S2E5: How to build an online community to promote your brand, ft. William Cook, CEO of Advertise Your Server

0:31

Introduction to Building an Online Community

1:58

Inception of Advertise Your Server

2:43

Evolution of Advertise Your Server

5:04

Expanding to B2B Companies

6:36

Benefits for B2B Brands

10:23

Setting Up an Online Community

20:39

Establishing Community Norms

25:08

Pitfalls in Online Community Creation

28:26

Connect with Advertise Your Server

Main Insight

Building an online community is essential for brand promotion and customer engagement. William Cook, CEO of Advertise Your Server, shares his expertise on leveraging platforms like Reddit and Discord to grow vibrant online communities that drive business growth.

Key Takeaways

1. Importance of Online Communities: Online communities provide a space for customers to interact, share experiences, and build a sense of loyalty and belonging. They are crucial for promoting brands and fostering customer engagement.
2. Choosing the Right Platform: Different platforms serve different community needs. Reddit and Discord are highlighted as excellent platforms for community growth. Reddit offers broad exposure, while Discord provides a more intimate and interactive environment.
3. Strategies for Community Growth:
   • Engage with Members: Regular interaction and engagement with community members are vital. This includes responding to comments, initiating discussions, and providing valuable content.
   • Consistent Value Addition: Continuously offer value to community members through exclusive content, updates, and resources that cater to their interests and needs.
   • Leveraging Influencers: Collaborate with influencers who can bring their audience into the community, increasing reach and credibility.
4. Monetization and ROI:
   • Direct Revenue Generation: Monetize the community through memberships, premium content, and exclusive offers.
   • Indirect Benefits: Enhanced brand loyalty, customer feedback, and market insights can significantly impact business growth and development.
5. Challenges and Solutions:
   • Maintaining Engagement: Keep the community active and engaged through regular events, Q&A sessions, and interactive content.
   • Managing Negative Feedback: Address negative feedback constructively and use it to improve products and services.

Guest Bio

William Cook is the CEO of Advertise Your Server, a leading online community growth platform. With extensive experience in community building and digital marketing, William has successfully helped numerous brands grow their online presence and engage with their audience on platforms like Reddit and Discord.

Company Description

Advertise Your Server is the premier platform for growing online communities on Reddit and Discord. They specialize in helping brands create and nurture vibrant online spaces where customers can connect, share, and engage. With a focus on providing consistent value and fostering meaningful interactions, Advertise Your Server is dedicated to driving business growth through community building.

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Chapters

• 0:31 Introduction to Building an Online Community
• 1:58 Inception of Advertise Your Server
• 2:43 Evolution of Advertise Your Server
• 5:04 Expanding to B2B Companies
• 6:36 Benefits for B2B Brands
• 10:23 Setting Up an Online Community
• 20:39 Establishing Community Norms
• 25:08 Pitfalls in Online Community Creation
• 28:26 Connect with Advertise Your Server

Transcript

[0:32] All right, today we're going to be talking about how to build an online community to promote your brand.

[0:38] So I've got William Cook with me. He's the CEO of Advertise Your Server, which is the leading online community growth platform.

[0:47] They help grow online communities on platforms like Reddit and Discord, and he's responsible for the growth and development of Advertise Your Server. So I am super excited to chat with you today, William, and hear all about your background and how you got started with this yeah yeah thanks for having me it'll be good yeah what was what motivated you to actually start advertise your server like how did you get into this yeah so kind of back in 2017 i was i joined discord kind of just to mostly hang out in private community communities with friends at the time you know gaming things like that and then kind of I kind of saw this opportunity well maybe you know while most communities back then and now are still very much you know small ones with friends I was thinking well maybe what if we were to make bigger communities and you know kind of expand our social circles that way and that's kind of where the idea came around from so there weren't really many places except back in the day as well there weren't a whole lot of places to kind of share different communities There weren't a lot of places to,

[1:56] you know, find new members of your community. So we decided, you know what, we'll advertise your server, basically advertising your server, which on Discord we call community servers.

[2:08] So essentially that was that. And then we made a whole bunch of different kind of categories, such as, you know, the gaming communities, role play, all those different kinds of things. And that's essentially how we started off. You know, there weren't a whole lot of servers or communities back then for kind of, you know, as a community directory. So we decided, you know what, let's go try it out and see if we can connect, you know, different people together that way. Okay, sounds cool. So what did your community end up growing into?

[2:43] Yeah, so I mean, over the years, it's definitely, you know, it's definitely gone in many different directions. I think less so, we've focused less on kind of the, you know, to promote your own community parks, there's many platforms for that now, we kind of want to be, you know, we've kind.

