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

Because of the many high traffic online games community sites and portals that are constantly looking for new content it’s easy to get you game featured. These website will often feature new games on the front page, providing massive amounts of traffic to your viral game and potentially getting your game played by millions worldwide. Try getting on the front page of YouTube or any of the other high profile video sharing sites and see how far you get. The sheer volume of submissions the video sharing sites get makes it virtually impossible to get anywhere near the front page, which means your video just gets lost amongst millions of others.

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.

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

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 more cost effective than viral videos

Given the above and the fact that production costs are similar, viral games give you a much better return on your investment. Viral games consistently reach a much larger audience for roughly the same cost as viral videos.

You can accurately track results with viral games

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. Its easy to incorporate a viral tracking system into your viral game code in order to monitor detailed statistics about your campaign. Using either one of the free or paid tracking systems devised specifically for viral Flash or even Google Analytics, you can track exactly who is playing your viral game, what country they are from, how long they play for and how they interact with the game, such as web link clickthroughs. This is invaluable for keeping track of how well your viral game is performing. This sort of accurate data just isn’t easily available with viral videos.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

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.

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.

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

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