online training.
More information on Casino Marketing Boot Camp and registration can be found online at www.casinomarketingbootcamp.com.
