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:
Seeding your viral game is easier
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 they are easier to seed and get in front of people, viral games generally get seen and played by many more people than videos. It's common for viral games to achieve millions of plays, whereas only a very small number of the very best viral videos can hope to compete with these numbers.
Viral games can link directly to your website
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.
You get more for your money with viral games
Considering the above points and the fact that viral video and viral game production costs are similar, this makes viral games much more cost effective. More views for the same spend as well as the fact that viral games are much more engaging makes them much more appealing as a marketing tool.
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 even use viral video to promote your viral game
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.
Despite viral marketing being synonymous with online video, viral games definitely provide the better, more effective alternative for viral marketing.
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