Marketing on Discord to gain 10-20k new users fast and easy
I wanted to highlight an interesting angle at growing your userbase, that I don't think many have made use of. This comes from my personal experience growing both of my online apps (one a SaaS, another a community).
And that space is Discord. While it has continued to market itself as a chat service for gamers, for years it has been home to many niche and not so niche communities. Every Discord server is almost like its own subreddit if I had to pick an analogy.
Now, how can you make use of Discord then? It's quite simple really. In your target market, research and find Discord servers that are most relevant. Join them, not as a brand, but as a person/developer/whatever of your product. Get to know the community and the owners. You don't want to be talking about your app/product straight away, as many have strict rules against advertising, that's not what we are doing here.
Which will lead you to two options. First one is to befriend the owner/one of the admins of the server and convince them to do a shoutout for all members in that discord. If your product is a really good fit, it's very likely you'll be able to.
Another option is to sponsor a giveaway. Many servers do that, so for 30-50$, you could make that shoutout happen. Pretty cheap if you ask me.
So now, what's the reach and conversion is like? I would aim at servers that are between 3k to 20k users. Big enough to make a difference, but small enough to make it possible to get that shoutout. For my project, I was having a conversion of 10-20% into confirmed users on my site, with a dozen of servers totalling 100k users. That's 10-20k users, either for free or for a couple of hundreds... Not too bad, if I can say so myself.
Obviously, just like with influencer marketing or posting on Reddit, it's up to you to make it a success. Make sure you find a good fit for your product. Depending on that, your conversion could be higher or lower. But overall, this has been my favourite way to market.
Give it a try and let me know how it went for you!
Love this idea and am gonna try it. I even found a website listing Discord servers: https://top.gg/servers/list/top
Great idea. What's been the best way for you to discover relevant Discord groups?
I am a heavy Discord user, so I find them organically usually. Otherwise, I can look at my competitors or relevant products, see if they have a Discord server and then go from there
This is a really interesting idea! How do you go about asking for the promotion? Do you just message the server admins? Do you open with a price point?
Usually, servers have an announcements channel of some sorts. So you can scan that channel and see if there were promotions there before. If they did, what were the prizes? You can then calculate your price from there. After that, I would usually just try to normally befriend owners by chatting in different channels and then at some point just send them a message, saying that I've seen that they do promotions and that you are interested in sponsoring one yourself. And if possible, promote your product cause it's relevant to the server members because of X or Y
Thank you again! I also heavily use Discord and didn't even consider this as a possibility lol.
The best things are always right under our nose. Let me know how it goes after you try it out
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This is a great post, helpful indeed.
Nice! This is on my to-do list for this week :)
Thanks so much great idea for an extra channel to grow the user base
I never thought of discord this way. I'm gonna try this for sure!
Thanks for sharing
In your experience, how do you find the right Discords to join?
So how does messaging work? You type something in a Discord window and it's gone in ten seconds if the chat is active. I'm not sure how effective it can be unless you're spamming the chat?
That's why I am talking about not advertising in the channels yourself, but getting the owners or admins of the server, make a full server announcement. In a channel (usually announcements or similar), where only they can post. So that shout out will reach every single person on the server and might stay visible for days, depending on how often server owners post announcements
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