Perfecting your Community Branding, Benefits and Best Practices
Branding is one the most fundamental parts of basically anything. The right branding can make you grow exponentially in the shortest…
Branding is one the most fundamental parts of basically anything. The right branding can make you grow exponentially in the shortest time-span, and a small design difference can make all the differences in marketing.
What is Branding?
Branding is the process of combining features such as a logo, design, mission statement, and a consistent theme throughout all marketing communications to create a strong, favorable perception of a company, its products, or services in the minds of customers.
And entirely wrong perception of many people is that branding only includes the logo and its similar digital assets. But no, branding is so much more than that. It’s how you want your [product](in our case, community) to be viewed and interpreted by your audience or community.
Branding in Communities? What?
The branding of an online community on Discord matters significantly in terms of its promotion & marketing, public relations, and overall growth & engagement.
For obvious reasons it’s totally understandable that not everyone may have the resources to hire professional artists or purchase professional tools to create the branding of their community when their just starting out. There are many free tools you can use, which we will soon discuss about.
6 Steps to Build a Great Community Branding
1 : Know Your Target Audience
Who are you building this community for? What is the general age-range or gender you want your community to include? What is your communities main interests? The answers to these questions is your target audience, make sure you know who you’re targeting.
2 : Know Your Purpose
You have your target audience, you know their interests. Where do you come in? What is your purpose in the timeline of someone in your target audience? Also ask yourself why you have created this community, and what your goals are. If you are confused when someone asks you “What is your server about?” you probably aren’t ready.
3 : Give Value & Uniqueness
Why should someone choose to be a part of in your new community, instead of staying and being active in the already big-name larger communities. Know what makes you unique. An original idea will help you grow easily with a positive impact.
Question for reader: Is an idea ever 100% original?
4 : Research Your Competition
To be fair, you probably aren’t the first player in the game. There were tons before you, there are tons competing beside you. Make sure you know always what they’re up to. And try to differentiate your server/community from them in the nicest way possible. The last thing you want to do is copy their uniqueness, that will hugely affect your audience and your integrity to them.
5 : Determine Your Guidelines
Create a brand guideline. There are somethings that you once commit to, become hard to and sometimes impossible to change. Create a brand guide since it establishes a consistent pattern for your visual elements (logo, templates, etc.) and helps to shape your brand tone.
5 : Market
A definitive guide to your marketing strategy always helps so prepare one. Identify what you’re basic requirements of digital assets are, what the secondary needs are, and the optional cherries on top.
For example, the logo is an absolute necessity. And so is the color palette (make sure you are consistent with it). Generally in a Discord community you’ll need a server icon, a server banner, an invite banner, channel headers (optional), profile headers for team members (optional), and maybe some emojis.
Next, if your community is thriving on this platform and want to monetize it, you will need products like merchandise or optional subscriptions or donations. That too, needing digital assets. Just know how you market a Discord server massively affects the type of community it will grow into, who the community will consist of, and you must expect the the appropriate results from them in future campaigns or events.
Picking Color Palette
I will write a separate article on this some later day but, picking the right colors will be one of the most important design decisions you have to make. Make sure to the color(s) you pick are bright and saturated enough to attract someone on sight, but not too saturated that it may hurt to look at.
Here’s something you might like:
Roonie
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That’s all for today!
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