[3:02] Gone into a uh honestly kind of space where people can a space for community owners and moderators where they can come together and kind of talk about different aspects of community growth moderation management strategy all those kinds of different things we've kind of made a space for all that rather than i guess just for advertising which is what it used to be we kind of thought you know if we want to kind of stay ahead of the, competition per se or you know stay ahead of the trends we kind of you know we can't stay on this one singular idea of just making a community directory we need to kind of expand it out and provide more value to our members because they're really at the end of the day that's what communities and businesses primarily do they provide value for their members and that encourages the members to stay so like you know what if we can provide useful information for our members and we can, you know, give them something they can't get elsewhere, then we're going to have a much more engaged kind of community that way. Okay. So if I'm getting the narrative right, essentially, you know, back in 2016 or so around when you started.

[4:15] Lots of different community owners like on Discord or Reddit, they didn't have a good way to grow the membership of their online communities. So you started advertise your server to bring all of those people together and like help them grow essentially. And then over time, you pivoted that to just like more like community growth strategies or learning from other community builders. And that's kind of where you are now.

[4:42] Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, back when we originally started, you know, we kind of just did it as a side thing. It wasn't all that much. So we kind of, you know, just built it off what we'd seen before. And then I guess as time went on, as members had differing needs and things like that, we kind of expanded out over the years, started putting more time

[4:59] into it, all kinds of things like that, essentially. So have you worked with a lot of b2b companies like businesses who want to sell to other businesses and are creating these online communities like around their products is that is that a tactic you've seen and has it worked particularly well yeah i think there are a lot of kind of so primarily communities built for for so on discord primarily they're They're built for B2C just because generally it's a consumer who uses Discord. But I could talk about like there's platforms such as Slack, which are much more business-related communities. So I'm in tons of different communities on Slack. Essentially, like, you know, you'll get businesses with like a Slack group. They'll, you know, have different channels related to their product and what they kind of do or like help or advice. And then you'll get kind of business consumers coming in there and talking to other businesses about how they can use these products.

[6:01] You know, for their own goods. Like, because I'm in the community industry, I'm a part of a lot of community Slack groups. And there's, you know, there's all these kind of B2B tools that have their own Slack groups. And essentially, you know, they can have new customers come to the community and you'll have, you know, old customers helping them out with how to use the product and stuff just because they're engaged in the community and they're finding it active. So it does save on support needs as well. But yeah, it's definitely, so it's not as popular in the B2B space, place. But I think, you know, it's definitely up and coming and it's definitely a useful thing.

[6:37] Okay. So some B2B brands that can get the most benefit out of this are the ones who have maybe like an online tool, like maybe a software app, and then their customers kind of join the group to get those support needs and then learn from other users. Are there other types of B2B be brands or other kind of use cases where having something like a Slack group could be valuable? Yeah, yeah. So I think primarily, as you said, it's mostly SaaS products, the service as a solution. I think though, there are a lot of consulting.

[7:15] It's a bit like, when we think about content marketing, in a way, communities can be a version of that, where our members create content and people come to that community to see what they've posted. So like, you know, I'm just looking for example, there are a bunch of kind of more professional networks that companies run. And in a way, these are, you know, B2B communities because it's, you know, big companies essentially running these online communities for people to network with each other. And in turn, it's basically building up their brand and reputation. So I think it can, you know, it can really apply to a lot, not just software.

[7:51] Companies per se yeah do you know of any like case studies like that or any companies or examples you can think of where a brand has gotten like more well known or a lot more engagement or even more business as a result of starting something like a slack group or a group on some other platform, i think you know if we think about the big ones we tend to think about so a company like microsoft.

[8:20] Companies like that the main ones they'll tend to use their own form platforms which you know in themselves are communities and in that way they're you know they are still b2b and b2c because they're you know they're extremely large but these communities are essentially, able to you know they use this as a support place so a lot of companies you'll see now they won't offer kind of on-demand support they'll have a form instead where you can kind of ask questions and then you'll have community members with different rankings answer those questions so it saves on you know having to employ someone to do that for you per se i think as well, you know members also get the benefit of being well known in the community they can network that way so they can network with other members and as they you know as they answer more questions It's kind of gamified in a way because they get different ranks such as, you know, expert, veteran, things like that within this community, which give them certain standing.

[9:21] So, yeah, you know, a lot of, I want to say, yeah, a lot of software companies, but also a lot of kind of like just internet-based companies. So generally with the online community space, it's not going to be general brick-and-mortar stores. It's going to be, you know, online ones that have got an online presence already. So whether that be like an email newsletter or, you know, a product or sign-ups or something like that.

