Reddit is a growing community of like-minded individuals who are focused on a diverse array of topics.
A lot of people would argue that Reddit has the most vibrant community on the internet. But, whether you agree with this or not, there’s no denying that this social media site is actually a very powerful source of attention that you can leverage as a digital marketer.
The platform has over 430 million monthly active users, which means that your audience is likely there, and with the right Reddit marketing strategy, you can make use of the many opportunities afforded by the platform to get better results for your business.
This article offers an overview of Reddit’s basic functionality and describes how the platform can be successfully and effectively integrated into a digital marketing mix.
Read on to discover 7 of the most powerful Reddit best practices for digital marketers that will help you supercharge your efforts and get phenomenal results from your campaigns.
What is Reddit Used For?
According to Reddit, the site is the “front page of the internet”. It primarily focuses on social news and aggregation, but communities have established themselves on the platform, often using it as a sort of internet forum.
There are thousands of individual communities that are organized around specific topics of interest
The core functionality of the site is that users post content and then others either upload or downvote the posts so that the most popular threads are pushed to the top while mediocre content is buried underneath.
So, for marketers who want to leverage Reddit’s massive audience, you need to publish high-quality content that will be interesting and relevant enough to be upvoted to the top of your target audience’s feeds.
Why Marketers Should Consider Using Reddit
The main reason why you should consider using Reddit as a marketer is that it’s one of the most visited websites in the world. It has over 30 billion page views per month from 430 million monthly active users.
An audience that size is nothing to sneeze at. It clearly goes across most major demographics, although it tends to skew toward younger users, reaching about 20% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.
In addition to having a massive audience, Reddit is also known to be a “black hole” on the internet where users are often drawn into content, spending hours diving deep into various rabbit holes.
The average Reddit visit is 10 minutes with users visiting 7 or more pages each. This proves that this popular platform has an engaged audience of people who come to the sites to not only look for entertainment but also answers to questions and solutions to problems.
The best part is that the platform will provide you with everything you need to learn about your audience, discover their wants or needs, as well as get insights that will inform your marketing strategies so you can produce better products, services, and content.
This makes Reddit one of the best ways to perform market research and reach the desired target market all while cutting variable costs that usually are associated with these sorts of processes.
Reddit Marketing Best Practices
Reddit has more active users than LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or Snapchat. That’s huge. And yet, most articles about strategies for social media marketing rarely ever talk about Reddit.
Although it’s the largest social media platform, it’s also one of the most underutilized sites, as far as marketers are concerned. It seems to fly under the radar with regard to social media marketing solutions.
One of the reasons for this is that Reddit doesn’t welcome organic, native promotion. Instead, the platform is more about authentic contributions from users, as shown by this quote from the platform’s community guidelines:
Of course, this makes sense, but it doesn’t mean you can’t leverage the power of the platform as a digital marketer.
After all, businesses and brands are definitely websites. So, what’s a marketer to do?
How do you get people in this massive community to care about your business, product, or services?
Here are some actionable tips you can use to put Reddit to good use as part of your overall digital marketing strategy:
1. Cross-Share Content on Subreddits
One way to help you get good results from Reddit is to crosspost to other subreddits to make sure your content is seen by as many users as possible.
To cross-post your content to another subreddit, click the “Cross Post” button located at the bottom of the original thread.
Just make sure to use the strategy judiciously so you’re not overly promotional with each post you share.
The good news is that there are a lot of different types of content you can post on Reddit, including:
- GIFs
- Videos
- Images
- Blog Posts
- Text
- AMAs
- News
- Ads
With so many types of content to post, Reddit can be a powerful tool to help you increase your reach. For instance, you can cross-share articles from your blog or organically link back to branded webinars that can be easily created with dedicated webinar software.
Subreddits are micro-communities on the platform focused on specific topics. This will greatly increase your brand awareness and get your content in front of even more target audiences.
If you are still not convinced that Reddit can be a powerful tool in your overall marketing strategy, consider that the platform gets over 1.7 billion visitors every month, making it a powerhouse among social media sites.
And, since it combines a social network with web content, social news, and a forum – all in one platform – this makes it ideal for sharing your blog and social media content to expand its reach.
Pro Tip: Get to Know the Rules.
On Reddit, you’ll find millions of micro-communities, each with its own etiquette, rules, and subscribers. You’ll find the rules on the right-hand side of the page.
