As legal sports betting becomes more readily available, the competition amongst sportsbooks to acquire new users continues to heat up.
American sports bettors have wagered over $77bn since June 2018, according to Legal Sports Report, and with major states like New York coming soon, every sportsbook is diving in.
With more states successfully setting up online operations, the pool of new users continues to grow. The American Gaming Association estimates that 45.2 million Americans will wager on the NFL alone this season, a 36% increase from 2020.
One of the prevailing ways US-based sportsbooks have attracted new customers is through large-scale spending on traditional advertising. Online gambling companies spent $154m in the first quarter of 2021 on television ad spots, according to Nielsen, with FanDuel and DraftKings leading the way to combine for just over $100m of that total.
Other sportsbooks are relying on affiliate partnerships as a more cost-effective marketing strategy to break into the market. By teaming up with sports betting content companies and harnessing their outreach, sportsbooks can efficiently gain new customers.
In turn, these sports betting content companies are working to refine the science of mass audience conversion for sportsbook sign-ups – down to the exact minute a social post or video should be uploaded.
But can social conversions for sports betting ever be an exact science?
Common sports betting social media practices
Sports betting remains a relatively new market in the United States, so its social media community only represents a segment of sports fans.
Unless a newly legalised state emerges, or a seismically viral win or upset loss owns the news cycle, sports betting topics probably won’t trend on social media. Instead, media companies must focus on expanding their brand into the broader world of sports and pop culture.
By live-tweeting sporting events, reacting to breaking news, and keeping up with viral moments, sports betting companies can tap into and learn about a wider audience, including their gambling aptitude.
“If you can dive into those conversations, you can then interject the voice of your brand within that digital space and gain the awareness to build a loyal community,” says Felipe Fontes, Senior Social Media Manager at The Game Day. “It also allows you to incorporate sports betting into general conversation, making it more digestible and accessible to the everyday fan.”
Sports media companies have an inherent advantage over sportsbooks in that regard: they can more carefully walk the line between casual sports talk and betting-focused engagement.
Affiliate partnerships can also help bridge the gap for sportsbook operators that originated overseas, giving them a voice and an opportunity to compete in a brand-dominated market like the United States.
“Affiliate partnerships help us create brand awareness, drive acquisition, and frankly, they help us understand the markets we are operating in,” says Jason Dietz, Manager of Performance Marketing & Affiliates at Betfred US. “As an operator, we lean on our Affiliates to guide us. Affiliates have direct insight into key demographics, overall traffic volumes, and user behaviour that we desperately need as we grow acquisition for our brand.”
Affiliates also help by actively promoting their partner sportsbooks with techniques that include featuring their odds in written content; promoting lines in YouTube videos; creating reviews of the sportsbook; and highlighting promotional offers that build intrigue toward potential customers.
Social media often plays a large part in these partnerships as well. Nearly 68% of affiliate marketers use social media to connect with customers, according to Affstat’s 2016 Affiliate Marketing Benchmark Report.
The science of social conversions
While sports betting content companies will easily find ways to integrate sportsbook operators into their social media campaigns, the integral challenge remains converting that social audience into active bettors.
While the average American spends over two hours per day on social media, according to a 2021 Statista report, the redirection of a user’s attention away from their feed takes strong messaging.
It takes a combination of attributes for a social media post to successfully divert someone onto a sportsbook’s website and convert them into a first-time sportsbook depositor.
First, posts must be properly tailored to their audience, an especially important factor when it comes to the type of content and the language used in posts. Both must be optimised for audiences that may differ across platforms from Instagram to TikTok, to Twitter to YouTube.
Social teams should also cast a large net. Targeting users in legalised betting states is certainly a viable strategy, yet team or player-specific posts limit the potential extent of the social conversation.
Instead, a focus on broader, all-encompassing social posts is more likely to create engagement and the potential for further conversions. These far-reaching posts also help normalise betting language, memes, and trends to the casual sports fan.
Timing also plays a factor in the discoverability, reach, and engagement of content. Certain social platforms garner more user engagement at various times during the day, but social teams can also take advantage of breaking news, like a trade or injury, with a well-timed and actionable post.
Those posts can also influence where the action is taking place. By dangling promotional offers from various sportsbooks, media companies can convince users to diversify their sports betting portfolio with various affiliates.
Figuring out how to maximise each of these qualities in each singular post is a challenge, one often faced head-on by an analytics department.
“Data is an incredibly important part of our content strategy,” says Nate Loucks, SVP of Content for The Game Day. “Our internal team tracks and analyses performance trends across all platforms. Based on trends gathered from these analytics, we are then able to pin down what we believe may lead to more success on a post.”
Data, Data, Data
While social media teams generally track performance metrics like organic impressions and engagement, they also analyse each post to see which stand out above the rest.
To maximise the potential of their affiliate partnerships, sports betting media companies need to know how posts that feature their partner sportsbooks fare, especially when betting odds and other actionable items are included.
To do so, analytics departments can research which posts are generating the most operator link clicks and, therefore, are most likely to result in conversions. From the trends in that information, you can build a more profitable content strategy.
While all of that data can help social teams improve their processes, it’s also important to learn as much as possible about your potential customers. Sports bettors notoriously skew heavily male, while 60% of active participants are in the 18-40 age range, according to a Kagan online consumer survey.
Targeting those demographics and capturing their data, whether it be emails, cell phone numbers, or social media profiles, goes a long way to successfully reaching them and eventually converting them into sportsbook customers.
While data certainly provides a roadmap to success, creativity and improvisation are the driving forces behind social conversions and effective social media practices.
At the end of the day, the most successful sportsbooks won’t necessarily be the loudest ones. They’ll understand the social conversation – and where that chatter will take place before it even happens.