[9:46] It's not going to be so much in-person businesses. This is like, I know Costco, for example, they have Facebook groups. They'll have like a Costco Facebook group where people post, you know, oh, look, I'm buying this. Oh, is this in stock here? And it just allows other members to contribute to the one community. And it really helps, you know, people find out what they need. Hmm.

[10:07] Okay. That's very interesting. Interesting. So with regards to how businesses could get this started,

[10:19] let's say I'm a B2B brand, I'm a B2B marketer. I'm looking at creating an online community, like an online Slack group in order to boost my brand presence or to start getting more engagement between customers. Customers like step by step how would you have me like set that up such that it can be successful, yeah so i think you know with any project it's always important to you know set up so the proper, baseline so we kind of got to decide in a way what we're trying to do so what would be the purpose so like what kind of what are we trying to improve first off so it's a particular issue we're seeing is there's something we want to try out, is you know do we see I guess potential in this space you know do we know where our audience hangs out because if we're if we have you know a more elderly audience well a platform like Discord or Slack.

[11:19] They might struggle to use a platform like that. Whereas a platform more like Facebook or something, they might have a bit more experience with. I think as well, when I look at, you know, goals, so things like KPIs and, you know, essentially, what are we looking to achieve? So, you know, do we want to have a certain member count, a certain engagement amount? Do we want, you know, a more qualitative experience where people are, you know, saying, oh, look, I got lots of value from this community.

[11:45] Do we want to, you know, collect emails, emails collect particular data do we want to you know turn our community members into you know paying customers we want to monetize the community to make money off it i think that's there are many different things we kind of have to consider we also have to kind of look look at you know why we bring people together so do we think we could share information this community and members would come together over the topic and one other thing i think is really important that not a lot of people consider is, you know, do we have a kind of a unique selling point for this community? Because sure, you might run a similar business, but, you know, if you've got a good product that will be different from other companies. But if you're running a general community around your general company theme, well, there's going to be a ton of other communities likely already surrounding that. So, you know, you're going to have to find a bit harder to keep those members because Because you have to remember, it's not like social media where people just follow you, check out content, and they comment.

[12:54] It really relies on the members staying engaged and staying on board with the community, sharing information with other members and checking in from time to time. With platforms like Instagram, we can just scroll our feed and it's all curated for us. But individual, like stack groups, we've got to click on each one individually, check them all out. There's no kind of There's no algorithm for there's no fee per se. It's all you know, it's all we have to do with ourselves So in that sense, it does take much more effort and, So, yeah, there's quite a few things to consider. I think, you know, kind of when we're starting our business as well, you know, we tend to look at a lot of the, you know, we build our business plan, we build, you know, who we're selling to, what are our aims, things like that. That kind of needs to come into our community planning as well.

[13:43] Yeah. Okay. So you're thinking about what's the business aim of creating this community?

[13:54] Like why do you want to do it do you expect it to have to get engagement or to the community members to become your customers or for it to be like primarily a support platform and then you have to think about the other communities that already exist to solve this issue and whether or not yours has a unique differentiator behind it is that that's accurate yeah yeah one thing i will So, like, as well as, you know, in the more kind of, I want to say C2C space in a way, where it's consumer to consumer, where it's just people building communities just for the, you know, as a hobby.

[14:31] There are so many just what we call general community servers. So, essentially, these are just servers that are for a community, but there's no real idea or unique selling point behind it. and they always fail because, you know, there are much bigger communities with hundreds of thousands of members that, you know, play games and things like that. If you don't have a unique selling point or a unique idea for your community, like why should anyone join your community with five members over, you know, one that has many more people and is much more self-sufficient and I guess has much more resources to run a better community. Mm hmm. So what is the main investment that's needed to start a community like this? Like, say you're maybe like a mid sized company with maybe a few dozen or 100 employees. Like, how much would you expect in terms of like time and money would a marketing team need to put into investing into a community in order to reach their business goals typically?

[15:35] So, yeah, this is where, you know, it very much depends on what's going on. But I guess if we think about there's been a lot of – there is a lot of debate, especially with community becoming like a newer kind of trend, where it kind of fits in the whole sphere of marketing, sales, social media.

[15:57] Like every business is going to have a different idea of where it fits in and what it needs. It really depends on what you're trying to, I think, achieve, as I said before. A lot of companies I know, generally they'll hire, they'll have like a, you know, they'll just have their social media manager be their community manager.

