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.
Viewing figures are higher for viral games
Because it's much easier to effectively seed a viral game they generally get seen and played by many more people than videos. It's not unusual for a viral game to get millions or even tens of millions of plays. It's very difficult to compete with these numbers using video, only an extremely small number of the very best viral videos even come close.
You can put web links into viral games
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
Rather than just have your audience passively view your advert, viral games encourage interaction with your brand to provide a much more engaging experience. This often makes viral games much more memorable and increases the chance of repeat plays.
You get more for your money with viral games
Given the above and the fact that production costs are similar, viral games give you a much better return on your investment. Viral games consistently reach a much larger audience for roughly the same cost as viral videos.
You can easily, accurately monitor 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.
You can use viral videos to promote viral games, but not viral games to promote viral videos
Although it may sound odd at first, viral video is a great inexpensive way to get some extra traffic to your viral game. We use simple gameplay videos to accomplish this. Because they are just video screen grabs they take very little time/money to put together. Conversely, using a viral game to promote a viral video just isn't possible or even desirable, for obvious reasons.
When thinking about your next viral marketing campaign, be sure to consider these points when making your decision about whether to stick with video or try out a more effective viral game.
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