What You Need to Know About Marketing on Reddit

Reddit calls itself ‘the front page of the internet’. Whether you agree with that or not, there’s no denying the huge popularity of the forum.

In this Article:

• What is Reddit?
• A Subreddit for Everything
• It’s Not Like Other Social Media
• Reddit Marketing: Why?
• Reddit Marketing: How?
• Gaining Valuable Insights

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a web forum that anyone can join and be part of. It’s made up of ‘subreddits’ (also called communities) each dedicated to a particular topic, where members can post questions, comments or content related to that topic, and other members will upvote or downvote those posts. Each subreddit is managed by one or more volunteer moderators, so in a subreddit, you’ll see a feed with the most popular discussions or highest voted comments and content. 

Source: Reddit

There are over 130,000 subreddits, which are all named ‘r/xxx’, depending on the topic. For example, ‘r/worldnews’ (with almost 30 million members) or r/knitting (418,000 members).

Source: Reddit

Let’s say you’re a piano player, but none of your friends and family play piano or care about your treasured passion (sob). The subreddit r/piano is where you’ll find a global community of 285,000+ people who share your love for the beautiful instrument; piano enthusiasts from around the world having discussions on teaching piano, learning piano, buying a piano, tuning a piano, sharing stories, inspiration, problems, videos, tips… you get the idea.

 People come to Reddit for the communities and all the entertainment and knowledge they provide.

There’s a Subreddit for Everything 

(literally…it’s called r/everything)

Whatever your passion, or question you need answered, you can almost certainly find a community of experts and like-minded internet-users. 

r/civic (53.4k members) Have a question about buying, driving, modifying, crashing, repairing, maintaining, owning, a Honda Civic? This your place.

r/mentalhealth (350k members) is a community where people can find support for mental health issues, connect with others who might be struggling, or just discuss any issues around mental health.

r/filmfashion (37.4k members) is where fashion meets film, topics mostly center on the clothes worn by characters in movies.

r/politics (8.2m members) Americans make up the largest group on Reddit, so this subreddit is mostly about American politics, but millions of people come here for news and commentary on all things politics. 

r/dadjokes (6.9m members. Yes, that’s 6.9 million hehe) Good ones, bad ones, and really bad ones, this is the place for those who can’t resist a dad joke.

And then… there’s this: r/BreadStapledToTrees (316k members) …yep.

Subreddits can be fun and entertaining, or they can be informative and serious. Many students turn to Reddit for help with homework and assignments. There are communities where programmers exchange knowledge, where gamers hang out, where parents exchange advice and stories. And if you still can’t find the subreddit for you, you can start your own! 

It’s Not Like Other Social Media

Reddit can be called a social media site, but it’s quite different from other platforms you’re probably familiar with. The big social media sites are designed to get users’ attention and keep it for as long as possible. This is both good and bad, depending on your viewpoint. It makes them highly entertaining and ‘scrollable’; you’ll always be served content which is personalized and aimed to engage you. 

On the flip side, it makes these apps highly addictive and prone to manipulation by content creators and businesses. People often report feeling social pressure when using certain apps; while everyone’s posting on Instagram about their perfect beach holidays and gym workouts, Reddit is an anonymous forum.  Yes, it’s true, Reddit is a business that makes money, and it uses algorithms just like Facebook and Youtube do, but the way Reddit users and moderators control and curate the subreddits makes it feel much more democratic and its content more legitimate. As a result, 82% of Gen Z Reddit visitors trust companies and products that are reviewed on the site.  

Marketing on Reddit. Why and How?

We’ll get to the how, but first; why…

Why Use Reddit for Marketing?

1.    It’s Good Strategy.

Omnichannel marketing is a must. Omnichannel means using multiple channels to reach customers, and Reddit can be a smart addition to your omnichannel marketing mix. 

Why omnichannel?

Even if you’re doing well on one platform, getting plenty of engagement, leads, and building a customer base on Facebook for example, it’s important to remember social media changes and evolves rapidly; user behavior changes, and it’s hard to predict where audiences will be even six months from now. 

