Hi, and welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with me, Leanne Jonathan. This is the podcast of digital and affiliate marketers in the iGaming Industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider's group on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs, and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started. Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Podcast, and today I'm super excited to have two social media experts here with me to talk a little bit about what's happening in the social space on multiple different channels and to discover how brands can maximize social media in 2021. So welcome Alex Bedini.
SPEAKER_02Hiya.
SPEAKER_00And also Robert Neander from Spin Brands. It's great to have you on the show with me here today. Don't know if you want to just tell us a little bit about Spin Brands and what it is that you guys do in your agency.
SPEAKER_02Of course, yeah. So Spin Brands is a kind of pure play social media agency. Essentially, we do a range of social only activity on behalf of a whole range of different brands. And primarily that's really about building brands through organic social by kind of content building communities, building trust and credibility. But more importantly, for today, all about using paid social media to drive user acquisition and ultimately drive ROAS on behalf of our clients.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so talk about ROAS because maybe some of our listeners don't know what that means.
SPEAKER_02Of course, yes, a ROAS uh kind of it's an acronym which stands for return on ad spend. Um, and ultimately, I suppose it's a simple metric which says for every pound or pound euro dollar I spend, how many pound euros or dollars do I bring bring back in? So, for example, if we say we had a seven times robust, it means we made seven pounds back for every pound spend in media advertising.
SPEAKER_00So there's clearly quite a lot of value to be had here in social media. Now, for the gaming industry in particular, which is um a lot of who our audience is, talk to us a little bit about why you like working with these types of clients best and what's currently working for these clients in this vertical.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean I was gonna take this one. Yeah, sure. Um I was gonna say, yeah, um obviously it's really interesting space, and there's uh a huge amount of sort of like competitors, and I think there's a lot of yeah, basically variables to play with because there's hundreds of different games that you can test, there's lots of different audiences. Ultimately, these games often attract a very wide sort of clientele, I suppose. So your targeting options are very broad. Um, and yeah, there's there's basically just a lot to play around with. So yeah, we really like working in this space sort of as much as we can. Um, and yeah, we've we've been finding really good results in sort of like the last year with some of our bigger clients as well.
SPEAKER_00Because traditionally, most clients feel, especially smaller um operators that come to market, they feel like Facebook isn't actually a channel for them that they can target. So it's quite interesting that you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Um what do you think are the best sort of games and types of clients to actually enter into this channel and what's worked well for you in terms of paid social for some of the iGaming brands that you're currently working with?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. Um, I think yeah, basically just any client that has really engaging visuals and really engaging games on their site, um, I think work best. Yeah, the sort of like the very typical sort of old school slot games and things like that we find don't perform as well on Facebook ads or really paid social in general. I think that's just because of the nature of sort of the visuals that you're able to show people on social. Um you want to really promote your most exciting, your most engaging games, um, and especially some of the games that have sort of like the rolling jackpots that have to be won every day, things like that, perform really well because ultimately you can sort of like suck people in um to like a really good like hook.
SPEAKER_00Um in terms of um budgets, because a lot of clients think that they need to have really big ad spend budgets in order to make a dent in Facebook and to actually get some in um traction. What are the types of things that you're seeing are working really well with smaller budgets? Like how do you actually approach client strategies in terms of paid?
SPEAKER_02I'm happy to say that one, Rob, if if you're if you're okay. Um I think one of the beauties of paid social is ultimately the ability to start very small, test and learn and basically build up. I suppose we do find there's a there's a minimum threshold that you need to be able to spend in order to actually see some results. What would that be?
SPEAKER_00What would that be?
