How Much Do I Need To Spend On My Advergame? 

By Simon Walklate

Advergames are seen by many marketers as just a way to get an advert for their product, brand or service placed on other websites and in front of their visitors. Often this means they think the best thing to do is spend as little as possible to achieve this. But why should you spend more on your custom advergame?

Many marketers seem to believe that all advergames are built the same and take some convincing of the merits of spending more than the bare minimum on their custom advergame. The problem is, having a minimal web based interactive widget built and trying to pass it off as a game rarely works. By choosing to use advergames in your marketing strategy, you’re choosing to advertise your product to the casual gaming community. If you’re not offering something genuinely worthwhile then they’re unlikely to take much notice. Going down this route will give you a minimal chance of success and may mean that a chunk of your marketing budget has been wasted.

The success of any advergame depends on two main factors:

1) Will your game attract players?

The main goal of any advergame is to grab the attention of your audience, keep them there and make them want to return again and again. The longer you can keep their attention, the more exposure you get. Obviously this means investing in a great game to providing a great interactive experience. The better and more immersive the game, the better the results will be for your business. You truly do only get out what you put in.

2) Is your game worth writing about?

Getting your advergame in front of the largest audience possible means getting it featured on the websites they visit. It’s not enough to just put your advergame on your website and hope the players will come, doing this guarantees failure. But why should they feature your advergame? This is where you need to give them great content that their visitors will want to read about and/or play. A great game will spread far and wide over the internet, being picked up and either hosted or written about and linked to by many gaming community sites, games portals and blogs. In some cases you may even get your game featured in traditional media such as magazines, radio or even TV. The better the game, the more you increase the chances of this happening. On the other hand, if your game is rubbish, very few websites are likely to feature it.

So if you’re thinking of using advergames as part of your business marketing, always remember that the more you put in, the more you will get out and ultimately the greater the success will be. All advergames should be a great immersive game in their own right, first and foremost, the advertising should always be secondary. This will benefit you brand with much greater engagement with your audience, and much greater traffic to your website or online store. To make your advergame successful means allocating the largest budget you can manage to the game, rather than trying to spend as little as possible.

Simon Walklate is a partner in Bristol, UK based Flash game designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in advergame development.

Article kindly provided by UberArticles.com

Topics: Advertising | Comments Off

Tags: Advertising

Reprint Rights

Comments are closed.