Are you trying to sell to 18 to 29-year-old males? If so, you should at least consider marketing on reddit.
But first, you need to understand what this mammoth website is all about…and it’s a little hard to capture its essence in just a few words. It bills itself as “The front page of the Internet,” but that doesn’t really go far enough. Remember bulletin boards? reddit is a mutant bulletin board that spun out of control (in a good way) over the last decade or so.
Let’s go back to the site’s newspaper analogy, it’s the front page, the sports section, the personal ads, the lifestyle section and every other subject/interest area you might find represented in the mass media. It’s all sliced and diced into subreddits and you’ll find a subreddit on virtually any topic you can imagine.
That’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that users are dispersed over countless subreddits. The good news is that this creates a lot of opportunities for marketing on reddit; there is certain to be one or more subreddits that are natural homes for the prospects you want to reach. For example, here are some subreddits related to entrepreneurism:
- Entrepreneur
- Startups
- Accounting
- Business
- Finance
- Inventions
- Motivation
- Smallbusiness
- Socialmedia
- Kickstarter
- Sideproject
- Telecommuting
- Growmybusiness
- Marketing
3 ways to market on reddit
You can leverage reddit to market or brand your business three ways. You can post a link, write an article, or take out an ad. Take some time to get a feel for the site and understand all of its quirky rules and etiquette guidelines. Posts are up-voted and down-voted, so you don’t want to make a major faux pas right out of the starting gate and get your post down-voted into oblivion.
With those warnings, a number of small businesses have been able to connect with their best prospects through reddit. Remember that question I asked at the very beginning of this? If you want to reach a young male demographic of individuals who are passionate about an interest that aligns with your small business, you can score a major win on reddit. The big hurdle you need to jump over is to be sure that they see your posts as informative, not salesy.
Further, if your demographic is here, consider advertising on reddit. They claim you can get started for as little as $5, but of course, it depends on how many people you reach. You’re charged per 1,000 impressions. If you have a big budget –$30,000 and above – you get their “managed platform” and an account manager. Otherwise, it’s a self-service system.
Examples of marketing on reddit
Reddit ads are sort of a combination of an AdWords ad and a Facebook ad. Your ad appears at the top of the page, like AdWords, but you target specific subreddits, interest groups, and locations (Get that local business owner?), similar to what you would do on Facebook. Here are some ads that reddit is currently touting as among their favorites:
Note that even ads get up-votes and down-votes. Understanding this is central to achieving any kind of success at marketing on reddit: Users have to like what you post. This gets to the heart of engagement…or perhaps I should say “positive engagement.” If you engage your audience in a negative way, you’ll tally up those down-votes faster than you can say you’re sorry, which probably isn’t the best for branding.
This means that you need to speak the language of the 18 to 29-year-old male demographic. If that’s not you, consider bringing someone onto your team to advise you or do your marketing here. Not long ago, I used a reddit article written by a young woman to discuss the employment expectations of Millennials. The woman’s “rant” about her job and her boss was excellent and provided a perspective that would be hard to find elsewhere: reddit can be unique in that respect.
Finally, if your current demographic doesn’t include these 18 to 29-year-old males, you should examine your business model and find a way to bring them into the fold, if at all possible. You need to recognize that they are tomorrow’s “bread and butter” – ignore them for too long, you’ll lose them to your competitors.
If you don’t achieve success marketing on reddit, someone else will.
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