SPEAKER_02I'd say probably anything above probably as little as a thousand pounds a month, ideally two thousand pounds a month, and you can actually run enough advertising to create enough data of impressions, clicks, kind of conversions to get a sense of what's happening. The key is the more budget you have, ultimately the more things you test. Because what you don't want to do is take a thousand pound budget and think, right, we need to test 30 different variables and you slice and dice it till it's so small that you can't actually take any learnings. But really, with a thousand pounds, you can get a clear sense of where are we talking broadly? Are we in the right kind of ballpark? And then it's not like kind of a maybe a TV media buyer where you have to plan things kind of quarterly and well in advance. If you see good results one week, you can double the budgets the next week, and then you can double the budgets the week after that, and you really have that control. And equally, if you need to kind of dial back because maybe a big a big um bonus has been won, or there's a change in regulations, or for whatever reason you might need to kind of adjust your budgets, you can do it very much on the fly. Yes, it does damage optimization, and you need to be a bit careful around that, but you can have complete control over how much you spend on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_00And in terms of you know, choosing, like would you advise that smaller clients choose their top performing games or choose a top performing vertical? If, say, for example, in slots, would you say um, you know, the top performing slots game, start with your ads there because you get more traction, or is it about being clever? Is it about actually niching down and getting really close to who your avatar is and taking that thousand pound budget and trying to actually reach that audience first and then expand out further? Because obviously what you do with a thousand pound budget is going to be very different to what you do with a 10,000 pound budget. And how does that strategy scale?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think from what we've seen is basically just trying lots of different games to start with to sort of see where you find a little bit of success and then just doubling down on where you find success. So ultimately, yeah, of course, you should start with your most popular games, the games that are sort of like your best sellers, so to speak, because you already know that they perform well, so you should be testing them first. Um but ultimately I think people are often a little bit scared, especially when they're on smaller budgets, um, to like double down and just like put all of their spend in one basket. But ultimately, if you have if you test five different games and one of them just works way better than the others, there's no reason why you shouldn't just put all of your spend into that singular game. And then potentially, you know, as that grows, you can test other things on a side.
SPEAKER_00And in terms of um uh you know, looking at the types of audience segments that really work on Facebook, I mean, is it still quite a younger audience? Because you know, we've got Facebook, we've got TikTok, we've got, you know, YouTube, we've got all of these different channels that we can choose to spend our media budget with. Are you still seeing really good results in the in the social space? I mean, is it becoming more noisy? Obviously, everybody's coming online right now. Like, how has stuff changed between last year and this year? Have you seen any trends that are kind of you know standing out at the moment that customers should be aware of?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think, yeah, ultimately, yes, sort of more and more budget every year is moving towards digital marketing, and that's across, you know, not just paid social, but also PPC and sort of every channel, really. So obviously the space is getting more crowded and it's getting more expensive, but ultimately that's just because it's working, right? People are putting budget into these channels because they perform really well. And there's no reason sort of not to be doing that. We sort of in January, actually, you know, this is the fourth of February now, um, saw our best results for our biggest iGaming client basically in the last sort of 13 months of working with them. So yeah, it's not like things are getting any worse. And then especially as you've been sort of working in the industry over time, you know, you get more and more data, you sort of find more and more learnings, and you can see how things work better. I think people get caught up a little bit with um like the percentages in these different platforms as well. Like, oh, there's only 20% of Facebook are a younger audience. But realistically, that's still a huge figure, like in absolute terms. So um, yeah, and it's sort of the same on things like TikTok and Snapchat, which are typically deemed as like younger audiences, but there are still you know large enough um yeah, user base on those older audiences as well.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So not to I I guess the message there is not to think of Facebook as only a certain type of genre because pretty much every I mean I'm on Facebook and I'm in my 40s. So, you know, it's like but but what about all the changes that Facebook's doing in terms of paid advertising? So, you know, the new um iOS um restrictions and things that they're doing, how how's that impacting client strategies? I mean, do clients need to think about this? How's it gonna change the way that they plan and strategize their campaigns?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, 100%. It's um obviously that's that's a um a rollout by Apple rather than Facebook. Sort of Facebook's just taking the precautions that they need to to comply with Apple's sort of new updates. But yeah, ultimately it's it's one of those things that sort of we had the same conversation when GDPR happened, we have the conversation all the time. Um ultimately it will hurt things, and especially for iOS, we're gonna lose a lot of reporting and a lot of um sort of like personalization uh for our advertising. But at the end of the day, it's still you know, these platforms are still where people are spending, you know, a m a lot of their attention, so they should still be advertised to really. Um and ultimately, yes, it'll hurt things, but people are still gonna opt into tracking, you know. Um we like Android isn't touched at all, so that's like not even a problem. So there's you know, a small percentage of you know your current um acquisition base will be hindered, but it's not like it's sort of going out the window by any means.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I want to drill down a little bit deeper in terms of the types of creative that clients need to be thinking about because it's no more just uh, you know, I mean, the typical stuff that I see because of what I touch on Facebook is a kind of long text message with a little photo or a video or somebody telling me why I need to be buying their services or products. But even now there's new kind of uh dynamic graphics where they're sort of jumping off the page at you, I think they're called breakout clips. Um, you know, what how how um important is it to get the creative right in an in a paid campaign? Talk us through some of the strategies that you kind of suggest with your clients to make those decisions a little bit easier for them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think especially in this industry, it's it's very much filled with very like number-oriented people who are very number savvy, very smart, and they love the optimization and the data. But at the end of the day, I think it's easy to sort of look at a spreadsheet and just see these people as like impression numbers. But at the end of the day, you know, they're real human beings looking at these ads and making a decision whether or not they want to click through and buy your product or engage with your product in whatever sense it may be. So yeah, we're very um, we're almost like creative first, I sort of think of ourselves as because the creative is the most important part, the optimization and all of the the rest of it can come second, but you need to make sure that you're actually delivering engaging ads and interesting ads that both sell your brand and sell, I guess, the the reason why someone would play your game over another one, especially in this industry iGaming, where sort of a lot of these um distributors use the same, you know, vendors of and they have the same games on their platform. You need to sell why your platform is better and whether it's enticing them with you know specific welcome bonuses or specific sort of like reactivation campaigns. It's it's essential that yeah, you kind of like differentiate yourself a little bit, and you're not just you know putting a static image in front of the user, you're actually doing something and and that also means the personalization is quite important in this channel, right?
