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

Friday, November 6th, 2009

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.

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

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

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 developers The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.