What is Viral Marketing?

In this post I'm going to explain what Viral Marketing is and what why It's such a good way to market your product, or in my case: Game.

  

What is Viral Marketing?

- Viral Marketing is a way to market your game through your community or fanbase. Creating something that will make the community themselves spread the word and, in a way, work as word-of-mouth advertising group.

 

How can you use it?

You can use it either by creating cool and remarkable advertising, such as gameplay or pre-rendered videos of your game, like Bungy did with Halo. You can also create incitament for your own community to start advertising your game and thereby bringing new players into the game.

Here's an example:

1. An Invite a Friend system is implemented (basicly allows your players to invite their friends into the game and getting rewarded for doing so).
   
   
2. Existing players starts to invite their friends into the game (thereby doing advertising).
   
   
3. New players starts to enter the game and the existing players gets rewarded for bringing in a new player into the game (the viral marketing is successful).

 

Why should you use it?

Viral Marketing can be used successfully even without investing any real money. The only thing you need to invest is time, creativity and effort. Although, Viral Marketing campaigns with real money investments may have greater chance of success and may enable you to create campaigns you otherwise wouldn't be able to.

 

This is my assumtion: Viral Marketing is the best way to market your game, as long as the game has or is built around a community.