Like any marketing campaign, a Reddit marketing campaign should be based on a carefully planned strategy to maximize success. A good Reddit marketing strategy includes the purpose of the campaign, measurable goals, and specific plans to achieve those goals.
In this article, we walk you through each aspect of a Reddit marketing strategy and help you build your strategy along the way.
Purpose and Goals
Establishing the “why” for your campaign is essential to formulating a strategy that will succeed on Reddit. Once you have established the purpose of your campaign, you can then choose the metrics that will help you determine the success of the campaign.
Assignment 4.1 – Write a purpose statement
The purpose of your campaign will be the first thing in your Reddit marketing strategy document. Create a document with the heading “Reddit Marketing Strategy”. You will use this document for the remaining assignments in this article.
Add a subheading, “Purpose”, to the document and write down your answers to the following questions to get a better idea of what your Reddit marketing strategy is about.
1. What do you want from your Reddit marketing campaign?
2. What will redditors get from your marketing campaign?
3. Why are you choosing to spend time and resources marketing on Reddit?
Use your answers to the questions above to write a complete sentence or two that clearly describes the purpose of your Reddit marketing campaign.
Assignment 4.2 – Choose metrics to track
Metrics are critical to creating a feedback loop that will help you track the success of your Reddit marketing campaign. Below are possible results from a Reddit marketing campaign that you can track and measure.
- Mentions of your business by redditors
- Website traffic generated by Reddit
- Email signups generated by Reddit traffic
- Sales generated by Reddit traffic
- Number of Reddit comments providing quality feedback or number of improvements made based on Reddit feedback
- Number of social media posts curated from Reddit
Create a subheading in your strategy document for “Metrics”. Using the metrics listed, above and any others that might apply to your specific situation, write down the key metrics that you will track during your Reddit marketing campaign as well as your plan to track them.
Components of a Reddit Marketing Campaign
Depending on your business, only certain components listed in this section will be applicable to your Reddit marketing strategy, marketing goals, and the assets that you can bring to Reddit.
Consider each of the following components to determine which should be a part of your Reddit marketing strategy.
Monitoring & Commenting
Monitoring Reddit for conversations relevant to your business is imperative to just about every Reddit marketing campaign. It shows redditors that you are there to join the discussion and contribute.
The best thing about monitoring Reddit is that you never know what you will find. You could find a complaint about a specific problem that you have the solution to or critical feedback that leads you to make a positive change to your business.
If redditors are talking specifically about your business, monitoring becomes even more powerful and necessary. You can respond to comments about your business to resolve problems, correct inaccurate information, and learn more about your customers.
There are three ways you can monitor conversations relevant to your business on Reddit:
1.Frequenting subreddits
2. Performing searches
3. Monitoring services
In Part 1, you chose a target subreddit that you should be visiting on a regular basis to monitor the conversations and content being discussed. You also learned how to use The GoPro Marketing Manager to respond to a technical question posed by a user in /r/GoPro.search function to find relevant discussions.
Refer to assignment 3.1 from Part 1 for a refresher on how to conduct effective searches.
We have not yet discussed the various monitoring services that are available for Reddit. The main benefit of these services is that they tell you when a certain keyword has been mentioned in a comment (performing a Reddit search will only tell you if a keyword has been mentioned in a post title or body).
At the time of this writing, there are three services you can use to monitor Reddit. We suggest you look at each one and decide which one best suits your needs.
Available Monitoring Services
Assignment 4.3 – Including monitoring & commenting in your strategy
Create a subheading for “Monitoring & Commenting” in your strategy document. Make a list of the subreddits you will check on a regular basis and the keywords you will search on a regular basis. For each search, include the link to the search results page so you can easily perform the search by clicking the link.
Make sure the search results are sorted by “new” so that when you visit the link, you see the latest mentions of the keywords being searched.
Explore each of the monitoring services and if monitoring comments are important to your campaign, set up one of the services with some of the keywords you listed above.
Decide how often you will monitor Reddit and include the frequency below the list of subreddits and searches. If you do not wish to perform regular monitoring of Reddit, include a statement on why it is not relevant to your campaign.
Non-Promotional Submissions
Like monitoring, non-promotional submissions are essential to your Reddit marketing campaign. Reddit has an unofficial “10% rule”, which requires users to only make 10% of submissions and comments self-promotional.
