By now, most marketing professionals are aware of the ins and outs of using social media platforms as a useful marketing tool. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn naturally come to mind. However, Reddit is mostly off the radar for business advertising. But with over a billion interested users, it may be time to add Reddit to your arsenal for reaching your customers.

What is Reddit? 

For those unfamiliar with the platform, Reddit is a single platform that combines web content, social news, social media, and live interaction. Its layout is straightforward, with threads usually only consisting of text boxes and a few photos here and there. But don’t let its lack of bells and whistles fool you. Reddit has generated over 1.5 billion users, making it the sixth most viewed site in the U.S, above Netflix. 

Registered users can contribute images, content, news, or anything else they would like to share. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called “subreddits” or “communities.” These subreddits cover a myriad of topics like cooking, sports, video, news, politics, and science. Participating users can then “vote” the post up or down. This ensures that interesting content floats to the top of the page while the unappealing posts are washed away towards the bottom. It’s a completely user organized app that encourages interaction and culminates communities of like-minded people online. 

Why Market on Reddit?

Reddit has quickly become a red hot opportunity for marketing. As mentioned above, it’s the perfect place to establish a marketing strategy simply because of how many viewers it generates on any given day. Reddit users spend an average of ten minutes per visit and view roughly seven pages in that time. During that ten minutes, millions of people could be looking at your advertisement. 

Reddit offers two different types of advertisements that marketers can use to their advantage. The first shows up in the user’s right-hand sidebar—this type of advertising is best utilized for larger photos or video advertising. The second type is buried in the feeds. It acts as a thread response, but when users click on the ad, they are sent to the ad’s landing page. This flexibility allows marketers to experiment with effective advertising on Reddit and decide what works best for the demographic they are reaching. 

Reddit also has an extremely low minimum daily ad spend. Clocking in at around $5, Reddit’s affordable ad spend puts it as a more accessible advertising platform than its competitors. 

Tactics for Effective Reddit Marketing

Reddit is an entirely underutilized platform, making it the perfect place to advertise your business, gain traffic to your website, and experiment with tactics that work. But Reddit can be a little challenging to advertise on because the audience mostly dislikes being spammed with ads or businesses that seem disingenuous. Because of this, it’s essential to treat these ad spaces like you would Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, versus Craiglist (little to no effort, and irrelevant to the content that the user is currently viewing). There are a few tactics to consider when breaking into the Reddit community.

Register as a user: The best way to get to know the platform you are advertising on is to become a user yourself. This allows you to learn the user experience’s ins and outs and see ads from other companies as you scroll. It also helps to gain Reddit loyalty. Users enjoy knowing that you are a trusted brand that participates in threads and posts content regularly before advertising. 

Post genuine content: Since Reddit is such a unique experience on the internet, it’s in the advertiser’s best interest to generate original, eye-catching content. The ads that Reddit participants see when scrolling through the site should blend in seamlessly with the content they are viewing. The more subtle the ad, the more likely you’ll generate traffic to your website. 

Do not use fake accounts: Reddit users are smart and quick to point out any shills. Using tools like fake accounts, asking your employees to upvote your threads, and undisclosed paid ads will be exceedingly hurtful to your business. 

The Bottom Line

Reddit is a unique social media platform that can be a handy marketing tool if used correctly. But as great as it is, it does require a strong level of knowledge of the user base before diving right in. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, Reddit has created a community of users that harness the site’s content, and they come together as a united front. If done incorrectly, the community as a whole could ostracize your company. However, if you can focus on Reddit’s best practices for advertising, you unleash the potential of millions of viewers a day looking at your business. 

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