A Complete Guide to Discord Marketing Strategies

Feb 23

Discord is a rapidly growing communication platform that has evolved from a gaming chat app to become a multifaceted social media platform. And like the old saying goes, “If you build it, they will come,” brands are quickly realizing that this emerging platform is filled with untapped audiences.

In the last few years, Discord’s versatility and user-friendly interface has proven an increasingly essential tool for businesses to market themselves, reach their target audience and build authentic connections with consumers. The platform offers a wide range of features, including text channels, voice channels, and direct messaging, allowing businesses to engage with their customers in real-time—and that’s just the beginning. This direct communication helps build stronger relationships with customers, increases brand loyalty and provides valuable feedback to improve the product or service.

Lemonade has had great success developing strategies that connect brands with audiences on Discord, so we put together this blog to help you get started. From demystifying the platform to strategies for building a community, read on.

What is Discord?

As mentioned at the top, Discord is a fast-growing communication platform designed for online communities, especially gamers (although that’s broadening). It offers voice, video, and text-based communication options and is accessible through web browsers, desktop clients, and mobile apps.

On Discord, users can create and join servers, which are essentially chat rooms centered around a particular theme, topic or community. The platform allows users to send messages, share files and participate in voice and video calls, making it an all-in-one solution for online collaboration and communication. It’s like a self-contained ecosystem; a bubble in the otherwise crowded landscape of social media.

Recently, Discord has grown beyond its gaming roots and is now used by a wide range of communities, including educational institutions, businesses and social groups. It's a popular choice for its versatility, ease of use, and cool features such as server moderation tools, custom emotes, and third-party integrations.

What are the Benefits of Discord Marketing?

Discord can be an exceptionally effective tool for brands, especially considering the platform’s self-contained ecosystem and topic-focused culture. With the right strategy in place, brands can use Discord marketing to increase engagement, build relationships with customers, gain valuable feedback and more.

By creating a Discord server, brands can create an online community of loyal customers and fans where they can interact directly with one another, share experiences and get support. This can be a great way to build relationships and loyalty, as customers will be more likely to stay supportive of a brand they already have a connection with. Additionally, brands can use Discord as a platform to launch campaigns, announce new products/services, and get feedback.

Discord servers can be used to host events, webinars, and other forms of interactive content, providing a unique opportunity for businesses to showcase their brand and engage with their audience.

To better adapt and optimize the platform as a marketing tool, Discord also provides detailed analytics to monitor growth and engagement, making it easy to track the success of marketing campaigns.

With its versatility, real-time communication, and analytical capabilities, Discord has become a valuable tool for businesses to reach and engage with their target audience.

Discord For Marketing: How To Get Started

If you’re interested in using Discord for marketing, you might be overwhelmed about how to begin. That’s totally understandable. Setting up a Discord campaign has a few more steps than, say, signing up for Twitter, but it’s still easy.

Follow these steps for getting your Discord community up-and-running, then keep reading for Discord marketing strategies.

Create a Discord server: Set up a server and invite members to join. Make sure to establish clear rules and guidelines for the community to follow.
Build a community: Host events and activities to encourage engagement and build a sense of community among members. Respond to questions and comments in a timely manner.
Utilize channels: Create channels for different topics and purposes, such as announcements, general discussion, and support. Use these channels to organize information and make it easy for members to find what they're looking for.
Use bots: Utilize bots to automate tasks, such as welcoming new members, tracking analytics, and moderating the server.
Track your progress: Keep track of your server's growth and engagement metrics, such as member count, active members, and message volume. Use this information to adjust your strategy as needed.

With Discord’s demographic of gamers and beyond, brands can tap into a passionate and enthusiastic group of people who love to be entertained. But how does a brand create strategies around using discord for marketing? Authenticity is key since Discord is community-based. For results-proven strategies keep scrolling.

Discord Marketing Strategies

Armed with effective Discord marketing strategies in place, brands can benefit from increased brand awareness, an engaged customer base, and an overall positive experience for their customers. Below are tested tactics that work.

Offer exclusive content: Offering exclusive content to your customers on your Discord server can be a great way to keep them engaged. This could include product previews, special discounts and more.
Create contests and giveaways: Contests and giveaways are great ways to generate engagement on your server and reward your customers. They create buzz, FOMO and surprise-and-delight.
Host live events: Host live events such as Q&A sessions, webinars and product demonstrations.
Share expert advice: Share expert advice and industry knowledge to help users learn more about your brand and its offerings.
Be helpful: Share helpful tips, tricks and tutorials related to your brand.
Encourage user-generated content: Encourage members to share their own content, such as videos, images and text. This helps create a sense of ownership and engagement within the community.
Leverage influencers: Reach out to influencers in your niche and ask them to join your server and promote it to their followers.
Promote your server: Share your server link on social media, in forums, and on other Discord servers. Consider partnering with other servers to cross-promote.
Keep it fresh: Regularly update your server with new content, events and activities to keep things interesting and engaging for your members.
Create a consistent branding: Use consistent branding across all of your marketing materials, including your server icon, banner and profile.

Now that you’ve got everything up and running, and your new community is growing by the day, you want to make sure you keep going in the right direction. How? Analytics!

Key Discord Marketing Analytics to Track

Analytics are a key part of creating and running a successful Discord marketing campaign since they allow brands to gain valuable insights into performance. By monitoring their analytics, brands can identify the most effective marketing strategies and campaigns, as well as better understand their target audience. They can also leverage those insights to improve performance by adjusting campaign resources or tactics, as needed.

So which numbers should you track?

Number of active users: This metric will help you track how many people are actively engaging with your Discord server.
Growth rate: This will help you understand how quickly your Discord server is growing.
Retention rate: This will help you understand how many of your users remain active on your server over time.
Engagement rate: This metric will help you understand how engaged users are with your server.
Channel visits: This metric will help you understand how many users are visiting different channels on your server.
Referrals: This metric will help you understand which sources are driving the most traffic to your server.
Server activity: This will help you understand how active users are on your server.
Content performance: This will help you understand which content is driving the most engagement and conversions.

Lemonade Can Help

Sure, it’s easy to write out all the steps for a successful discord marketing strategy, but putting it together takes time, attention and experience. That’s where Lemonade comes in! We have experience connecting brands of all sizes with audiences on Discord in authentic and effective ways.

Drop us a line and let's build something amazing.

LEMONADE

Lemonade is a full-service ad agency specializing in creating authentic relationships. Our diverse crew of intentional creatives and strategists aims to connect brands with culture in ways that inspire action. From getting ahead of the latest social trends to decentralizing our thoughts on Web3, we create paths for brands to enter the conversation in meaningful ways. https://www.lemonadetheagency.com/#contact

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