It’s important to note that each subreddit has its own set of rules, so what worked for one community may not work for the next, which is why you should always make sure you read the rules before posting or interacting with others in the group.
While on the subject of posting on Reddit, it’s also important to remember to be human. Only post content that really helps others in the community, and do your best to avoid spamming, otherwise, others users will revolt against you.
Redditors are very protective of the sanctity of their community, and they will quickly remove obvious outsiders who don’t place a premium on the quality of the content they post so as to prevent their special corner of the internet from being overrun by users whose only goal is to sell stuff.
Also, don’t repost content.
This is one of the worst things you can do on Reddit and it’s extremely frowned upon. Make sure all your content is original and exclusive.
Better yet, make it funny, trendy, and relatable.
2. Engage Potential Followers in Conversation
Reddit communities are extremely interactive. When compared to other social media sites where users are typically concerned with their own presence, people on Reddit are more focused on what’s going on in the world around them and in their communities.
If you can understand the basics of the platform, as well as its user base, you’ll be able to understand how to leverage its different features.
In other words, your Reddit marketing strategy will have to be different from other social sites because of the differences in the way users behave on the platform.
In order to get real results from this community that’s filled with users from a diversified user base, you must engage potential followers in conversation by participating in relevant subreddits.
There are currently over 130,000 subforums and communities that are active on Reddit. This means that you have a wealth of opportunities to engage with your target audience, regardless of which industry or niche you are in.
In fact, even if you can’t find a subreddit for your specific niche (which is highly unlikely), it’s still very easy to start your own so you can begin to build a community around the topics you care about.
This is extremely useful for digital marketers, and being able to take part in subreddit communities will help you understand your target audience, what matters to them, and how you can provide the solutions they need.
Be a Community Member First
This is an important tip to help you skyrocket your engagement levels. Keep in mind that it takes time to and the trust of other users on the platform. So, take the time to comment on other relevant posts, submit high-quality content, and familiarize yourself with the platform to avoid irritating other Redditors.
By taking a sincere interest in the community, you’ll be able to engage more easily.
In other words, you’ll find it easier to pick up the traditions and mannerisms, as well as the unspoken rules of each subreddit, and discover which content gets the most interest so you can focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Moreover, you’ll be able to learn how to title and format the content of your posts in order to get maximum effect.
3. Use Reddit for Customer Research
Reddit makes a great customer research tool to help you find the latest trends in your industry or niche.
The platform has an increasing role in the internet community space, which makes it perfect for conducting research to learn more about what users in specific niches are thinking and how to reach them.
As previously stated, when you post on Reddit, your content is open to receive upvotes or downvotes from the Reddit community.
The posts with the most upvotes get featured on the front page and users can follow specific subreddits by different categories that are relevant to their interests.
As a marketer, this can provide you with tons of helpful insight as to who your customers are, what they want, and how you can provide the solutions they need.
The fact that posts can be voted either up or down helps to ensure that only interesting and relevant content makes its way to the front while uninteresting content is buried underneath, making your work to find trends a lot easier.
This is also one of the reasons why Reddit has been the birthplace of so many of the internet’s most memorable viral sensations and memes.
Pro Tip: You can host or participate in AMAs (ask me anything) which are basically live Q&As where you answer questions from Redditors.
These events are perfect for growing your audience. Just make sure that the interviewee is especially relevant to the topic being discussed.
You can then cross-promote these events on your other social media accounts to get even more exposure for your brand.
Not only is this a great tactic for promoting your brand, but it also provides you with real insights into the things your customers think about and want.
4. Use Reddit to Speed Up Your Sales Cycle
Reddit provides you with a great way to grow your marketing efforts outside of traditional social media sites.
A recently released study shows that when it comes to product research, Reddit users evaluate twice as many brands in four times the number of research sessions than on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
The study also noted that Reddit users are nine times faster at deciding on purchases compared to other social platforms. This speed advantage offered by the platform offers a welcome experience for B2B marketers who often deal with lengthy sales cycles.
Furthermore, the study also shows that 90% of consumers place more trust in the research they conduct using Reddit as opposed to other social media websites.
This can be extremely beneficial to marketers working to rebuild eroded trust through the use of authentic content on the platform.