[16:14] That works great when you have just social media platforms, but I think when you're trying to expand to places like Slack and things like that, you need to remember that, you know, it requires a bit more effort per se. Like the platforms really put the onus on you to look after it, whereas you know if people say bad things on instagram well instagram generally will take care of that or meta whereas on platforms you know such as slack it's much the audience is much more new to do everything in the community so that includes things like moderation so you know chewing you get rid of the bad eggs people spamming things like that you know getting members as well there's there's generally not a whole lot of um directories like on instagram gaming literally search there's also the algorithm but on slack you know you have to you have to find a link to the community same with discord so unless you have an email newsletter already or something like that it's very hard to kind of get people into the community so i think you know generally a lot of a lot of businesses i've seen will have depending on the size they'll have a community team so you would have like community manager you know con content manager i know so in where I work, so we kind of have a chief community officer, and then under that we can kind of have our different community teams, we have our moderation.

[17:31] So they kind of look after moderating, we have kind of engagement which look after events.

[17:36] And things like that, so they're kind of our two and we also have partnerships, we look after partnerships with other communities, so, that's kind of the framework we follow, a lot of other communities, you know, they'll just have one community manager or they'll have a team, everyone in the community If you're a community-focused business, everyone in your business will generally have a kind of community-based role. But for the most part, you know, if you're just today, if you're a larger business, whether you're hundreds of employees, you might have like, you know, a community team of five or something like that who would look after all the different aspects of beauty. But, you know, it really depends on your size as well. If it's a small community, you don't need a whole lot. When you really start to scale, that's when you kind of need to bring more people on board to help look after it. So just the getting started aspect is more about just the initial moderation and just making sure that you're keeping enough kind of engagement in the community to give people like useful things to do or useful opportunities or whatever you've brought them together for. And then the investment would scale with the size of the community typically. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, look, I think communities tend to grow exponentially.

[18:49] In terms of the ratio of members to the resources they need. So generally, you know, when you're quite small, you generally need, you know, you at least need people watching in the community and things like that because there's always going to be kind of that grunt work that no matter what size the community is.

[19:09] It's going to need those people. So like even as you scale, like you might need to bring more people on but not you know it's not like need to bring tons of people on because a lot of things can be done with automations a lot of like you know when we hold events they're very easy to scale especially if they're online because you can just invite more people to them.

[19:31] You know it's not like you have to spend more money per se as the community grows you'll need you know you'll need more moderators people like that to keep things in check you might want to you know if you want to start hosting more programs in your community such as a mentoring program maybe or competitions or webinars or things like that you might want to employ more people in that aspect but generally like you know community doesn't need a whole lot of time because there are a lot you have a lot of passionate members already who are willing to kind of volunteer put their hand up to help out as we you know as we say in microsoft's case where their entire form is i'm pretty sure it's volunteer based you know people volunteer to help other members and that's how they you know do a lot of support and help out their customer base basically so you'll get a lot of passionate members who really care and you know they'll keep engagement going they'll help look after the community when you know you're not around and they'll you know they'll keep posting interesting things to encourage other members to stay okay that makes sense so with the initial kind of rules or guidelines

[20:36] that you need to get Get the community started. So our end goal is going to be, you know, get this initially off the ground, get some members in there. And then, you know, once you've hit kind of a critical mass of members, you can even start promoting them to like being, you know, you know, people who.

[20:56] Give advice if it's like a customer support kind of focused community or who are giving like the most like tips or just kind of watching the community in general, like, you know, on your behalf and kind of a decentralized way. But how can you structure the community from the beginning and then make sure that, you know, as it grows, you keep the right norms within the community and the right rules such that it becomes like a place that's actually beneficial to your goals as opposed to something that is full of spam or it's been taken over by, you know, salespeople posting irrelevant ads and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, it's, it's most, one of the most important things I think is having a clear set of rules. I think though, like my, my favorite rule is always use common sense when you're, when you're posting things generally, you know, you need to, you need to say a bit more than just common sense and new rules, but that's kind of what I like to say only because, you know, If you think something shouldn't be posted, it's probably better not to post or ask before posting it. The great thing about community moderation now, though, is that we can automate a lot of it. So we can set up filters, we can set up triggers. So when X happens, do X. So if there's a lot of messages being sent, if they contain certain words, if someone's doing something we don't like, we can automate an action. So warning them or something like that. with the advanced.

