How Should We Promote MC-Market?

[Mick]

G'day,

In our very recent announcement, we stated that we are looking to expand MC-Market through paid advertisements. Until now all of our promotion has been completely organic, but now that we are in a stable position I want to focus on more rapid expansion.

I think that all things considered MC-Market is in a difficult position to promote ourselves. We are too business-ey and have too high of an age requirement to promote ourselves through Minecraft youtube channels, but we are also too Minecraft orientated for a large portion of professional freelancers. The best audience for us to target would be places that Minecraft server owners are active, but the problem with that is that means competing with hosting companies who are prepared to pay far more per click than we'd be able to since their customers lifetime value is significantly higher. One thing I definitely do not want is for us to dilute our community with more users that will not align with our current userbase. I do not want to flood our forum with children who have no interest in buying or selling the products or services that the people on our forum currently provide or promote ourselves in toxic communities.

So yeah, the question I have for you all is how would you promote MC-Market?

In terms of budget, I am unsure of exactly how much I want to spend at the moment but definitely at least a few thousand and depending on how successful we are potentially tens of thousands so I don't think our budget will be an issue for most things.

If any of you have a particular interest in marketing and have prior experience and would like to have a more in-depth conversation, please create a conversation with me.

Thanks everyone, I look forward to hearing what you all have to say

Mick

 

[Asodey]

Here are some ideas I could think of:

• Sponsored banners on Minecraft serverlists.
• Google ads.
• Find discords that offer minecraft marketplaces and get a sponsored message on it.
• Maybe ads on channels of certain youtubers (whose audience is mostly made up of people who pass the age requirement for mc-market, the age requirement can be displayed on the ad - for example, the youtuber will say "just a heads up this market is open for everybody who is 13 years old or older" or something like that).
• chearful.ninja sponsored ads (maybe?).
• Purchase tweets from twitters that have a decent audience, or just tweet more and use the '#market, #minecraft' more often.

these are just some basic ideas I could think of, hope it helps!

 

[Kjell]

Agree with Asodey! Those are the most popular ways of advertising.

 

[Scroll32]

Agree with assay on the 1st two. Google ads would help with people organically searching for you, and the server ad list with help you get what you guys really need, which is concentrated minecraft player bases.

 

[MrAniman2]

First, I would figure out what you want Mc-Market to be... a paradise for shady services or (try to be) a respectable website.
Next, instead of looking for more users why not first try to understand the reasons people are leaving this site, why the majority of highly respected Minecraft community members avoid this website?

 

[User]

Here are some ideas I could think of:

• Sponsored banners on Minecraft serverlists.
• Google ads.
• Find discords that offer minecraft marketplaces and get a sponsored message on it.
• Maybe ads on channels of certain youtubers (whose audience is mostly made up of people who pass the age requirement for mc-market, the age requirement can be displayed on the ad - for example, the youtuber will say "just a heads up this market is open for everybody who is 13 years old or older" or something like that).
• chearful.ninja sponsored ads (maybe?).
• Purchase tweets from twitters that have a decent audience, or just tweet more and use the '#market, #minecraft' more often.

these are just some basic ideas I could think of, hope it helps!

1. big yes
2. big yes
3. From what I've heard (and my personal experience), these tend to be very inefficient in the long-term.
4. Just seems a bit off to me, personally. Even if the Youtuber made videos related to the MC account community.
5. nah
6. nah (for the first part), but I think that more regular Twitter activity could help bring in new members.

 

[Cal]

Google ads make the most sense for me, just make sure the promise of making money is clear. "Make Money for Building in Minecraft", "Sell your Minecraft Account for Cash" etc. That's what seems to draw in most users on the site.

 

[MarkElf]

I'd like to see MC-Market advertise on Reddit. There's quite a few new and clearly inexperienced server owners in r/admincraft that could use the majority of services offered on the site.

 

[Innings]

There is a decent sized minecraft marketplace on fiverr that you could advertise to.

