Website Marketing Club

Which Work Better For Marketing, Viral Videos or Viral Games?

Nov 5, 2009 Advertising

Although most people still associate viral marketing with video and YouTube, achieving satisfactory results with commercial viral video marketing has become difficult, due to over saturation. Viral games however can still provide great results, almost always surpassing those of video campaigns, 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

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

Viral games can have clickable web links embedded within them and clickthrough rates are very good. Typically many times better than other forms of online advertising such as banner ads at around 10%. The problem with viral videos is you can’t include these clickable links. The best you can do is include a URL and hope. Clickable web links in viral games provide many times the referral traffic of a video because of this.

Viral games are interactive

A good viral game engages your audience much better than any video by allowing them to not only see, but interact with your brand. This increases the impact of the advert, makes it more likely to stick in the viewers mind and makes return visits much more likely.

Viral games are much more cost effective

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 accurately track results with viral games

With viral games it’s possible to insert a viral tracking service (or even Google Analytics) into the code to track detailed visitor data across hundreds of sites and all through one dashboard. This makes it much easier to see and monitor the success of your viral marketing campaign. You can also track clickthroughs to your website accurately with viral games, because links aren’t possible within videos neither is accurate referral traffic tracking.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

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.

Despite viral marketing being synonymous with online video, viral games definitely provide the better, more effective alternative for viral marketing.

Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game developer The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral games.

Tags: Advertising, Business, computers, entertainment, games, internet, Internet Advertising, internet marketing, marketing, Sales, viral advertising, viral games, viral marketing