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

Written by Simon Walklate

Friday, 06 November 2009 02:00

by SimonWalklate

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

Online gaming portals and community websites are constantly looking for quality games to feature, so are often happy to include your viral games for free. It's not difficult to get your game featured on the front page of high profile gaming websites and therefore seen by millions worldwide. YouTube and the other big video sharing sites are a completely different story though. There's just too many videos being uploaded on a daily basis, making it virtually impossible to make yours stand out.

Viral games get played by more people

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 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

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 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.

You can use viral videos to promote viral games, but not viral games to promote viral videos

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.

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.

Author Info:

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

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