Best Business Guide to Marketing on Reddit
Does your marketing plan include more than just Facebook, Twitter, and other basic social media platforms? Have you considered using marketing on Reddit as a resource? Using Reddit to market your business is explained in this article.
Why Business Should Marketing on Reddit?
As much as we, as social media marketers, embrace social media’s deep potential to engage and empower consumers, this profession frequently has a limited understanding of what social media actually includes. Despite its popularity, marketing on Reddit is one of the most underutilized social media marketing channels.
According to Alexa.com, Reddit is the #6 most visited website in the United States (#19 globally) as of this writing, with an average daily user time of 11:29 compared to Facebook’s 9:34. While it may not be able to compete with Facebook in terms of daily traffic, it is now outperforming both Twitter and LinkedIn.
Businesses can easily do marketing on Reddit and get more results than other platforms. Reddit is alive and well. It is divided into thousands of groups based on specific themes or hobbies. Redditors subscribe to the communities of their choice, similar to how Twitter users follow particular accounts to select what content shows in their feed.
How to do Marketing on Reddit and Engage Users?
Redditors are very protective of the communities they’ve formed, and they despise individuals or brands who try to profit from a subreddit. When marketers use Reddit incorrectly, they treat it like a classified ad, paying little attention to the values and objectives of the individuals with whom they’re communicating.
An analogy for this would be talking about how amazing your T-shirts are at the local comic book store during a Magic: the Gathering event. People in Reddit groups have gathered for certain reasons—hobbies, social concerns, or just simple fun—and if you want to succeed on this social site, you must respect that.
If you want to do marketing on Reddit, you need to follow these guidelines:
- First, join up. A brand-new user account with no posts other than those marketing on Reddit isn’t something most people believe in. Join the community and learn how things work, from comment threads to inside jokes before you start to market on reddit.
- If you want to be successful, you should give more than you take. You’re expected to contribute 80 percent of the time and promote yourself 20 percent of the time in most Reddit forums. That ratio can go up or down depending on your content and target audience.
- Create fresh material and engage in meaningful conversation. If you repurpose your daily Facebook post and post it to a subreddit, you won’t find success on Reddit. You can, however, open a new stream of admirers for your business if you can become a valuable, contributing part of the community.
- Shills should never be used. Redditors have seen it all, from fake accounts to undeclared paid sponsors to employee upvoting obligations, and it enrages them when marketers try to take advantage of them.
Options for Target Marketing on Reddit
Target marketing on Reddit can be difficult without the vast data collection of Facebook or other social media platforms, especially when most accounts are fully anonymous. Reddit’s particular interests, on the other hand, offer some intriguing and potentially lucrative audience segments.
Community Targeting —
When you use the community target market on Reddit, you’ll choose the subreddits that most closely match your target demographic. This technique considers a user’s interactions with a community (subscriptions, visits, comments, and upvotes), as well as their views of community material via an aggregated feed (or listing pages). Once a user is added to your targeting pool, advertising can be displayed to them across Reddit – not only on the subreddits they’ve chosen.
Interest Targeting —
This method organizes individuals based on the topics they interact with on Reddit, similar to community targeting. Reddit has divided interest targeting into 15 categories. While these are generally larger than community-specific targeting, Reddit does allow for some exclusions to help you focus more narrowly. Gaming, for example, is a popular topic on Reddit and one of the potential interests you might choose from. Reddit, on the other hand, allows you to specify PC Gaming vs. Video Games to ensure that you’re just targeting your most likely buyers.
Custom Audiences —
Within Reddit, these audiences are the most granular, allowing you to target individual people using email addresses or mobile app IDs (MAID, IDFA for iOS, and GAID for Android). Because Reddit users aren’t needed to furnish an email address in order to create an account, emails can be challenging. Marketers must either have a large email list or, at the absolute least, be aware that their match rate is likely to be below. After you’ve uploaded your list, you can add overlays or exclusions to narrow down your results even more, such as Community, Interest, Keyword Exclusion, Device, or Location.
How to Make Your Brand a Successful Marketing on Reddit
This road map will help you to get started and start doing marketing on Reddit.
