share
The future of branding and marketing is now. In the current day and age, traditional means of marketing are a thing of the past. With each and every day, a plethora of strategies are being created to accurately and directly target the audience that you are after. Instead of the abrasive and aggressive advertisements of the recent past, we are coming into the age of community and digital home spaces.
Meet discord branding. The top-leading marketing choice for a myriad of businesses worldwide.
This leap to a digitized community should not be any news to most of you since it is part of a bigger tendency. The current teenager and young-adult generation, Gen Z, has been very vocal about what they want and how they want it. Hence, there is a slow shift to digitized small communities like the ones on Discord!
Many might think this as a outcome of the pandemic, but surprisingly comprehensive data shows that Gen Z has been slowly transitioning to Discord and many such cozy online community-building applications. The desire to be a part of a micro-community or a large but close-knit server of people is a desire shared among many youths in the current year.
What Are the Main Advantages and Goals a Company Should Expect
Admittedly, for many marketers, discord branding might be completely foreign territory, and that is exactly why many businesses miss out on such a fruitful opportunity. Brands on Discord need to accomplish two key things.
First, to provide an experience wholly unique and one that their target audience will not be able to find anywhere else. Second, they create and strengthen connections and inner social interworkings of personal relationships under their community banner.
Discord is most likely the easiest and the best platform to create an outlet for your target audience. A place where they can meet and make new friends and acquaintances. A place for networking and understanding. These require a healthy amount of moderation, though. The more popular discord servers experience a constant conversation between a variety of text and voice channels.
Channels are kinda like topic dividers. Each Discord server is divided into many different themed chats. These can range anywhere from casual chit-chat text channels to gym or food-related picture-only channels. Each and every single one of these channels needs to be closely moderated, especially for the bigger brands out there. The last thing you want is for some outlandish member of the community to ruin your brand’s image in the eyes of many forever.
Ways in Which Brands Sustain and Care for Discord Communities
While building a community might sound simple, at the end of the day, haven’t every brand under the sun done that one way or another? Sadly, it is not as simple to do on Discord. Discord branding is a whole other beast compared to building communities on places like Twitter or YouTube. Here, interactability and conversation-starting are key!
Mark down Your Target Audience and Pick a Few Members
When it comes to discord communities, it is better to start small. Try hand-picking a couple of people from your target audience and privately invite them to your newly created server. These might be your most avid fans or your most vocal supporters. It really does not matter much. You just need a start. No one likes joining a completely fresh server. The wonder of Discord is coming into a live community that you can consider your own, with nets upon nets of social networking and relationships to build off of. The best way to encourage that atmosphere is to start small.
Leave the server to these few people to brew in. With proper encouragement and engagement, they will shortly create a starter base for your discord server.
Create an Intricate Yet Flexible Production Schedule
So, how do you exactly encourage this hand-picked group of people to interact with each other? First, think of the things you can provide these initial members with to keep their interest in the server for as long as possible. In the case of crypto, this may be exclusive access to a private subset of your coin or even early access to your newest minting project.
Next, examine what your target audience is like. We bet that most businesses already have a tremendous idea of what their target audience likes and dislikes and what type of content they encourage or do not. Play into this data. Create events, conversation starters, and other types of media around these special interests. People are most easily drawn to places where they can express their opinions about things they enjoy most in life.
While creating this production schedule, remember to have regular updates and tidbits about your project or another sort of media so the server doesn’t go stale. Moreover, try to convey a feeling of exclusiveness and excitement in each of your posts. This will, hopefully, make it so that the people reading and interacting with your content will feel like they are spending their time wisely.
Try your hand at more active events, too! This might be hard for some marketers who are used to things like YouTube or Twitter advertisements, but interaction is the key to success for discord communities. Create raffles, voice chat contests, and other events and games to really spice up the experience on your server. Discord itself is built for this perfectly. With a variety of community-making toolsets, it is incredibly convenient to set up such events.
Troubleshoot, Make Note of Mistakes, Adapt, Overcome, Repeat
These early stages of your community are the most opportune moment to learn! At the start, most interactions will hang on you. Your posts, your engagement, your attitude, all these things will add up to determine how active your members are in the first few months of your discord community. Note what works and what does not. The content that ignites the hand-picked members you have invited into the server at this state will be the type of content most of your community will want to see in the future.
See what works and what does not, make observations, and update your data. Your goal here is to finalize and distill your content creation process into a tea while also making sure that your community is starting to sprout its own legs. Once you are sure that your community can stand on its own and that most of the conversation is not led by you or your team invite more people.
This is the perfect time for more members to join the server. When a starter base of a community is established, it is much easier for new members to join and fill social roles that are needed within the community. Moreover, new members are more likely to stick around if there is an active conversation every day on every channel.
Moderation and Post-boom Systems
Once your discord server has flourished and your content farm finalized, it is still not the end. Marketing is never really over when you think about it. Now that the community is up and running and producing engagement rapidly, your second most important focus is moderation. While there are a bunch of discord bots you can employ to help with this, they are rather rudimentary, and most only allow for a blocklist of specific keywords or slang and not much else.
Instead, elect moderators from that initial pool of members that you have hand-picked or other valiant community members. Try to choose the people who are most passionate about your brand but also have a reasonable, empathetic part of them. A good moderator is one who can dish out praise and criticism at the same time.
Be All End All of Social Media Marketing
We hope that the strategies we showed you here today will aid you in your journey to getting acquainted with Discord’s marketing side. Discord is a great opportunity for brands of all shapes and sizes to expand and grow as a community and a family of its own. You will find that marketing is much easier when you have a stable and strong community behind your brand, always ready to boost engagement on posts or backup starters when needed.
With Discord, you can accomplish things many brands wish they could with more typical social media like TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. The reach and power of Discord is simply not on the same level. With Discord, you can give each and every member of your community or supporter of your brand a little corner on the internet that they can call home. A place where many like-minded individuals share their thoughts and experiences with each other, strengthening the bond between them and helping your brand more carefully establish itself in the public’s eye.