[22:26] Advantage of now having tools like generative ai we can actually screen content which is like what discord decides to implement where content being posted will be screened by ai so i think it's her it's her community so it's a community preference when they really do it and you can kind of set your own filters and the ai can basically determine is this appropriate to be sending or not whereas before it would only rely on does it contain this word does it have this characteristic whereas now it can it can take a more human approach to how we look at content so it can be like well a human a human would read this as this it's like these past examples in my database we will do this so essentially we can automate a lot of it there is still you know a need for moderation but i think as your community scales you can just get members to help out with moderating you can build a volunteer moderation team which is what a lot of communities do now. They have so many passionate members that they can just ask the members, hey, would you like to volunteer as a moderator and help out the community? And they're like, sure, I'd love to, just because they spend so much time in there and they really kind of appreciate what the community's been able to do for them.

[23:42] And yeah, I think as time goes on, policies need to be adapted. It's important to have a fair and impartial system for how punishments and things work. I think, you know, as you get bigger as well, you have more scrutiny over what you do on certain communities. You know, we look at a platform like X and everyone's got different opinions on how moderation should work on that and how it's vastly different from what it used to be. I think, you know, when communities are smaller, it doesn't matter too much, but as they start to grow, it's important to have the policies set in place, you know make use of automation so we can offload a lot of the manual work required to moderators and just have moderators you know chill hang out in chat provide content and kind of look over those things that need a human to do so and you know it also protects moderators from harmful content and things like that if we can use a bot or an ai tool to screen content that might be harmful for well if we can if we can have our have our moderators avoid looking at that then it's going to be beneficial to them okay that makes sense what are what are some of the issues challenges pitfalls that you've seen like people come across especially in a business to business context when they have tried to create and grow an online community.

[25:08] Yeah, I think I kind of spoke a little bit about this before, but the main setback, I think, or the main thing that holds people back is the idea that they're just creating a community for the sake of it. They're not actually kind of thinking deeply about, well, what do I actually want to do in this community? What do I want our members to get out of it? They kind of make a general community just like sit and forget, which you can't exactly do when you're trying to build up an active member base.

[25:38] We have seen with so many communities that you know they just put a few channels in say hi every once in a while and with that you know you're not going to get in on talking it you know if people aren't getting value from your community they're just going to leave because it takes effort as we as i kind of talked about before so you kind of need to work out why you want to have a community, you know what you're really going to do with it how it's going to impact your members i think you You know, we get a lot of people who see this community trend. They're just like, oh, hey, I'm going to build a community now without really thinking too deeply about how it's going to work. You know, we've seen with even social media platforms, if you don't have engaging content, if you don't have, you know, the right content, then you're not going to grow or you're not going to grow very fast, per se, or you're going to have very poor engagement. So, it's really important, I think, to start your basis off with making sure you have the resources, making sure you have a unique idea.

[26:40] And it's a bit like building an MVP or a Minimum Viable Product, you got to say, well, if we get a few members in here, are they going to be keen on joining or are they going to, You know, they're going to want to build things, you know, it's really, I think, it's a bit like building a project. You just got to, you kind of just got to go for it sometime and make sure there's a proper plan behind what you're doing. Because otherwise, you know, you spend all this money building a community and I guess now when you don't achieve anything, there's a big upfront cost to building a community. But in the long term, that really does pay off only because you don't have to, you know, You can rely on your volunteer teams and things like that in the future. And it's not like as well with social media, where you have to post content multiple times a day. Your members will talk for you. Like for me, at least, when I go on holiday, I don't really have to spend too much time with you.

[27:37] I'll have a team that will help out. But at the same time, we have so many awesome members that you know. We reward them as well. But we have so many awesome members who come together and we were able to look at that. I guess one thing I will mention in the B2B side is that when we're kind of looking at businesses per se, there's likely to be less active members of the community only because they're doing it at work capacity. So, you know, their employer is paying them to make their company better. So if they're spending too much time in your community, that might be a bit of a conflict there. So that's kind of one thing to keep in mind. So while, you know, it might not be as impactful, there will still definitely be members who are, you know, regulars in your community who regularly check it out.

[28:26] Okay, that sounds awesome. And as we're wrapping up, William, I would just like to shine a spotlight on you and your work with Advertise Your Server. So is there anything you'd like to promote or anywhere you'd like people to get in touch with you?

[28:41] Sure, sure. So we kind of have a few different, we have so many so much free we have a blog so blog.ays.gg we post about a blog post a week just on community stuff we also do a bit of community consulting we kind of we kind of do everything community growth in a way so yeah feel free to check out ays.gg that's kind of our main website and from there you know you can check out all our free content we have a bunch of different blog posts we have a youtube channel with all different content come come join our community as well ask questions we'd love to have you and yeah just thanks for having me on the podcast it's been it's been great to talk about community yeah it's been great having you as well thanks william.