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Do Viral Games Perform Better Than Videos For Marketing?
Although most people associate viral marketing with funny or controversial videos on YouTube, due to the vast number of videos out there it's becoming more and more difficult to get noticed. Viral games on the other hand still provide good consistent results, for the following reasons:
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.
You can put web links into viral games
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
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
Unlike viral videos you can use a viral tracking service (by embedding a couple of lines of code) to track detailed, accurate results of who sees your campaign. You can see details of geographical location, view time, interactions (such as web link clickthroughs), etc. across hundreds of websites, all through one dashboard. This is invaluable for measuring the success of any viral marketing campaign. None of this is easily possible with viral videos.
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.
Although videos are the first thing that spring to mind when you mention viral marketing, games are definitely more effective and worthy of your marketing budget.
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