Social media marketing is a crucial part of any online marketing strategy. Over the years, more and more social media platforms have come to the fore. While these platforms eventually decline, some are here to stay.
Among the more ‘stable’ social media platforms is Discord. What sets Discord apart from other media is its uniqueness. Discord was initially conceived as a chat and interaction platform for the gaming community. Gamers could come together and create their own ‘servers’ similar to a forum where they could interact with each other through voice, chat, and video and play their favorite games together.
It still remains extremely popular with the gaming community. It is only recently that marketers have realized the potential of Discord as a marketing platform. What makes marketing on Discord unique is that it can be automated to a large degree with discord bots.
That’s right! Once you set up your Discord server correctly, you may not need to do anything to market your brand further except a regular overview. Before we get to how that is possible, let us understand how Discord is a potential marketing platform for brands.
Why You Should Market on Discord
Marketing on Discord is suited for businesses and brands looking to build a community for their brand. Currently, Discord has over 100 million active users, with more joining each day. Here’s why you should market on Discord:
- Increased Engagement: Active communities usually have a lot of engagement. With Discord and automated Discord bots(discussed later), you can increase user engagement by creating a fun community for your Discord. Discord’s VoIP interface helps generate brand trust for existing and potential customers.
- Activity Monitoring: One of Discord’s most important features, activity monitoring helps you gain insight into your customer base through your Discord. Since Discord will require your customers to sign up, you can accurately use the engagement metrics and analytics.
You can find out various important things such as the geographical location of your customer base, retention rates, and much more. - Direct Customer Contact: Unlike other social media, you can contact customers directly through video and audio. This makes customer support easy and your most loyal customers can always get in touch with you. From a marketing perspective, direct contact enables you to be honest about your products. It enhances user experience and customer satisfaction tenfold.
How to Market Your Brand on Discord
Discord is essentially a VoIP platform that allows people to communicate with each other. Discord acts much like a community forum but with the added benefit of being able to market on it. To market on Discord, you need to be able to provide a good user experience and create a good community. Discord bots can help a lot when marketing on Discord. They can be made for free and are used by the top communities to automate menial, repetitive tasks and make your server user-friendly. Here is how you can market your brand on Discord:
- Create Tiers: When you start out with creating your Discord community, create grouped tiers for your users. The more a customer uses Discord, the higher their tier should be. Hire moderators to keep control of these tiers and promote engagement in each group.
- Use Discord bots for onboarding: Discord bots are amazing automated AI bots that can help make your Discord a better place. They have various functions and one server can have multiple Discord bots. They can automate your server. For example, if a new user joins your server, a Discord bot can help them understand how your community works and guide them on using Discord.
- Use Discord bots for moderation/support: Another application of Discord bots is using them to moderate your Discord server and helping maintain its integrity. You can also use Discord bots to provide preliminary customer support to your users before letting them connect with support agents.
- Communicate: Announce new products on Discord, create pre-order queues, run promotional campaigns, conduct surveys and engage with your server community. For each activity mentioned above, leverage Discord bots. The top Discord bots can do all of this and automate everything meaning that managing a Discord server is extremely easy.
- Gather Key Information: Try to motivate users and gather important information from them using surveys, polls, and forms. This information can help you draw out potential leads and market your products further. Discord will help bolster your marketing strategies.
Tips to Market Effectively on Discord
Discord helps you get in touch with an enthusiastic target audience and various ways to communicate with said audience. Here are some tips that can help you market better:
- Works for younger demographics: Discord is a casual social platform. Most of its user base is either teenagers or young adults. If your target audience fits those demographics, you are more likely to build a good community on Discord. For older audiences, it is recommended you stick to other social media platforms.
- Discord Partner Program: Try to become a part of Discord’s Partner Program. The discount partner program allows established communities greater personalization on their servers. Basically, you can end up branding your server further.
- User-generated content is essential: Discord allows users to interact and post messages, images, and videos. Allow discussion and interaction between your Discord users for a little word-of-mouth marketing. Embrace the community you create. Don’t try to shove your products down the user’s throats. Encourage engagement as much as possible.
- Offers & Discounts: Give users incentives to join your Discord community. A product discount, subscription offers, etc., will drive more users to your Discord and help you sell more products.
Summing Up
Marketing on Discord is a bit indirect. You don’t sell directly through Discord but spreading brand awareness, increasing customer engagement, and creating a dedicated community is the main reason why you should have a Discord channel for your brand.
Discord will continue to rise as a platform in the coming years. It is imperative that organizations figure out how to market their brands through the power of Discord communities. Start marketing with Discord today!