Discord is a nice fit for startups and other small businesses that want to keep their community private. It has a strict no-advertising policy, so you don’t have to worry about your startup being overwhelmed by advertisements in your chat rooms.
Although, initially Discords main subscriber base were Gamer’s and Streamers. The Community building platform has come a long way, especially due to its humble yet focused beginnings on building a community-driven platform.
To understand how we can market on Discord as a Startup, we have to understand the environment that surrounds the community which uses it.
The Beginning of Discord
Discord is a Social Media Platform and was primarily focused on enabling users such as game development companies to build and grow their communities through the platform.
The difference between other social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Is that on Discord the communities are recognized as Server based.
And a server can be composed of multiple channels that differ based on topics, which can cater to different appeals.
With bots / moderators controlling the narrative of the channels. This enables for gaming companies, streamers, etc. to attract their user base and introduce customization that welcomes more users.
Discord is also very user friendly, given that it doesn’t have an algorithm to control the feed of your communities subscribers.
Which allows the users to see every single post that was made in every public channel.
By fully having control over the narrative of what your Discord Server is, an organization or even an individual could make use of the platform.
Discord Startup Marketing Plan
Given that we’re trying to build an online community for our business. It’s important that we look at how communities have been built so far.
Pablo Picasso said “good artists borrow, great artists steal”, so, let’s find out what we can steal from others, in terms of marketing.
Spotify Sharing Playlists
Spotify has a channel named #listening-party where users can share their custom playlists.
This allows for music lovers with similar taste to share and listen to their playlists from across the globe.
By creating such as channel Spotify has made it possible for their users to not just show royalty to their music tastes but also towards their product.
Instead of sharing a text-based list of songs, Spotify users can easily share their interests in music via Discord.
This allows for users to be a self-promoter of Spotify and its various offerings, and this kind of thinking is what makes Discord the best tool for marketing.
In this approach, Spotify has made it easy for users to communicate amongst one another. This helps Spotify promote its vast range of music, and attain user retention by doing so.
Given that most users are only familiar with the list of songs their are attuned to. Recommendation algorithms can never give the user 100% satisfaction by offering what they want to hear.
Spotify promotes itself using the creative choice of its diverse users to get even more users, you can definitely call this a win-win.
Server Channels
Channels don’t only serve a purpose of promoting a product, and collecting a users base.
You can also use a channel to give essential communication services to your users that want to receive / give information on your product.
Some of the most common channel names and their purposes are as such:-
- #general – To talk about different topics that are not covered by your other channels, and can lead to the creation of a channel.
- #q&a – The name speaks to itself, you can create such a channel to answer basic queries.
- #announcement – An important part of our Discord marketing strategy is that we need to be able to push out the latest information about the product / service we offer as fast as possible.
- #rules – This can be quite a drag for your users, but always make sure to explain the intent of your server and what purpose it serves, to make sure that everyone goes along with together.
Aside from these communities can also have channels that a essential for their purpose.
Let’s say you own a digital art e-commerce platform that buys / sells NFTs, and have exclusive artworks from popular artists.
Creating channels in the genre of these artists, or even in the name of the artist themselves, will allow for your users to get more active on the platform.
Promoting on Other Social Media Platforms
Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms to promote can be very rewarding.
Once you get to use your social media channels to promote the content from your discord channel.
You can except your user base to not just grow in Discord but also get more enthusiastic of your product.
How so? Well… Your products are not static, and neither should your presence in your product consumers user base.
Discord is a more lively platform that allows users to connect in a more direct form, with live streams, audio chat, etc.
You can use your discord to improve the engagement of your user base.
Demographics in Discord
Discord gives you a rich list of tools, to get information on your user base. This can be useful for marketing your product to your customers.
And in some cases you could even choose to promote your Discord Server with your users.
This will help to grow your community, which you can in return use to boost the hype of your product / service.
Data is key in social media, and discord gives you a pretty decent overview as you can see in the picture below.
And this can be extended via the Dev Portal.
Conclusion
From this article, you can see that Discord is a revolutionary social media platform that has its roots in the gaming industry.
But, this doesn’t essentially limit Discord to the gaming industry, other industries such as Crypto Exchanges, Music Streaming Platforms, etc.
Have used the massive growth of the platform to develop their businesses too. And, by doing so have grown their community greatly.
Use this opportunity to explore the potential that Discord can have on your business. And learn to keep in touch with all your customers together.