I personally feel this is probably the most under-approached method of marketing that is done for Minecraft servers. The players who play minecraft, believe it or not, have lives. They spend their time and a lot of it outside of the game on services like instagram, facebook, tik tok depending on where they are in the world. What you can do is take advantage of this and push content towards them on these other platforms. Build an instagram page and go follow people who follow meme accounts oriented towards minecraft. Go dm these people or engage with them on posts and talk about your server. It is literally as simple as that.

To more effectively grow you can invest some money into ads. For this I do not know if running direct ads through the platforms are profitable but it can be since the amount of ad spend on mobile games is crazy and the avg player spend on minecraft would easily beat an ad based mobile app. You can spend money on affiliate marketing so buy a $20 story post or whatever on minecraft meme pages. You can possibly negotiate with the page to set up a referral system and not even pay the $20. For example you can go hit up a page and be like hey let's set up a 10% off donation code called code "PlanetMinecraft". For everyone who uses your code I will give you 30% of the profits.

There is a lot of different things you can do and with the new immense growth of tik tok and with that platform there is room for many new strategies to be formulated.

I honestly think server trailers are partially useless and I don't understand why people think just uploading a trailer on their own server youtube channel with 5 subscribers will instantaneously garner growth.

What can be done is taking that server trailer and partnering with tons of content creators with fan bases to advertise your server. They can also play on your server. Go pay a youtuber $25 a video based around your server. If he has fans those fans will literally donate money just to be seen by the youtuber.

You can go set up a system like fortnite creator codes as well so everytime a creator's code is used they get a percentage. Fortnite does $5 for every $100 but you can give way more -- don't be greedy(You aren't epic games...)

I underestimated the effects of discord marketing. I personally met the owner of a super garbage server and found out that after a week of launch they racked in $700.. I was super confused how they had scammy branding aka the free domain provided by a server host but managed to still rack in $$$. The only thing they did was discord marketing. You can literally go on different discord channels and shoutout your server. Go dm ppl to shoutout your server. Go hype it up etc.

It's literally that simple. Heck if you know tech you can probably set up a bot with proxies to go do that for you automatically lol. (I'll talk about this later) :)

This works but you need to be on top of your game for this. Server lists allow you to bump your server after x amount of hours. Planet Minecraft lets you do this every 24 hours. Take advantage of it and try not to miss a day. But you also want votes get members to vote on your server by providing incentives for them to vote.

*I personally think this is the least effective way to market your server unless you pay for server ads but I think if you have money for ads you are way better off doing any other form of paid advertising....

Personal opinion feel free to comment below if you disagree with this.

Sometimes growth can be as simple as engaging with your players and ask them for help. If they like the server ask them to go tell their friends about it and help you. Maybe even reward them or set up a program for example most refferals gets a free rank or whatever.

Everyone loves free things but sometimes people give stuff wrong. There are two types of giveaways the ones that influence brand loyalty aka giving back to your community and growth related giveaways aka doing it to grow your server. For growth giveaways you want to reward members for sharing your marketing your server for you. If you have an Instagram page give away a $50 store voucher if they go tag 3 friends or something of that sort. Or a $50 Voucher for getting the most votes for the month. Or a $50 Voucher for getting the most invites on discord. There are many different possibilities.

An example of a giveaway based off brand loyalty is rewarding the players with the most playtime. (Really important you want to keep your players on the server rather than join for 10 minutes get lost and leave.) More on this in a different blog post . :)

The hustle is real and some people are willing to do it at any cost.There are ways to go and automate the process of engaging with people through bots.

Instagram engagement can be done with bots. I am doing something personally with my server by creating what I call a web. I have one centralized instagram account for example @AbruptiveMC where I have my server and do stuff naturally aka with no bots so I don't get banned. Then I will create 10 sub accounts that are assosiated with @AbruptiveMC but not Abruptive MC like @AbruptiveJoin123 or something like this. I then link up these accounts with proxies and put it on a bot to automate engagement. If these accounts get banned I just make more and it won't affect my legit account or get me in trouble. You kind of have to do this for instagram if you don't want to risk getting banned.

For discord this can also be done with proxies and such exactly the way described above ^.

There is also the unethical thing of advertising on servers. I would not suggest this because it will ruin your reputation in the server owner community but can also result to a lot of DDOS attacks and such because it pisses people off. There's different ways to do this but you can literally just go on your minecraft account and advertise the IP. I did this when I was in elementary school aka like 8 yrs ago and literally killed a server with 300 avg players and converted them onto my server. You can also do this with bots as well and also proxies so you don't get IP banned.

*I would highly advise you don't do anything I said pertaining to advertising on other servers. It is rude and messed up also it can lead to the wrong type of attention.