Games as part of your Online Strategy
February 14th, 2012

As a creative digital agency, Naked Penguin Boy works across the online marketing spectrum, from digital strategy to website design, advertising, mobile, social media, viral marketing and of course games.

 We put a lot of thought and passion into everything we do. If it’s a tiny Facebook ad or a complex ecommerce site we design and build with both your customers and business objectives in mind.

 We also track and analyse every element of our campaigns both for our clients and our own learnings. A few years ago our analysis showed that in almost every instance of online marketing, games would always give the best ROI.

 In a pound-for-pound comparison, it might seem unlikely that a game would provide a better ROI than a rich-media banner, with games costing tens of thousands of pounds to develop and banners costing next to nothing.  However, once you take into consideration the large media spend required to place the banners on high traffic sites such as Yahoo and MSN, it’s easier to see how a simple banner campaign can become quite costly, and provide significantly less engagement than is possible with a game.

 Of course, games still require a seeding budget, but most agencies usually account for this as part of the overall game development costs, ensuring there are no hidden surprises to come later down the line. Game seeding is also much more cost effective, with placements costing far less than that of their banner equivalents and providing almost incomparable levels of customer engagement.

 It’s not only the direct cost as games have the following advantages over many other forms of online advertising and marketing:

• Non-intrusive and requested by the user
• Content engages and captivates for minutes even hours
• Engage users with the brand in a positive manner
• Good for wide distribution
• Possesses a long lifespan
• Excellent Viral prospects
• Work well with social media
• Cost efficient in comparison to many other tools
• You don’t always have to pay for placement
• Impressions, similar to banners you are going to get that anyway
• Games can still drive traffic elsewhere

So whether it’s Adver-games, viral games, social games, Facebook games or whatever you would like to refer to them as, games should definitely be a part of every digital marketing strategy and can be extremely useful for….

• Brand Awareness
• Drive Traffic
• Data Capture
• Site Content – Stickiness
• Customer Acquisition
• Media Effectiveness
• Revenue generation

Ultimately, games increase sales, so the next time you are deciding what to do with your tight budgets consider a game to achieve your objectives and to deliver a good return on investment.