SPEAKER_00Because there is so much coming at us through this channel every day, and speaking authentically to your audience means understanding who that audience is and then working backwards from there to make sure that the campaigns are matching. And I often find that um, and you and you hit the nail on the head, Robert. You uh most of these casinos have the same games platforms plugged in, right? So there's really no differentiate or differential on product um other than look and feel and also customer service on the back end. So, how do you make sure that clients can continue to um engage authentically to their brand? I mean, is is there like you know, tweaks and things? What are what are the functionalities that Facebook currently gives you to make those um audience choices and those audience segments? Because and I also want to get into a little bit of retargeting later as well, because that's obviously a massive part of the paid channel. How how do you guys deal with that?
SPEAKER_02I'm happy to sort of uh jump in on that one, and I think it really comes down to segmentation, is kind of a big part of it. So, and I suppose there's manual segmentation, and there's also kind of algorithm, algorithm-based segmentation. And obviously, we can identify different types of audience that might be relevant to a particular game or particular sort of type of game, and obviously we can have specific creative around that that kind of ultimately speaks to them. But also, that's this is why kind of creative is now so important, is that in terms of optimization and data, actually, these platforms and the kind of the constant machine learning do a huge amount of the job of kind of optimizing for us, i.e., we can kind of throw a bunch of different creative, different creative directions, different visuals out there, and give quite a broad audience type. And actually, kind of Facebook or Instagram, whatever it might be, they they will match up kind of bit by bit the kind of the right people to the right creative. And that kind of process happens quite organically, which is why kind of the kind of the biggest um, I guess, competitive space now has come become the creative, because the autumn uh the automization of of optimizing ultimately has um has really kind of dominated. And then I think the other thing to say is that in a weird way, Facebook advertising could be a hundred times creepier than it is now. It's got so much more data than it kind of than it needs, it's got so much information about who I am, what my age is, where I go on holiday, the sports I like, the teams I like. And there it they could easily run an ad that says, hey Alex, we know um you were watching the Tottenham game last night, and did you know there's some good odds on the uh on the on the game at the weekend? Um, and it looks like your calendar's clear, so why don't you put a bet on and enjoy it? And that that kind of thing probably would be doable now in terms of the data they can see, but I think even they know that that's kind of going way, way too far, way too above and beyond. So it is personalized to an extent where it's almost like the the technology is kind of much further ahead than the kind of uh the general kind of acceptance of how how specific the targeting can be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we touched a little bit on targeting there, and I want to talk about retargeting and also retention, using Facebook as a retention tool, not only as an acquisition tool, because in our industry we look at acquisition and retention very differently, but the lines are starting to blur, even in the affiliate space, because affiliates are now part of that you know awareness journey, but also the reconsideration journey after the player ends. So, how are you finding that Facebook is playing a bigger role in your clients' strategies in terms of like retention and reactivation almost?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think um I honestly think that retention and reactivation is overlooked in like every vertical that sort of uses paid social because I think a lot of um businesses they you know have a certain customer acquisition cost as long as long as they're hitting that, they're they're pretty much happy. And then they just expect that the continuum of purchases is going to happen sort of via things like email and SMS. Um realistically, like yeah, exactly. I mean, like realistically, it's just anecdotal, I guess. But I like have I never open my emails, you know. I've got um probably subscribed to dozens of different brands, um, marketing sort of flows, but I never look at them. Um but if you're gonna deliver an ad to me while I'm scrolling through Instagram, I'm like guaranteed to see it, you know. And if there's like a new product launch or if there's a new, you know, in this case, reactivation bonus or something like that, um, it's gonna, you know, get my attention and I'm actually going to see it, and I've got a much better chance of yeah, ultimately, you know, converting again. Um, so yeah, we're really like bullish, I guess, on using retention a lot more um and sort of like as much as you really can because there are so many different data points. You know, you can retarget someone who's played a specific game on your app or on your site with the same content or with content from like a similar game, um, which is yeah, obviously so, so powerful. So yeah, I I think it's also really cheap to retarget people because ultimately, you know, on paid social, you're typically paying for impressions. Yeah, if you've got you know 5,000 customers on your database, you know, you only need to pay for 5,000 impressions, which is you know far, far fewer than you're probably going to be spending on your um your acquisition channels. So your acquisition campaigns, I mean.