Become an user
Creating a Reddit account is the first step. A username that contains the brand term, as well as a personal name, is a good option to consider. Everything will feel more authentic if you can connect your marketing effort to a real person.
To receive alerts, create a TrackReddit account
Using TrackReddit, you can be alerted when certain keywords or phrases are mentioned on Reddit (free and paid options available). If someone mentions your brand, you may answer immediately and participate in discussions about the precise themes or product types that are important to you, all in real-time. That’s one of the key things of marketing on Reddit.
Create a Feed
Go through all of the subreddits that might be relevant to your brand and see what you can find. Starting with the default top page is a smart idea. Then look at the recommended communities in a subreddit’s sidebar and run a Google search for “Reddit + [industry keywords]” to find smaller, more specialist communities (swapping in the topics or keywords that matter to you).
Boost Participation
Establish a consistent commenting schedule before you begin submitting original content. No, this isn’t a workout regimen in which you acquire your ten comments in a single day. You must actively participate in discussions, respond to inquiries, and laugh along with others.
Share content that is original and original
Make a piece of content specifically for your Reddit audience (the following section discusses what types of content are popular on Reddit), but don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t receive much attention. Not every Reddit contribution will become viral, just as not every Facebook post will go viral. At the very least, you’ll get some positive feedback and a few votes.
Maintain Consistency
Keep up the good work on Reddit. While there are plenty of ways to make money on Reddit, it’s not a cash machine. Take a long-term view and continue to be a contributing part of the community and keep slowly marketing on Reddit.
What comes next for most brands is frequency and volume after they’ve gone through the above road map. The problem is that there is no ideal solution. Some Reddit subreddits are more popular and active. It’s true that some subreddits require users to post more or less original content.
How to Promote Your Business on Reddit
Reddit’s ad revenue pales in contrast to the other social media networks, despite its massive active user base. In 2018, Reddit’s ad revenue was under $100 million, while Twitter’s was $655 million! This implies that ad competition is minimal, and inventory is inexpensive – two reasons why advertisers receive more bang for their buck on Facebook than on other social media platforms.
Reddit divides users into communities for almost anything under the sun, making it simple for marketers to target the right people. Targeting is offered by interest category and individual subreddits if you choose to run a sponsored ad.
Targeting Subreddits for Marketing on Reddit
When it comes to reaching a highly relevant audience on Reddit, subreddits are the most straightforward way to do it. As a result, you can choose which subreddits your ad will appear on.
Tips for Subreddit Targeting –
To target by subreddit, look for smaller communities with roughly 5,000 subscribers and get a sense of how engaged their members are. You want to locate communities that are large enough and active on a regular basis, but not overly big and unfocused. Redditlist is an excellent resource for finding subreddit ideas because it provides the top 5,000 subreddits, along with their rank and subscriber counts.
Reddit Interest Targeting –
Interest targeting is the other main method of marketing on Reddit. Users are targeted with advertising depending on their surfing habits on the site and the types of subreddits they frequent. If you browse r/LonghornNation, for example, you’ll very certainly be included in the “Sports” interest category, even if you don’t subscribe to that subreddit. The Reddit ad platform offers a pre-defined selection of hobbies, such as Gaming, Travel, and Fashion & Style, from which to choose.
Content Types for Marketing on Reddit
Reddit may be a home for almost any sort of digital content, including new types of content you may not have considered. Basically, if you can connect to it, you might be able to get a Reddit audience.
However, there are certain categories of content that seem to garner the most attention on Reddit. I’ve arranged these types in a rough order depending on their engagement potential, but what works for your brand may change. Keep in mind that original material, in general, outperforms everything else.
The following are the categories of content that garner the most out of marketing on Reddit.
Also Read: How To Promote A Business Through Social Media?
GIFs
GIFs are popular on Reddit, and they include sports, events, movie scenes, cartoons, cute animals, and redubbing pop culture scenes with inside Reddit humor. GIFs are bite-sized versions of the video, and if your brand involves any kind of action, a GIF can be a good fit.
