Reddit – the front page of the internet – is a different animal when it comes to content strategy and marketing in general. The audience is typically brutally honest and not in the mood to be pitched, which is why it’s overlooked by the vast majority of marketers.

Over 26.4 million people use Reddit every month, so while it may be challenging and have a serious learning curve, developing a solid social media content strategy for Reddit is a great way to get your brand in front of a large and active audience, and most importantly, natural.

Research your Reddit audience and plan accordingly

The process for creating a content strategy on Reddit is a little different than the other social media platforms, but it starts just the same. You’ll need to do a bit of research to find out exactly where your audience is spending their time and what type of content engages them. In this step, you’ll want to identify as many subreddits as possible that are relevant to your brand and where you could potentially share content. If your competition is active on Reddit, you should also check out what they’re doing and how the community is responding to their activity.

This is the time to set goals for what you want your Reddit campaigning to achieve. As with any marketing endeavor, you should have specific objectives in mind to aid in decision-making and keep all the content geared at reaching those goals. If multiple people will be managing your Reddit account, it’s also a good idea to establish a brand personality so your comments and communications will be consistent.

However, we do know that Reddit posters are not just honest, but also organic-minded. This means that if they get a whiff of a post possibly being sponsored or for hire, they will either attack it, or, worse – report it to the mods for deletion. Therefore it is huge that any content posted to Reddit appears to be both natural and offer value to all users of any sub-Reddit you post to.

Key Performance Indicators for Reddit Marketing

With your clear and specific goals in mind, determine which metrics you’re going to track to inform you of your progress. Watching your progress towards your goals will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so you can adjust your Reddit content strategy and achieve your goals faster.

Reddit’s metrics are slightly different than the metrics you’ll see on Facebook and Instagram. It has data like Karma and the number of nano-influencers you’ve engaged. Several of these metrics can help you track engagement. User followers can tell you how much of an audience you’ve amassed.

Reddit’s KPIs

• Karma
• AMAs participated in
• User followers
• Nano-influencers engaged
• Non-branded posts created
• Cost per thousand impressions on ads
• Promotions run
• Comments received
• Traffic to your site from Reddit

Be unique.

Bring your audience research together and create a new list of the type of content they want and need. Then create a list of the content that’s already available on Reddit. Indicate in your list whether the available content is strong or weak. Look for gaps and weak points where your brand could get a foothold and carve out a market share for your content. You’re going to be competing against content creators in addition to your regular industry competition, so finding a niche to fit into can make a stark difference in your performance.

What do Redditors want?

Refine your content further by tailoring your approach to your reader’s status in the buyer’s journey. This falls under audience research, but it’s a separate analysis that can help you in preparing content and choosing where to post.

Create content that’s focused on brand awareness and providing valuable information for readers who are in the awareness stage. The awareness stage is when consumers have just realized they have a problem but haven’t started considering solutions yet.

Created content that’s focused on credibility and introducing a solution for readers who are in the consideration stage. As the name suggests, this is the stage in which consumers start looking at the various viable solutions to their problem. It’s important to have some brand awareness and a relationship established by this point.

Make a list.

You usually want to create a calendar for social media content and you can certainly do that for Reddit too, but your real brand benefits are going to come from posting valuable content to relevant subreddits, so mapping out your own premade content isn’t as crucial a step in this case.

Make a list of the subreddits you identified as relevant to your brand or where your audience spends their time. For each subreddit, make a list of valuable, informative content that you could share there. This can be existing content or content you’ll create specifically for this campaign. It should contribute to the subreddit in a substantial way. Resist the urge to advertise.

Create and post your Reddit content.

Schedule some time to create your content in batches, so it’s prepared before you need it. You don’t have to post it all at once. It’s better to space it out so that you’re active every day.

Respond to communications and always maintain your brand personality, even if another user forgets his or her manners. Linking to outside content is one of the most popular comment types on Reddit. Links to videos are the most upvoted. Don’t feel like all your comments need to be full-length blogs.

As long as you’re being relevant, following the rules, and most importantly providing value, your content should perform well on Reddit.

Here are 3 awesome marketing threads that were really popular on Reddit in the past year:

• 7 Content Marketing Strategy for 2021!
• Underrated Content Marketing Tools You Need
• A huge list of learning resources for digital marketing