Secondly, you might be missing a huge market by neglecting one or more channels. There are plenty of people who are active on social media, but only on one platform, like Twitter. 

Finally, different channels can form multiple touchpoints on your customer’s journey. Seeing your content or ads on multiple platforms doubles down on your brand/product messaging AND those different channels can complement each other. For example, your Instagram and Twitter channels can introduce a wider audience to your YouTube videos.

Reddit is often overlooked as a marketing channel (which is great news for you!)

2.    It’s Affordable

Reddit advertising is surprisingly cost effective and content marketing can be free! When it comes to digital advertising, we all know it can get expensive. Reddit’s minimum daily ad spend of around five dollars, makes it low risk when you’re testing new ads and campaigns, and its relatively low cost per click makes it much better value overall. Ads can be shown to certain subreddits to target the best audiences for your brand. If you don’t want to spend money on advertising, you can take a more subtle content marketing approach. No, this doesn’t mean jumping into subreddits to push your products like an uninvited salesman. Moderators won’t take kindly to that, and you might be removed. Content marketing Reddit style means joining a community with the genuine aim of helping or connecting with people to provide something of value and build lasting positives relationships (more about that later)

3.    It’s Influential

89% of Reddit users are college educated or currently studying (more than double the general population), 35% percent of users earn over $75,000 a year, 25% of 25 to 29-year-olds use Reddit actively. This means the average Reddit user is much better-educated, younger, and more affluent than average, and far more likely to be a future leader and decision maker in the fields of business, creative etc. Building relationships and brand awareness with Reddit users is potentially much more valuable than with consumers on other channels, as they’re more likely to be thought leaders and people of influence (and of course, with more spending power). 

4.    It’s Useful

Aside from helping you find potential customers or grow your brand; Reddit can be a fantastic source of consumer and market data. By joining and monitoring subreddits which are relevant to your products or industry, you can gain a huge number of up-to-date insights. Reddit users are honest and informative, sharing their thoughts and experiences in longer and more detailed form than, say, Twitter or Facebook.

How to use Reddit to market your business

Reaching a new Audience

In short, Reddit offers you powerful features to build interactions and insights about your Target audience. However, it is important to note that the most popular topics discussed among the Redditors are gaming, music, art, culture and current affairs. Therefore, it is crucial to connect your brand with those ideas and create a relevancy. Remember the audience is looking for two things on Reddit, either they want information or mere entertainment. 

1-    Save yourself from getting ‘Down Votes’ as this will portray your image as negative and Redditors will drag it down to the bottom.  

2-    The average visit last for 10 minutes, which means that your content should be interesting and short enough for user retention.

3-    Don’t get too jumbled up in entertainment post and keep eyes on offering solutions to the target audience. This will help in making your voice important and authentic.  

4-    Reddit is an anti-advertising platform and Redditors hate direct promotions or anything that says SELL SELL SELL. There is a subreddit of 200K subscribers called /r/hailcorporate, where Redditors try to identify and document brand placements across the site. 

5-    Reddit has been named as a trickiest platform to crack by social media influencers across the internet. A case study of EA might help you in understanding the dynamics better.  

Gaining Valuable Insights

For most marketers, Reddit’s main asset is insights. Using the forum to reach new customers or build brand recognition will take a lot of time, effort, and a good understanding of the forum, and many small businesses would prefer to spend resources reaching customers via other channels. But one way in which Reddit can be immensely valuable to all brands and businesses is by providing a huge volume of honest and relevant insights.  

Mandala Analytics now gives users access to Reddit data with full analytics, along with other the other major platforms already offered. This means you can analyze mentions of your chosen keywords, so you can easily start getting the best insights from Reddit. Mandala saves you time by showing you those mentions of your keywords, you then simply click to add that channel to your campaign, so you can monitor posts from that user, or you can follow that subreddit separately to keep up with the conversation. To see how mandala can save you tons of time in gathering insights, check out Mandalasystem.com.

Summary

Reddit is a unique online space, with huge base of loyal and passionate users. It offers some amazing opportunities for those marketers who are willing become redditors themselves, or to simply learn from all those amazing communities.