 

[Innings]

Regarding the youtubers, you could advertise on channels that audiences are made up of server owners? Make sure the youtuber says that you have to be 13 and older.

Maybe the plugin showcase videos, that would be primarily server owners.

 

[Precise]

A referral system would be super cool, every x amount of users you refer you get a certain reward. Maybe some badges, etc...

Obviously this would need to be moderated first to make sure no alt accounts are being made, etc...

 

[MarkElf]

A referral system would be super cool, every x amount of users you refer you get a certain reward. Maybe some badges, etc...

Obviously this would need to be moderated first to make sure no alt accounts are being made, etc...

I'm not fully against this but resource owners are at a significant advantage. I'd top that referral list pretty easily. At least a quarter, if not easily more, of my resource buyers, made an account just to buy my resource from Spigot or other third-party sites like Reddit, Github, etc. 'Referrals: X' under 'Messages' on the left would be cool, especially if it was clickable to a list of referred used but that would be a waste of site resources considering the amount of info already cached.

Edit: Cause I don't want to make another post. If people are legitimately making alts to boost their referrals, that's extremely disappointing. Moderating referrals can be automated to the extent that if a user is banned, their referral no longer counts. I don't think much more need to be done. If someone refers a scammer or malicious user to the site, there's no reason to count that that referral towards the user's count anymore.

 

[Precise]

Add more services that server owners can use (such as a server list). Using those various tools, a decent amount of server owners will find there way onto the main website.

They actually are planning a server list feature! Check the thread here - https://www.mc-market.org/threads/615948/

 

[Ally]

A referral system would be super cool, every x amount of users you refer you get a certain reward. Maybe some badges, etc...

Obviously this would need to be moderated first to make sure no alt accounts are being made, etc...

I personally disagree with this idea. Certain competitors do advertise referrals, yes, but I don't think it would suit the environment here. On the surface,

1. People will begin to relentlessly farm referrals by any means necessary and do what they can to bypass moderation. You'd bring a whole lot of traffic to MCM yes, but nothing short of meaningless spam. You can see this in Discord - people will pretend to fake other people (alts) and do what they can to get the reward offered. Granted, there is more flexibility but my next point:
2. The moderation of those referrals rewards would be insane for a start. MCM blocks proxies, yes, but there is no perfect system and people would find ways around it. The only way to know if someone was fake or real or not would be by moderation. And if lots of people are doing that, then it becomes incredibly difficult to control.

Just my two cents. They are probably solvable issues in some way or another but would it be worth the effort?

 

[Precise]

I personally disagree with this idea. Certain competitors do advertise referrals, yes, but I don't think it would suit the environment here. On the surface,

1. People will begin to relentlessly farm referrals by any means necessary and do what they can to bypass moderation. You'd bring a whole lot of traffic to MCM yes, but nothing short of meaningless spam. You can see this in Discord - people will pretend to fake other people (alts) and do what they can to get the reward offered. Granted, there is more flexibility but my next point:
2. The moderation of those referrals rewards would be insane for a start. MCM blocks proxies, yes, but there is no perfect system and people would find ways around it. The only way to know if someone was fake or real or not would be by moderation. And if lots of people are doing that, then it becomes incredibly difficult to control.

Just my two cents. They are probably solvable issues in some way or another but would it be worth the effort?

I respect it, and thought of this after I posted it.

 

[User]

Google ads make the most sense for me, just make sure the promise of making money is clear. "Make Money for Building in Minecraft", "Sell your Minecraft Account for Cash" etc. That's what seems to draw in most users on the site.

Not sure how well that second one would go over, considering it's against MC's TOS. Technically, so is half this site, but advertising the MC accounts specifically might push Mojang a bit more than intended. The dilemma is, though, that the account section is one of the biggest on the site, yet it's one they'll probably have to steer clear of. Will be interesting to see how that all works out.

 

[Ted]

You could try advertising on THE OLDEST ANARCHY SERVER OF MINECRAFT