Reddit Marketing: 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Benefit from an Active Reddit Presence

Reddit marketing can be a big key to promoting your small business online. After all, the website is known as the front page of the Internet. Reddit is currently the 19^th most popular website on the Internet. The website is basically a mix of a social media platform and a forum. Its only goal is to organize the top viral content on the Internet according to feedback and posts provided by users. To put into perspective just how powerful Reddit can be for anybody trying to market a business online, the site received more than 1.2 billion visits just in the month of October 2019 alone.

To say the least, business owners who can come up with interesting content to share about what they’re doing can benefit from loads of traffic, but it also works the other way around. It’s possible to find the day’s top stories in any given niche just by using the search bar on the website and typing in a keyword. That’s a great way to publish blog posts that will get traffic or come up with other content marketing ideas.

Let’s go deeper into how small business owners can use Reddit marketing to benefit their business in the long run and grow their presence online. We’ve already touched on a few of the ways, but let’s dig a little deeper.

Finding Viral Content

Finding viral content on Reddit is really simple if you’re not looking for anything related to a particular niche. All you have to do is go to the Reddit homepage and click on the Popular section and you’ll see all the posts currently going viral. How does the site determine what deserves to go viral? The users vote a post up or down based on whether they like it or don’t like it. The more upvotes a post gets, the more it rises to the top. The Popular section doesn’t distinguish between niches, but within niche categories, you get the same result. The cream always rises to the top.

What are Subreddits?

Niche categories on Reddit are called subreddits. Think of it this way. Reddit.com shows you all of the latest and greatest trending content. Reddit.com/r/smallbusiness will lead you to the Small Business subreddit, a niche page where only post related to small business are posted. A post can be anything though. It can be a link to a news article, a meme, a question, or just a rant. Participating in the Reddit community by posting content and commenting on the posts of others is a key part in getting the most out of the website as far as generating traffic is concerned.

What is Reddit Karma?

Reddit Karma is basically a way of Reddit rewarding uses for participating in the community. Post something people like and they reward you with an upvote which gives you points, whether your post is an actual thread or just a comment on somebody else’s post. Post spam, clickbait or anything else that’s too controversial or misleading and people will actually vote down your post and you will lose points.

Gaining karma points is important because certain subreddits won’t allow you to post anything unless you have achieved a certain number of Karma Points. Moderators determine what those thresholds are and whether certain subreddits should have a threshold at all. While there is no hard or fast rule for how this works or how it’s determined, limiting a particular subreddit to users who have a certain number of karma points is usually a reflection of how spam prone that subreddit might be.

For example, if your small business revolves around cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin, you’ll need to earn a significant number of karma points to participate in the r/btc subreddit. The Bitcoin boom of 2017 saw people across the Internet spamming Reddit, Facebook and other sites with bogus offers related to cryptocurrency investment opportunities. So Reddit has limits on pages that are likely to produce lots of spam if they didn’t have those limits. This makes it easier for the community to engage without garbage being posted over and over again.

Users build up karma points by sharing viral content or having their comments get a lot of upvotes. Building up an account is as simple as taking a viral story from one subreddit and posting it in another. It takes time but it’s not rocket science. Anybody can do it.

Paying for Reddit Ads

Reddit ads are distributed based on a CPM model. CPM is an acronym that represents the cost per 1,000 impressions. This means for every 1,000 people that see a paid post you are promoting, you’ll get charged a certain fee. This is different from pay-per-click advertising where you only pay when somebody clicks on your ad. The advantage to using paid advertising on Reddit is that you can target very specific subreddits with a special offer just for those people. Let’s say you’re running an online store that sells dog collars that are only for pitbulls. Pitbull owners represent a very passionate niche, not only because they love their dogs, but because much of society still dismisses pit bulls as being too aggressive to be considered pets.

Knowing this niche very well, you can decide to promote a post in the r/pitbulls subreddit and offer your dog collars to users through a special promotion where the dog collar is free and the customer only pays for shipping. Viola! You’ve got yourself highly targeted traffic with an incredible offer, which usually equals sales.

r/deals: An Alternative to Paid Reddit Advertising

r/deals is a subreddit or anybody can post a deal or promotion for reddit users to take advantage of and enjoy. The upside to this is that it’s free and you can potentially get a lot of traffic with an attractive offer. The downside is that it doesn’t target a particular niche, and you’re mostly targeting people who are looking for a deal, which means they might not buy anything that is a high-end offer.

However there is a way that you can take advantage of these facts. Going back to the example above, if you’re selling dog collars that apply to all dogs but have a unique feature that makes it kind of a novelty or viral kind of product, you can offer them in the r/deals subreddit and potentially have a ton of success. Finding products that are going viral and reselling them at a higher price is a very common way to make money online these days. In a subreddit like r/deals, you generally need to promote things that are free or very cheap and very much have a broad appeal.

Outside of that formula it’s probably best to pay for an ad if you really want to promote something and yield immediate sales.