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and in terms of um, I just want to kind of speak more to the smaller operators coming to the market because we all know, like, you know, the Bed 365s and the the Betways and the Kindreds and all of these bigger brands, they you know, they they have in-house teams that they work with big agencies like yourselves to kind of get their paid um spent through these channels. But for the smaller brands coming in, what are some of the pieces of advice that you can give them to help them get started before their budgets get bigger? Like what is it that they should be doing to make sure that they actually get onto the platform in the first place?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I mean personally, I think just we sort of have it's a bit of a theme now, but um just doubling down on creative, like realistically, you're much better off to have one really killer piece of creative than five or six just very average pieces of creative. Okay. Um and if you can do that, I think yeah, you've got a much better chance of cutting through the noise. And it sounds a bit cliche, I cliche, I suppose, but just doing things differently, you know, if you look at not to throw any shots, but if you look at a lot of these big vendors, they're running almost exactly the same ads, just with you know slightly different numbers on the image. Um doing something a bit more exciting, doing something a bit more innovative, ultimately, I think yeah, gives you a better chance of standing out from the crowd. And um especially as I think this industry is typically um consumed by an older uh demographic, yeah, to sort of yeah, get in front of these younger audiences and younger people to sort of yeah, show them something really exciting rather than just you know the standard fishing frenzies and eye of horuses, you know. Um I think is really important.
SPEAKER_00Uh back in the day.
SPEAKER_01I think just to um yeah, sorry, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, I was gonna say back in the day for me when I was making a casino it was Mermaid Millions, that was like the big deal. You know, so I mean, but yeah, I I get what you're saying. And and in terms of keeping it simple, stupid, that same old ad, you know, kiss ad, it's still works. So if you're a smaller brand, don't try and you know have 50 different ads live at the same time because you're just gonna be diversifying your spend. But what were you gonna say, Alex?
SPEAKER_02As I say, the other thing as well, I think is to always think kind of socially native first. I think so often, um, especially kind of some of the slower to move industries, they try to kind of essentially shoehorn the previous type of advertising into the new platform. And it's not about taking a YouTube video and putting it on social. It's not about taking a shortened TV ad and putting it on um on social. It's actually about creating something that actually uses the benefits of social media. Like, so for example, if you're making an Instagram story ad, think about the Instagram story experience. Think how people use it, think how people scroll, think how quickly they tap, think about how you can actually capture that attention using that full screen experience. Think how you can use the swipe up function in some sort of fun way that ultimately links to the creative, because the more native you can be to that individual kind of platform, and that could be Instagram, that could be TikTok, that could be Snapchat, whatever it is, as long as you're kind of thinking first like that, the the algorithm will reward you for it massively. Ultimately, so will the consumer, and it also gives you a chance to differentiate from some of those slightly slower to respond and people. And I think the fun point on that is that actually creative doesn't have to be expensive. I think people worry that creative means kind of I've got to get a either a video crew down here or I've got to go to some really expensive agency or whatever it might be. I mean, we make we genuinely sometimes make ads using free platforms like Canva sometimes, because actually you can you can use some of those different functions. And um, so really I wouldn't ever see kind of creative as kind of a high barrier because that there's a lot you can do um in a sort of sort of native, scrappy way that can actually look very polished and and do a really good job.
SPEAKER_00And actually, sometimes being native and scrappy is a good way to stand up because everybody else is overly polished, and you It makes you stop and actually take a look at what you know what the message is. So I want to just kind of round up the conversation now. So we know that Facebook can be done for smaller brands. We know that focusing on the creative is incredibly important. We know that understanding the customer and the channel that you're going to be using is also very important when you're planning your strategy. Where do you think Facebook is going to kind of change or dominate in the kind of year ahead? Because obviously all of these social channels are going to be competing. We've just seen how big Clubhouse is now. And obviously there's going to be advertising on that channel too. I mean, that'd be stupid if they don't. It's not there yet. But should clients really be looking and picking a channel and going all in in one, or should they try and diversify across multiple and test the different ad segments that they're getting? Like what is what's your one big tip that you want to leave our listeners with in terms of paid social? And I'll ask both of you because both of you might have different tips.
