How to Market on Reddit: Strategy for Businesses

With over a billion monthly visitors, Reddit rightfully calls itself the front page of the internet. Believe it or not, Reddit is the origin of most memes you see on other social media. The reason being its slightly sophisticated, internet-savvy user-base. With a proper strategy, Reddit can be used to generate a lot of traffic to your website, and if one's post succeeds in hitting r/all, it can undoubtedly receive millions of views.

Why it is hard to promote on Reddit

Sadly, promoting on Reddit is not that straightforward. What works with other social media does not work for Reddit in 90% of the cases. There are two reasons for that:

• Reddit is strictly against self-promotion. Unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, no self-promotion is allowed on Reddit. You're not allowed to self-promote on a subreddit you own either and when it comes to promoting in other subreddits, its even more difficult. A group of people called the moderators moderate every subreddit and act as the unpaid cops of Reddit. They will remove your post at the slightest hint of spam or self-promotion, and even ban you in some cases.
• Redditors hate blatant marketing. It is quite easy to get roasted on Reddit, and it is even more typical with a visible marketing post because Redditors hate it. To add to the misery, Reddit has a downvote option, which means people can dislike something they hate. Hence, there is a high chance of your marketing post getting downvoted to the depths of hell, failing to receive any traction.

Due to these two reasons, it is quite reasonable for marketers to get demoralized and give up on Reddit.

How to market on Reddit successfully

A couple of important things need to be taken care of to run a lucrative marketing campaign on Reddit.

Avoid acting like a company and respond as an individual

The first step in this rule is, not using a Reddit account with the company's name on it because that acts as the most visible sign of a promotional post. Use a regular username for it instead and grow it as an individual around your niche. To do that, make non-promotional posts related to your niche, news and discussions, for example, and contribute to other related posts through valuable comments. Please do not make your account look like someone who is on Reddit only to promote his products and try to keep promotions as only 10% of your entire account history.

Frame your marketing posts the right way

The most common reason behind promotional posts getting removed on Reddit is wrong posting style. As I mentioned earlier, Redditors hate blatant, low-effort promotions which do not provide them with any value. A post with a link to the product and a selling title is just not going to work on Reddit. Such posts receive instant hate and in most instances are removed by the subreddit moderators. Check other submissions in your target subreddit and try to identify what kind of a post would have the maximum acceptance. Frame your posts in a way that they do not look like a direct promotion, and if possible, avoid acting as your product's owner and instead market it as a happy customer.

Final Words

Once you can make a submission which gets loved by the audience, you are deemed likely to receive success with your campaign. Identifying the right subreddits and the proper style of posting is the key to success on Reddit. If you would like to increase your posts' reach and bring more traction to it, you can always add some upvotes to it and boost its rankings.