Video
Linking to platforms like YouTube or Vimeo will typically result in minimal interaction. Videos might take a long time to load, and many communities aren’t ready for that level of commitment upfront. To be fair, this isn’t true for all subreddits, so your results may vary, but if you can make a GIF out of the greatest part of a video and then link to the entire source in the comments, you’ll almost certainly get greater engagement.
Pictures
Still, images are mobile-friendly and require less initial engagement attention. Again, the image must be intriguing, and if you can incorporate a cat or dog into it, you will be ahead of the game.
Text
Many subreddits rely nearly entirely on text-based submissions and discussions to thrive. In the age of smartphones, this may seem contradictory, but many Redditors enjoy in-depth information and thought-provoking discussions, therefore the text is their favorite medium.
Blogs
Blog spam is strongly disliked by Redditors in general. You must be extremely active in the subreddits where you choose to share blog content if you want to be the exception. You should double-check that the material is fantastic and that your delivery does not come across as self-serving. Consider writing a text post on Reddit instead of linking out to your site if you have a blog-length piece of content worth sharing.
AMAs
AMAs (ask me anything) are threads where Redditors are invited to ask a person any question they wish. AMAs work well for people or brands who have unique tales to tell or who have a strong reputation. AMAs are typically held in the r/IAmA subreddit, although they are also held in interest-focused subreddits. One between Dr. Jane Goodall and some guy who used to play Goofy at Disney World is one of the most famous AMAs. If you use this method, you’ll have to accept the AMA notion, for better or worse, so be prepared.
News
Reddit is a major hub for breaking news because of the internet’s speed. Sharing a piece of news can make you a hit in areas where fast updates are important (politics, video games, movies, etc.). This information can arrive in the form of a new tweet from a thought leader or the first article on a topic that has the potential to become a major issue in a community.
Ads
At the present, Reddit’s ad platform is a bit of an ugly duckling. While businesses have had great success with it in the past, Reddit’s ad platform has been tweaked and retooled multiple times in recent years, making it difficult to evaluate best practices or how an ad spends on Reddit compares to Google or Facebook advertising.
Takeaways from Marketing on Reddit
Overall, marketing on Reddit remains a less appreciable resource. Owing to the fact that, unlike Google or Facebook, Reddit demands actual participation and a long-term perspective. Smart brands and marketers who are willing to put in the effort may find the result worthwhile on marketing on Reddit.
Reddit’s collection of highly engaged communities contains endless important insights and people looking for answers, even if their ad products may use some improvement. You won’t simply get more visitors to your site if you’re the brand that steps up and helps solve problems; you’ll have a whole community behind you.
Conclusion
Reddit’s community structure means it will occupy a very different place in your broader strategy and a different kind of brand engagement than other social media platforms, which are built on the premise of centralizing a following around your account (your Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn connections).
When I first start talking to clients about how they can use Reddit, I usually characterize it as a natural extension of their PR efforts. It’s an opportunity to speak directly with your target audience, to be a part of the communities that matter to your business, and to form genuine connections with them.
Reddit is an outreach tool when viewed in this light. It won’t replace the audience-building you undertake on traditional follower-based platforms, but it should give you more options for creating and sharing original brand content.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does it cost to advertise on Reddit?
The cost of Reddit advertising is calculated per thousand impressions. The cost of Reddit advertising can range from $0.20 to $100 per thousand impressions. A $5 per day minimum is required to begin a Reddit advertising campaign.
2. Is Reddit a free site?
Reddit signup is free, and it is necessary to access the website’s basic functions. Redditors can upgrade to Reddit Gold for a monthly charge or an annual membership.
3. Why is Reddit so well-liked?
It’s a fantastic resource for information on almost every aspect of human knowledge. You can peruse the many subreddits on philosophy, languages, coding, molecular gastronomy, and anything else that piques your interest.
4. Is Reddit secure in terms of personal information?
When you first sign up for a Reddit account, you won’t have much privacy. Reddit may track and keep a lot of information about you with the default settings, including your IP address, interests, and online activity (even when not on Reddit). Sign up for Reddit using a pseudonym if you wish to improve your security.
