Squarespace, a leading consumer website builder, is one of the most aggressive marketers in their industry. In fact, they announced a 40 million dollar online marketing campaign in early 2014. They have also ran huge TV ad campaigns (including Super Bowl ads) and they have a robust affiliate marketing program.
Squarespace did run ads on reddit back in August of 2014 but we think they are missing out by not following up on more marketing opportunities on reddit.
Marketing Opportunities on reddit for Squarespace
There are millions of web users on reddit they could be marketing to. Most of these users are young males, which we assume is a major target demographic for Squarespace.
There are also a handful of subreddits that contain a more targeted audience of people who need to build websites.
Subreddit Audiences that Squarespace should engage:
r/photography (~220k subscribers)
r/web_design (~124k subscribers)
r/Entrepreneur (~114k subscribers)
r/webdev (~80k subscribers)
r/graphic_design (~61k subscribers)
r/ForHire (~46k suscribers)
r/design_critiques (~17k subscribers)
These seven subreddits have a total of 660,000+ susbcribers. This is a huge audience and it doesn’t even include the opportunities for more general audience targeting on reddit.
Redditors are talking about Squarespace
There are numerous mentions of Squarespace on reddit. People are asking for advice on choosing a website CMS and other redditors are discussing features of Squarespace.
Here are three examples of reddit posts that Squarespace should be monitoring and possibly responding to:
Marketing Recommendations for Squarespace
We recommend Squarespace take the following actions to further explore marketing and advertising on reddit:
1. Monitor reddit daily for mentions of Squarespace. Utilize Karmalytics.co to track keywords related to the Squarespace brand. Tracking the right keywords will help Squarespace identify opportunities to engage redditors and contribute value to the community.
2. Run experimental ads on the subreddits listed above. There is a large and very targeted audience of potential Squarespace users in the subreddits previously mentioned. Experimental ads should be crafted for each subreddit and given a small budget to test effectiveness.
3. Run experimental ads on the Front Page and interest groups of reddit. If Squarespace can create effective ads for the general reddit audience, then we would obviously recommend they run more ads to the Front Page and interest groups. General targeting also provides a higher level of advertising inventory which could accommodate larger ad campaigns that Squarespace might run. The Jeff Bridges Sleeping Tapes would be a great candidate for Front Page advertising (there are also 3 subreddits related to sleeping, r/GetOutOfBed – r/Sleep – r/Insomnia, that would make great candidates!).
4. Top level employees at Squarespace should hold AMAs or feedback sessions in various subreddits. AMAs are a great way to show a subreddit community that you care. C-Level executives would certainly gain lots of exposure through an AMA. Support staff members could even generate valuable attention. Also, the feedback received during AMAs could be massively beneficial to the Squarespace team.
5. Develop the r/squarespace subreddit community. Cultivating a dedicated subreddit for Squarespace is an opportunity to build a vibrant community of loyal Squarespace users. This subreddit can be used to handle general support questions, gather feature requests, and provide a place for Squarespace to convert redditors into paying customers. We know that Squarespace has their own Forum (see here), but a subreddit would be low-maintenance option for redditors to look for help. See /r/GoPro for a great example of a subreddit that is maintained by a large company.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
Squarespace is one of the top website builders and they have a huge marketing budget, but they have not taken an active interest in marketing on reddit. Reddit’s general audience are young male web users, which we assume is a market they want to communicate with. There are also numerous subreddits that are even more targeted audience groups that Squarespace should communicate with. We recommend that Squarespace monitor reddit for mentions of their brand and run more experimental ads, and develop their own subreddit.