With proper interactions, your brand can find valuable communication opportunities and possibilities on Reddit, especially when you take the time to understand your audience’s needs and learn the questions they are asking.
5. Topic Generation
Reddit can also be a great place for topic generation, as well as ideas on how to write catchy headlines for your posts.
Other than the quality of the content itself, another factor that determines how well posts do on Reddit is the way their titles are framed or worded.
The title of the post allows you to show off what your content is about and entice people to click through and read the rest of your post.
On Reddit, you’ll be able to observe a wide range of styles that resonate the most with readers’ by seeing which posts get upvoted more. You can sift through all the popular posts on your homepage to see which titles get the most engagement.
You can then reverse engineer this for your own blog post headlines, email subject lines, landing pages, and other copywriting needs.
6. Find Lucrative Keyword Gems
Reddit is a great place to find low-hanging keywords. For marketers who want to use advanced SEO techniques, you can use keyword tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to find plenty of relevant Reddit keywords to further your marketing efforts.
All you have to do is enter a subreddit into your keyword research tool and click search.
You’ll then be presented with a list of lucrative low-competition keywords for which the content in that subreddit is ranked.
You can also use the platform for deep-dive posts to uncover “question keywords”. In this regard, the platform’s high audience engagement offers a key advantage to digital marketers.
Just remember that the majority of subreddits rank for many keywords that you likely don’t want to target so do a quick CPC filter to find legit keywords.
For instance, you can set your minimum CPC to $2 to make it easier for you to filter out all the junk, as shown in the example below:
7. Use Reddit Ads
As a general rule, Redditors are not too tolerant of content that has brand promotion and will be quick to flag it as spam.
Many users will vent or call you out about your brand’s poor marketing tactics or the bad user experience you’re creating in the subreddit. It’s a good idea to consider using Reddit ads instead.
Reddit is very effective for organic marketing communication. But, it can be even more effective for marketers when used for advertising your brand in order to expand your presence online.
The platform assists advertisers in a variety of ways:
- It allows them to target their audiences by interest or community, or custom audiences.
- Advertisers can tell their stories on the platform
- There are tools to help measure the success of your campaigns
These are all areas that digital marketers are eager to improve. Furthermore, when you advertise on Reddit, you get opportunities to reach influential communities with thousands and even millions of people who are engaging with relevant content.
You can use promoted posts on Reddit. There are a number of options to choose from so you can place ads on the platform, as well as the site’s official app.
As a way to encourage businesses to advertise more on the platform, Reddit has partnered with multiple research firms to release report data depicting the advantages of advertising on Reddit over other major social media websites.
If you want to begin advertising on Reddit, check out this report from GlobalWebIndex detailing a lot of background data on what users want to see from brands on the platform.
According to the report, the leading desired quality is reliable content.
How to Build an Effective Reddit Strategy
As a social news aggregator and discussion platform, one of Reddit’s main goals is to create massive value and provide users with a sense of belonging and being part of a community of like-minded people.
Once you understand this, marketing your content on the platform will be easy.
When sharing content on Reddit, you can choose from one of many effective Reddit marketing strategies, including:
- Content Marketing: Reddit is best used as an extension of an existing content marketing scheme.
- Sponsored Content: Using native ads on the platform is a great way for brands to build an audience on Reddit. The best part is that ordinary Reddit rules don’t apply here, and it’s alright to be promotional or salesy when using ads.
- PR and Engagement: Redditors aren’t keen on blatant self-promotion, but the community does like brands that interact on user-generated content pertaining to the brand itself.
- Building Value: The central theme that drives all successful campaigns is to build value. So, rather than solely focusing on your image, strive to make legitimate contributions on the site, and you will see great returns from your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
There you have it. 7 marketing tactics to help you drive meaningful traffic from Reddit to your site.
Although not a conventional channel for digital marketers, more and more businesses are now using Reddit and will continue to do so in the coming years as the platform continues to grow.
Of course, it helps tremendously if you are genuinely committed to and engaged with the communities that you part of, but with the steps outlined above, you don’t have to fully dive in order to reap the benefits of this community.
Even if you only have small pockets of time in which to engage with others on the platform, these tips will help you gain a ton of insights and rewards for your marketing.
Are these tips enough to help you build a thoughtful Reddit marketing strategy? Share thoughts in the comments below!
See also: How do you effectively use Reddit?