SPEAKER_02What I would say is that don't underestimate, underestimate Facebook. And people often do that because Facebook is not, it hasn't been cool for a while. And even Instagram is becoming quite uncool now. And therefore, people kind of quite easily gravitate towards the new hot thing. But you only have to look at Facebook's numbers, kind of Facebook overall corpse numbers. Like they're everything about them is just on the up and up and up. And they've got the smartest minds, the smartest tech, the smartest people out there. And it might not necessarily mean oh, actually running an ad on the Facebook homepage on desktop is necessarily the right thing anymore. But believe you me, they are light years ahead of us in terms of like development and kind of they they know what the roadmap looks like. So they will have a product, whether it's a new app or an existing app or a kind of alteration to something, they will have something there new. So I would say Facebook is largely here to stay, and I think um just got to keep an eye on kind of what those changes are. Um but at the same time, yeah, it is it's never good to have all your eggs in one basket. And I really don't think it makes sense to be all in on one platform because the ultimately the CPMs and the cost of media is continuously on the rise with Facebook at the moment. So I think it's nice if you can get Facebook broadly, Facebook, Instagram working for you, great, kind of use that, build on that, bank on that. However, I I always like to kind of keep at least say 10% of my budget for kind of a test and learn approach. And that could be testing a new format, could be testing a new channel, could be testing something completely out there, but ultimately finding that kind of next, next, um, next bucket to be able to put your media spend in is always a good idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love that. And from you, Rob.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, more or less to echo the same points, really. Um Facebook is Facebook and Google are so far ahead of every other platform in terms of like their AI and their machine learning, but there's really no reason to sort of look away from those two channels. Um yeah, they they're just there's and like um Alex said, and there's no doubt that they're gonna create you know something new or they're gonna acquire another company and just you know stick their advertising platform on that. Um so yeah, I if I especially if I was sort of on low budgets, I would definitely just be focusing on Facebook um as an advertising channel and and really going all in on that. We found quite a lot of success with Snapchat recently, um, mainly just because of what we've been talking about, the fact that it's so much cheaper than Facebook to run ads on that um yeah, ultimately your conversion rate can be much lower, but you're still gonna you know convert um have a bit sort of dissimilar to CAC.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I think what what is just one last question, just for my own curiosity. What is the average CPA that you can back out on for an iGaming client on paid paid ads? Like I know it's how long is a piece of string, but like like what's the worst and the best that you've seen in if if there's a ratio?
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, it's uh it depends. We've sort of we've seen some clients. I think you know, one of these clients that came to us a couple years ago was sort of seeing 150 pound, 200 pound CPAs for um their sort of like customer acquisition costs, but we're like hovering a lot closer to the 50 pound mark in the last few months. Um but I think that's and yeah, sort of Snapchat are po posting similar numbers at the moment as well. But ultimately, um yeah, again, like you said, it's how long is a piece of string. It completely depends on your platform, how engaging you know the app or the site is, how engaging the games are that you've got, how engaging the creative is. Um I think you can drive very 100%. Yeah, I think you can drive very, very cost efficient results through Pay Social at the moment.
SPEAKER_00I think that's one thing that people do forget is that whilst the ad is bringing the person to your website, what happens on your website needs to work just as well because otherwise it just increases your costs, right? So and in terms of Facebook, one last question, in terms of Facebook and Instagram, would you say run them together? Would that be your recommendation? Or would you say, you know, keep your budget in in the place where you know you're gonna get the best audience?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, um, Facebook's best practice is to turn on automatic placements, which is essentially just to run every placement across um sort of Facebook's advertising network. And yeah, I I think I can pretty confidently say that that's the correct decision because um Facebook will, at the end of the day, we were just talking about how you know the machine learning and the AI is second to none. Facebook knows where your users are, it will see the results and it will put the budget where you know it's gonna do the most for you. So yeah, just give Facebook the wheel, I think, is my uh takeaway.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so there you've heard it on Affiliate Insider's podcast with Alex and Robert from Spin Brands. We've given you loads of information to think about in terms of entering Facebook or not ignoring it as part of your digital and retention strategy today, and also giving you some great stats in terms of how to run your campaign. So want to thank you guys for joining us on the podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you here and to have your expertise for the affiliate insider community. Thanks for that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you've loved what we've been putting down in this podcast series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to the podcast channel. That way you'll never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving trends.