Viral games can be great way to get a huge number of people engaging with your brand. However, there are instances where using a viral game would be a complete waste of time and money.
Seeing marketers really embrace the idea of using video games as a truly engaging, interactive marketing medium is great. The problem is, maybe they’ve embraced the idea a bit too enthusiastically, allowing the idea of this exciting new opportunity to cloud judgement about whether it’s really going to work for the specific campaign.
When Viral Games Are a Good Idea
If you have a product with huge mass market appeal to promote, then viral games can be a great promotional tool. Viral games are intended to be spread far and wide. The more exposure the better. The more the game spreads, the more people play the game and ultimately the more exposure and web traffic generated for the brand or product it’s promoting. With mass market products, you’re guaranteed almost all players are potential customers.
Good examples of appropriate uses of viral games are retail products, movies, books and music. Viral games are perfect in these cases for increasing brand awareness over a wide variety of demographics.
When Viral Games Are Not a Good Idea
Viral games are rarely a good idea for businesses operating in very tight, specialist niches. Getting people playing your viral game isn’t a problem. Getting the wrong people playing your game is.
Video games have mass market appeal. Combining that with the nature of viral marketing means you’re essentially making the game freely distributable and allowing it to be posted, talked about and linked to anywhere and everywhere. So you’re likely to end up with a huge amount of players, very few of them even vaguely interested in your business.
One potential way around this is targeted, paid placements. However, these can get very expensive quickly. Plus, you’re only able to loosely target broad demographics, such as countries and age groups, so this probably isn’t a viable solution in most cases.
Should I Ever Use a Viral Game For a Niche Market?
To say viral games can never work for niche market businesses is incorrect, but it does rule out the usual viral seeding channels. If you already have a huge targeted mailing list and user base to promote the game to in the first instance then a viral game can be a great way to make a business website more sticky.
Long established brands with huge amounts of web traffic and massive mailing lists, as well as a good social media presence can probably forgo any sort of blanket viral seeding for their game. The success or failure of a viral game however hinges on initial exposure. You can have the best game in the world, but if no one knows it’s there, it will struggle. So it’s always a good idea to use every method available to promote a viral game.
It’s absolutely essential that in niche market cases a business is able to get a viral game the intial exposure required to make it a success. For instance, viral games can provide a great hook for a press release, so don’t waste any opportunity to get your game seen by your target audience.
Think Before Using Viral Games
It’s so easy to see the potential of viral games and allow that to cloud your judgement about who’s actually going to end up playing. As a general rule, niche market businesses should avoid them, unless you’re confident you can drive the necessary targeted players to make it worthwhile.