This rule is rarely enforced but is often used as a retroactive reason to ban an account that is promoting itself in a way that a moderator or community does not like.
So if a moderator is suspicious of your account, they might look at your post history and if they see mostly posts promoting your business, they can ban your account under the 10% rule.
Pictured below is an excerpt from the Reddit wiki on Self-promotion explaining the 10% rule.
So it should be clear that non-promotional submissions are vital to your strategy. Not just to adhere to the 10% rule, but because it is good for Reddit. Non-promotional submissions can be links to content or self-posts that you create and post directly to Reddit.
The more you follow your target subreddit, the easier it is to identify the types of content and discussions they will find valuable. You do not need a technical test for it.
Non-promotional submissions should be the easiest types of submissions you make. Just keep the community in the back of your mind when you are consuming content elsewhere on the internet. If you find something interesting, share it on Reddit.
Assignment 4.4 – Create a plan for non-promotional submissions
Create a subheading in your strategy document for “Non-Promotional Submissions”. For non-promotional link submissions, write down a list of blogs, YouTube channels, and social media accounts that you can use to find quality content.
Ideally, these content sources will be related to your target subreddit, but it is okay to share non-promotional submissions that have nothing to do with your business.
Also, decide how often you will check these content sources and write them down. For non-promotional text submissions, write down a list of post ideas that you could submit to your target subreddit.
If you are having trouble coming up with ideas, think about the various conversations you would like to start with your target subreddit or information you can easily give to the subreddit.
Throughout your campaign, you can refer to this list of ideas at any time to create a post that starts a discussion.
Promotional Submissions
In the previous article, you learned about the types of promotional submissions that work on Reddit and planned a single submission. Refer to that submission plan for the next assignment.
Assignment 4.5 – Brainstorm ideas for promotional submissions
Copy the submission idea you came up with within the last article into your strategy document under the subheading “Promotional Submissions” and then brainstorm more ideas for promotional submissions.
Write down at least 3 ideas for promotional submission and for each idea, include how the submission will help you fulfill the purpose of your campaign.
Feedback Submissions
Using Reddit to acquire quality feedback is an ideal use case of the Reddit platform. Reddit’s voting features make it easy to determine which responses are the most credible, and valued by the community.
This allows you to ignore feedback that is downvoted as it is likely not something that other members of the community related to. Feedback posts are interesting because they lie somewhere between promotional and non-promotional.
They do not make any attempt to drive traffic or generate direct business results, but they do focus on and generate value for your business. Most subreddits will not have a problem with a feedback post as long as you promise to take specific action based on the feedback received.
A developer asks /r/productivity for feedback on their newly developed app and receives 100 comments with 87% upvotes.
For example, if you own a restaurant, you could post the following to your local subreddit: I am the owner of [local restaurant]. Is there anything you don’t like about our restaurant?
Then in the body of the post, you could say that all feedback will be considered and will be used to make improvements to the restaurant.
Additionally, follow up with each comment you receive to ask further questions or to simply thank them for their ideas. If you show the community that you are actually listening, they will be open to your post and not condemn it as promotional.
Assignment 4.6 – Brainstorm ideas for feedback submissions
Think about the aspects of your business and industry where market feedback could be valuable to you. Create a subheading “Feedback Submissions” in your strategy document and write down at least 3 ideas for feedback submissions.
Advertising
Reddit advertising has proven to be a poor strategy for most businesses and therefore we decided to not write about it in these articles. If you want to learn more about Reddit advertising, read this blog post: The Marketer’s Guide to Self-Serve Reddit Advertising.
Execution Logistics
After going through the previous sections, you should have a solid plan for the types of Reddit marketing activities you will engage in during your campaign. Now you need to determine who will execute the plan and how they will do it.
Assignment 4.7 – Logistics
If you have a team of one, then this will be a little easier for you, but go through the questions below to help formulate a plan to execute your Reddit marketing strategy.
The Team
- Who will be in charge of the Reddit marketing campaign?
- Will the person in charge be working alone or with others?
- Does anyone need to sign off on copy for comments and submissions before they are submitted to Reddit?
Timeline
- When will time be scheduled to execute the strategy?
- What day will you begin executing the strategy?
- What is the expected duration of the campaign?
