The “Wisdom” Of The Crowd: 3 Ways To Use Reddit As A Campaign Resource

We use Reddit as an essential part of our marketing and promotion strategy at Go Fish Digital. By identifying subreddits that specialize in topics relating to our campaigns, our team is able to submit links to those campaigns directly to audiences that have self-identified as being interested in that kind of content. Over the years, this has proven to be an excellent way to drive traffic to a client site and has even generated some links for campaigns when writers found a piece of content we have created that was well-received on subreddits they follow, or even Reddit as a whole. 

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While promotion is what we use Reddit for the most, we have found the site to be a versatile tool that can be used a number of additional ways to improve, create, and conceive top-notch marketing ideas. Here are three of the ways our team uses Reddit and its user base to do our jobs as digital marketers to the best of our ability. 

Finding Inspiration 

We have a lot of clients at Go Fish, and for the most part, there isn’t much overlap between the core business identities and fields from one client to the next. As a result, our team has to be able to come up with ideas for any number of topics that relate back to what our clients do, and that frequently means we have to acquire at least a passable level of knowledge on these topics just to be able to brainstorm potential campaign ideas.  

In these instances, Reddit can be incredibly useful. As we have outlined in the past, the upvote system that Reddit uses combined with the ability of users to create and subscribe to niche subreddits dedicated to their interests means that our team can find ideas related to specific topics that are already well-received and trending in just a few clicks. 

Being able to go directly to a community of fans and subject matter experts to see what they are enthusiastic about helps us more quickly understand what appeals to them. From there, we can work forward or backward to produce a new and unique campaign idea that plays off of what we know audiences enjoy. When it comes time to brainstorm content ideas for an industry that we are largely unfamiliar with, taking some time to peruse the right subreddits can make all the difference between coming up empty and hitting a home run with your campaign ideas. 

Refining Your Campaign Strategy And Approach 

An old adage on the internet is “Never read the comments,” and in most cases, we would be hard-pressed to disagree. When used as part of an on-going revision process, however, the comments on Reddit can be an absolutely unrivaled asset when it comes to creating quality content.  

Anyone who actively participates on Reddit can tell you that its users are opinionated. People who take the time to participate in the comment sections on Reddit are rarely shy when it comes to giving their opinion, and thanks to the anonymity of usernames they almost never hold back from revealing their true feelings.

In most corners of the internet, this combination of anonymity and the relatively minor punishments that can be handed out for poor behavior would only produce a digital space to stay away from whenever possible. For digital marketers, however, that exact combination is what makes Reddit a perfect proving ground for your content. 

Being able to anonymously submit early-stage content pieces to Reddit allows marketers to receive quick and honest feedback directly from Redditors so they can pivot and improve campaigns before they are officially released to the general public. The dark side of Reddit’s commenting community will not be afraid to tell you that they hate your designs and why, or rip apart the validity of a dataset you have compiled. It’s important for us to remember that, in every pile of over-the-top negativity, there is a nugget of truth to their criticism, and extracting that nugget and acknowledging however much validity there is behind it can lead to making major improvements to a final product. 

Collecting The Right r/SampleSize 

Speaking of surveys on Reddit, that is the final way our team utilizes the platform to create great content. Surveys and their results have been of interest to people around the world for decades. After all, who doesn’t want to know what other people think and see just how similar or different the consensus opinion is from our own? 

Reddit has a few major advantages as a pool for survey respondents. First, it is possible to create your survey and post it for free using programs like Google Forms. Second, there is no limit to how many responses you can gather, whereas services like Pollfish charge more money for more responses. Third, you can identify and target subreddits where people are both inclined to participate and opinionated enough about a survey topic to make the results worthwhile. 

To those final two points, our team has begun using Reddit to collect survey answers more and more recently when it makes sense, and have used this approach to earn average survey response numbers that double what we used to gather through paid sources. While getting 600-1,000 responses is the norm for those paid options, surveys posted to Reddit regularly see us with a base of 1,500-3,000 respondents, with one recent success even clocking in at over 13,000! While gathering all responses from a single platform like Reddit can add some bias to the data, these bigger sample sizes improve the study’s overall validity in the eyes of reporters and readers, making them a major asset to the overall success of a campaign.       

In digital marketing, there are countless tools and resources out there that help us do our jobs and craft campaigns. While it is easy to get caught up in shiny new pieces of software or get lost exploring a previously undiscovered data source, it is always worth remembering that at the end of the day, we are trying to create things that appeal to other people, and Reddit just might be the best place on the internet to find out what other people like and dislike. Properly utilizing the Reddit platform and user base can go a long way towards taking your content from good to great, so why not use it?      

Does your team use Reddit as a way to strengthen your content campaigns? If so, how? If not, why not?

Let us know down in the comments!