Viral games are much easier to seed successfully

There are many online games portals and community sites that will feature and actively promote your game for free, making seeding viral games relatively easy. It’s not difficult to get a game on the front page of a few high traffic games portals, potentially getting your game in front of millions worldwide. 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 consistently higher viewing figures

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

It’s easy to insert clickable links to your business or product website into your viral game. And people do click them (usually in their thousands). Typical clickthrough rates on a viral game are over 10% (many times higher than banner ads). It’s impossible to include a clickable link in viral videos, the best you can do is include your web address within the video and hope people visit your site. The actual traffic generated this way can’t hope to compete with direct clickthroughs from 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.

Viral games are much more cost effective

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.

Viral games are easily trackable

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. 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

This may sound like a slight contradiction, but viral games can actually utilise viral video marketing to increase plays with little additional cost. We often use gameplay videos to get extra traffic to a viral game. Because it’s literally a video screen capture from the game there is very little work (and therefore cost) involved in adding this to a viral game.

Whether you’re a large book publisher or a small independent film company viral ad games can generate massive, cost effective worldwide exposure for your book or film. The game can be built around the plot to help immerse the player in the story and create intrigue and anticipation of your book or film’s release.

Viral Ad Games can also be a great tool to promote your music online. A Flash game can be created to compliment the audio track (samples from your music release) and get your music heard worldwide. The game can then link to your online store to drive online sales. Big bands on major labels have been using video games to promote their music and drive sales for years, now you can get in on the action. We have packages to suit all budgets, whether you’re an independent band or artist, or a major record label.

The study, conducted by market research firm Frank Magid Associates and advertiser Zappos.com found that in-game advertising provides “substantially better performance and consumer perception than traditional TV advertising”. If you’re still not convinced of the merits of advergames, you can read the full story over at Brand Republic here.

Click-through rates for in-game advertising are also many times higher than other forms of online ads, such as banner advertising.

Then there’s the fact that advergames are far less expensive that TV advertising.

So why not get in touch now to find out how you can get involved with advertising your business with an advergame.

1) Adver-games are interactive – Unlike traditional advertising methods, adver-games allow potential customers to interact with your brand. If done well you can get your marketing message across without it even seeming like an advert.

2) Adver-games are fun – Adver-games combine advertising with fun. Potential customers actually enjoy seeing your advert and interacting with it, unlike most other forms of advertising.

3) Adver-games don’t have a fixed lifespan – After the intial production cost, advergames can continue to provide a return on your investment over the longer term. In fact it’s not unusual for adver-games to continue working for you years after initial launch.

4) Adver-games are trackable – You can measure the success of your campaign by using a tracking service in your adver-game. This gives detailed information about who is interacting with your brand and how.

5) Adver-games give worldwide exposure – Adver-games can be a great way to increase brand awareness outside your own country. It’s easy to get potential customers from all over the world to play your game via the internet.

6) You don’t need paid placements – Although it’s possible to use them, paid placements aren’t necessary like other forms of advertising. There is a huge number of worldwide community sites and online games portals that will feature your game for free.

So why not start to use adver-games in your next marketing campaign.

Being highly targeted websites, you can present your audience with just the specific information they’re looking for without including irrelavent information. Because of this, your visitors are more likely to turn into sales or enquiries. Having a separate microsite dedicated to each product or service you are trying to sell, in addition to a page on your main business website, gives you twice the exposure and potential for sales. Search Engine Optimisation can be much more effective, because you are optimising a top level domain rather than trying to increase ranking of an inner page on your main website. Plus, you’re only having to optimise your homepage, targeting a few specific keyword phrases, so you’re free to make full use of multimedia technologies such as Flash without impacting your search engine rankings.

To discuss your microsite design requirements, please get in touch.