Guide to Reddit Advertising and Is It Right for You?
Advertising on Reddit can seem intimidating and too random to warrant, creating a cohesive advertising strategy. Since the site’s primary purpose is to expose its viewers to top-trending content, users are notoriously anti-marketing. Regardless of these challenges, Reddit’s potential advantages prove too good to pass up.
Reddit is perhaps advertising’s best-kept secret. At the core of the platform is a highly engaged and passionate group of users who are authentic, influential, and disruptive across the Internet.
Reddit is a discussion, web content rating, and social news aggregator forum with over 330 million unique users. It is divided into thousands of subreddits, which range from groups that you would typically expect such as r/Canucks or r/History to weird, oddly specific subreddits such as r/IdiotsInCars or r/CorgiButts. Think of any subject, and there is a subreddit dedicated to it.
Is Reddit Right for You?
The answer is yes, it is. Let me explain:
Reddit’s advertising viability is based on its extremely high user engagement. It boasts of thousands of interest-based subreddits – over 130,000 in fact. When you consider traffic, the site ranks fifth among all US-based websites.
What’s more, Reddit users tend to spend more time on average on the site compared to any other social media platform. This is because of its tailoring of interests and subsequent high engagement levels. What is especially useful to advertisers is the fact that they can expose particular interest groups to their ads by targeting relevant, specific subreddits.
This means that you can tailor your ads more precisely depending on the group of users you target. For instance, if you are a wedding photography company, you can target subreddits that cover weddings, photography, and other related topics. Ergo, you already know that the users seeing your ds are predisposed to have interest in your content.
Build Trust and Engage with Target Subreddit Communities
Just remember that once you have identified and cultivated your list of target subreddits to advertise on, you need first to start engaging with those communities before promoting your content. You need to build an authentic connection and a level of trust. To do this, begin by upvoting other interesting submissions that align with your brand.
Next, share valuable content – mostly other than your own. Find interesting content from other blogs or media outlets that you think your Subreddit community will find useful. It is vital to use the platform genuinely to know and understand your target audience before offering them your content. This allows you to build a rapport and tailor your content accurately down the road.
Getting Started On Reddit
The first step to Reddit advertising is deciding your objective. What is the nature of your advertisement? Are you trying to increase conversions? Traffic to your site? Or is your campaign solely focused on brand awareness?
After defining your objective, you can then decide on how to target users. As previously stated above, Reddit is a useful site for targeting users based on their interests, and you can do this by focusing on relevant subreddits. Subsequently, choosing those is as equally important as defining your targeting based on things like user location and what devices they are using to view Reddit.
You can then select your bid depending on the strategy you want to use:
- CPM – cost per 1,000 impressions
- CPC – cost per click
- CPV – cost per view
The objective that you defined earlier will determine whichever of the above strategies you select. For instance, if you aim to improve your brand awareness, you are better off bidding via CPM. On the other hand, if your advertising objective is increasing conversions, you should choose to advertise via CPC. The bidding strategies above are optimized to help you achieve your specific goals.
After deciding on your bid strategy, the next decision to make is the type of ad to run. The three to choose from are:
- Link Ads: These are the most common ad styles on Reddit. They comprise of a headline, a link back to your preferred landing page, a thumbnail less than 500KB, and an image that is no bigger than 3MB.
- Text Ads: These are less common than link ads and comprise of a headline and text.
- Video Ads: Video posts must be in either MOV orMP4 format because the site does not support other formats.You can also choose to have the video start automatically once a user gets on the page or start when users click on it. Video ads comprise of a headline, a call to action, and a link back to your landing page. You can also add a cover image or thumbnail.
The Bottom Line
Advertising on Reddit can be simple, wide-reaching, and inherently engaging. Ultimately, it is worth considering using the platform to share content for the sake of audience engagement and helpfulness, rather than as a cost-effective advertising strategy.