Viral marketing has become synonymous with often funny or controversial online videos. Due to over saturation, achieving good results with commercial viral videos however is becoming more and more difficult. Viral games on the other hand are far from the saturation point, and with video games being a massively growing market, they’re doing better than ever, here’s why:
Viral game seeding is easier and provides more consistent results
There are many online games portals and community sites that will feature and actively promote your game for free. It’s relatively easy to get a game on the front page of a few high traffic games portals, potentially getting your game in front of millions worldwide, but try doing that with YouTube, or one of the other main video sharing sites. Over saturation on the video sharing sites has meant that it’s virtually impossible to make your video stand out from the vast number competing for your audience’s attention.
Viral games get played by more people
The ease of seeding and the fact that there is less competition means viral games typically get many times more views than videos. Millions (or even tens of millions) of worldwide plays are commonplace with viral games. Getting those sorts of numbers with viral videos is impossible for all but a handful of the very best viral videos.
You can embed clickable links in a viral game
One of the main things that make viral games so effective is the referral traffic they generate. It’s possible to put clickable web links within the game to drive traffic to your business, or a specific product website. Clickthrough rates on viral games are typically over 10%, much higher than other forms of online advertising such as banner ads. This is where viral videos fail. With no way to include clickable links it’s just a case of inserting a web address and hoping the visitors come. Obviously doing this just can’t compete with the direct clickthroughs generated by a viral game.
Viral games are interactive
Viral games draw the viewer in and encourage them to interact with your brand, rather than just passively watch the advert. This can give your advert a much greater impact, make it much more memorable and increase the chances of people coming back for repeat plays.
You get more for your money with viral games
Given the above and the comparable production costs, viral games are generally much more cost effective than videos. You can expect your marketing message to consistently reach a much larger audience, for around the same cost.
You can accurately track results with viral games
The success of viral videos can be very difficult to monitor accurately over multiple sites and trying to determine additional viewer information can be nearly impossible. Its easy to incorporate a viral tracking system into your viral game code in order to monitor detailed statistics about your campaign. Using either one of the free or paid tracking systems devised specifically for viral Flash or even Google Analytics, you can track exactly who is playing your viral game, what country they are from, how long they play for and how they interact with the game, such as web link clickthroughs. This is invaluable for keeping track of how well your viral game is performing. This sort of accurate data just isn’t easily available with viral videos.
Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa
This may sound a bit odd, considering everything preceding this, but inexpensive viral videos can be effectively used to boost traffic to a viral game. We often do this with the viral games we release, where we create a short gameplay video in order to further promote the viral game. Because it’s just a video capture of the game there is very little time, work and cost involved.
Although videos are the first thing that spring to mind when you mention viral marketing, games are definitely more effective and worthy of your marketing budget.
Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game developers The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.