Subscribing to Different Subreddits in your Niche

Think about all the keywords that are associated with your industry or line of business. Many of the most popular keywords probably have their own threads on Reddit.com. Literally any broad niche subreddit that you subscribe to will elicit other suggestions that are related. You can sit around and subscribe to all the suggestions you see and be is connected to your niche as you want to be.

If you only read the top posts of each subreddit and began to participate in them by commenting and adding your own posts, you will not only gain karma points, you’ll begin to understand what people in those various subreddits enjoy reading and learning about.

Let’s pretend that you are a writer interested in self-publishing books. You can look up self-publishing in the search bar on the Reddit.com homepage. Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll see other suggested subreddits like r/publishing, r/selfpublish and r/writing. Just like that you can subscribe to four different threads on one topic, find the one that’s the most active are intriguing and become an active member of that thread. You can even create viral content based on other Reddit stories you’ve found, re-spin that content on your own blog and then share that blog post back on Reddit and get yourself traffic.

Using Reddit for Content Marketing

Re-writing a blog post and putting it back up on Reddit is a classic content marketing strategy, but of course blog posts aren’t the only kinds of content you can publish on your own website. It’s also not the only kind of content that you can find on Reddit.

There are subreddits dedicated to memes and GIFs. GIFs are those moving, animated viral images that you see on all kinds of social media websites. Memes are funny or thoughtful messages complemented by a photo. Both of these media assets are usually made only for the purpose of generating traffic, going viral and increasing engagement.

Reddit.com is so powerful when it comes to the stuff, they are even YouTube channels with millions of subscribers where the only thing in the video is a list of the top comments in a given niche being read outloud by a robotic voice. The Youtube channel Cowbelly Studios is the quintessential case study for that. The channel does nothing but highlight Reddit comments. The people behind it are making big money with the traffic, rest assured of that.

Provide Customer Support

While it does take time and effort to build up your karma points as a Reddit user and it also takes time and effort to establish a new Reddit page and grow its audience, anybody can do both of those things. There are no special requirements other than that you engage in the community, don’t spam, and add valuable content to the threads that you are a member of.

However, viral content and content marketing aren’t the only reasons to use Reddit. You can also establish a subreddit using the brand name of your company as the subreddit title and URL. This way you can handle customer questions, comments and complaints. Many small business owners look to do this through Twitter and that’s okay, but Reddit’s interface is a little bit easier to follow. You can simply put together a post asking for questions, comments, concerns and feedback and people will definitely complain in the comments section of they’re having trouble at need to raise an issue. They might even complement you on what a great job your business is doing serving them.

Listening to your audience and your customers is very important in this day and age and it has to be a part of any social media strategy. The fact remains that most of your business will come from your most loyal customers, so you need to take care of them.

The added benefit of doing this is that when you have something to promote or something to sell, you can have a Reddit page filled with your own customers and prospects to promote to. Having your own list of targeted customers is the most powerful thing anybody can do it online marketing, whether that list exists on an email newsletter, a Reddit or Facebook page, or any other platform.

Organize an Ask Me Anything

Ask Me Anything is a special Reddit thread where people can invite other Redditors to literally ask them anything. Many of the threads are totally not safe for work, but definitely entertaining and sometimes hilarious. They can even be quite thought-provoking and intriguing. From time to time a celebrity or well-known business person will offer up their fans the opportunity to ask them anything. As a small business owner, you could launch this within your own subreddit, or promote it in the/r/AMA subreddit and get lots of customer feedback or field interesting questions that might show just how much people are engaged with your brand, product or service.

Promoting the fact that you have an Ask Me Anything session coming up on your blog or through your mailing list will give people an opportunity to get ready for it even if they don’t use Reddit on a regular basis. If you’re going to logon and answer any questions, you definitely want there to be a spike in traffic on Reddit. The best AMA sessions can end up living on the subreddit for a long time which could get you valuable targeted traffic on a consistent basis for quite a while.

How Reddit Complements a Broader Marketing Strategy

Reddit can be a very powerful tool for any small business owner for a variety of reasons. It can drive traffic to a blog, engage customers with interesting content, answer their questions and drive loads of traffic to your website for a long time. You can also use it to promote content and social media pages and of course promote actual giveaways and deals that you want to offer to generate sales. Reddit is probably one of the best third-party websites you can add to your online marketing strategy.

Still keep in mind that no marketing strategy operates based on just one website or tool. Search engine optimization, graphic design, understanding your customer’s journey, and putting together a proper marketing funnel are all part of a robust plan that will lead your small business to success.

The best way to benefit from anything related to social media and engagement these days is to engage yourself. Become a part of the community and most importantly let customers know that they are part of your brand’s story. That they are part of your community. Do this and you will succeed in your online marketing efforts whether you are using Reddit or any number of social media websites and strategies to generate traffic.

Jack Choros

Jack has been in the internet marketing space for 10 years. He enjoys writing and watching the Toronto Raptors.