Location Intelligence and Geofencing: How Casinos Can Win

Casinos thrive based on guests coming to their venue, enjoying their visit, and returning with more potential loyal customers. While casinos often have incredibly sophisticated customer relationship management programs, their dataset and associated insights are limited by what guests do within their own properties. Location data allows these venues to know the share of a consumer’s casino visits they are receiving.

Understanding who is coming to a specific venue, where they are coming from, their demographic information, and details about behavior helps casino owners build the right experience for their clientele.

Location intelligence is an underutilized asset for casinos and resorts looking to gain these customer insights and make smart business and marketing decisions. Through the information and data gained from location intelligence, casinos can analyze foot traffic, increase their understanding of guest behaviors and demographics, and build out comprehensive views of their competition and market share.

When using a location intelligence partner, casinos and resorts are able to access massive amounts of anonymous, precise mobile device location data. This data allows casinos to glean valuable insights into the behaviors of anonymized mobile users as they move throughout their day.

How Location Intelligence Helps Casinos:

• Gather competitive intelligence and market insights
• Understand consumers and their behaviors on a deeper level
• Enable more contextually relevant and personalized guest experiences
• Make better business decisions based on foot traffic analysis
• Focus advertising campaigns on real-world activity and transactions
• Utilize foot traffic analysis to connect targeted advertisements to casino foot traffic 

Geofencing

Casinos can geofence their own locations as well as those of their competitors to get a better understanding of consumer foot traffic trends. Monitoring devices that visit competitor locations provides casino owners a sense of loyalty levels, and identifies prospective customers, or win back ones they may have lost through targeted offers. Location intelligence provides an excellent seed audience as they can geoconquest competitive properties’ highest value visitors.

Customer Preferences and Behavior

Foot traffic analysis can also help casinos, hotels, and resorts to segment their guests into audience groups based on patterns of behavior. Casinos that have access to extensive databases of location intelligence are able to segment data into ‘Personas’ based on behavior patterns. For example, if a mobile device visits coffee shops multiple times each week, they can classify them as a “coffee drinker.” This might allow for better targeted offers or awards to customers or potential customers that lead to resort visits.

Casino Analysis – Encore Boston Harbor

As an example, these groupings allow users to compare data sets, like those of attendees at Encore Boston Harbor, a newly opened casino and hotel in the Greater Boston Area over Labor Day weekend.

Here are some of the interesting findings based on location alone:

• This analysis shows that 80% of the people visiting Encore Boston Harbor in this time frame were from Massachusetts. The ‘heat map’ below shows where visitors were coming from. This data can determine where to put marketing dollars to entice out-of-state visitors.
• Of the low number of visitors from out-of-state, the majority used airline travel to visit Encore.  With this type of data, casinos could partner with airlines to develop promotions to increase visitors, or with travel options from the airport to the casino.
• The data shows that visitors are incredibly interested in fitness - our personas group them as above average interest levels in fitness. Casinos can use this data to provide guests with incentives to use their on-site gyms.
• Data showed that Encore visitors frequented either very high-end restaurants or fast food restaurants — no casual dining.  Casinos can take this data and partner with local restaurants or tailor their internal sites to meet these preferences.