With so much emphasis this time of the year on college football and the NFL when it comes to booking action as an independent sports bookmaker, the start of a new season of hockey in the NHL tends to get overlooked. No matter how much action your football betting customers are generating right now you could be missing out on a huge betting opportunity without putting a solid marketing plan in place to capture some of the early betting action in the NHL.
Hockey bettors are a loyal bunch and once they lock into a site to place their action, they tend to stay there for what is one of the longest seasons in any professional sports league. While the betting action that hockey generates will never be as much as the NFL or the NBA, can you really afford to leave money on the table by not going after the action that this sport does generate?
A good starting point to building some additional NHL betting action is your current Pay Per Head service. They should be able to provide you with all the betting lines you need to build out your NHL betting board. Once the NHL regular season does get underway, there will be a steady stream of betting opportunities from now until the Stanley Cup Finals next June. Working with your price per head provider, you should always have the opportunity to move your own NHL money lines, run lines and totals as well as change your overall offerings to best meet your particular business needs.
Your PPH service should also be able to provide you will direct backend access to reports that can track all the daily NHL action coming in. This way you can closely monitor everything on an account by account basis. You can also set up betting and credit limits for each and every one of your betting customers by creating individual account profiles with the help of your price per head sportsbook software solutions.
Marketing your NHL bookmaking services to your entire customer base as well as to any prospective betting customers you are trying to reach is crucial to building NHL betting action. Most bettors will default to one of the big offshore sportsbooks operating online to bet on hockey unless they know your private bookie operation offers NHL betting lines on your board. You should never assume that just because someone is betting football with your bookmaking service that they will automatically gravitate to you for every other sport including the NHL.
It also might make sense to market your sports bookmaking services directly to NHL fans through your online website or any other means of social media you employ as part of your overall marketing strategy. Many times NHL fans equates directly to NHL bettors, so it is well worth your while to spend some time trying to add some hockey-only bettors to the fold.
Two of the most important aspects of any marketing plan to help grow your overall customer base while building bottom-line profits are persistence and follow through. If someone has never bet the NHL with you in the past, you have to give them some tangible reasons to bring their action to your bookmaking service. This will take some time and effort, but once you do have an established betting cliental for this sport it will give you a solid base to build even more NHL betting action down the road.
If you want to think of your sports bookmaking business as a viable, full-service operation that is built for long-term profitable growth, then the NHL has to be a part of the mix.