Are Videos Better Than Games For Viral Marketing Campaigns?
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 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.
