What challenges do you face when marketing on Reddit? Help me build the perfect solution!
Hello Indie Hackers!
I'm currently working on promotee.co, a platform designed to ease the process of marketing on Reddit. However, I'm now at a crossroads, trying to figure out which direction to take my product. This is where I need your help!
I'd love to hear the problems and challenges you've faced when marketing on Reddit. Share your thoughts below so I can better understand the users' needs and make promotee.co the ultimate solution for Reddit marketing.
Thanks in advance!🙌
PS: This authentic post was created via marketee.io
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Reddit dislikes self promotion. It is a community and the redditors quickly sense a self promotor. Reddit is also struggling with its advertising program. They introduced advertising that looks like a reddit post, hoping the redditors would engage. However i am yet to see a reddit ad where community members engage with the advertising. Therefore it may be a good platform for brand awareness, but extremely poor platform for lead generation (speaking of ads)
Redditors do like when you are contributing to a topic or sparking a discussion. You got to be like them to get them to like you.
The problem is not the audience on reddit, it's just the majority of people didn't figure out how to cater to reddit yet. It's as simple as being transparent AND providing value, then the self-promotion will likely be forgiven.
Here's a brilliant example: https://www.reddit.com/user/caliber-justin/comments/uxpv93/hi_im_one_of_the_founders_of_caliber_a_100_free/
I've experienced this as well, the moderators & auto-moderators are quick to take down anything that has to do with self-promo even if its relevant. For example, I couldn't ask the lose weight reddit what topics they'd benefit from in my health newsletter.
Isn't it true for any community?
No. Reddit in particular suffers from upvote/karma bandwagon. Therefore an ad with less upvotes continuously gets less (as everyone keeps downvoting) which is discouraging.
Professional or targeted communities are way better in terms of marketing
i've read marketing data that on average, reddit users are young, casual, and don't have a lot of disposable income... this is the real reason ads don't work there.
Where have you read this?
Mostly true for any community. I follow communities in Third Party Risk Management. Redditors engage with the post if someone asks for advice, but they don’t hit a like button when the same person self promotes.
I think it's a good thing. I believe that once you start giving values and plug yourself the right way, it works.
It's super hard to do marketing on reddit. It's mostly the user behaviour m Most people on reddit hate ads/self promotion. The only thing that's worked for me is being authentic and sharing your story. Not your product but your story
Or your expertise
Reddit advertising would have been better off if karma/upvotes were entirely fake or not included. Otherwise the current upvotes/downvotes create a biased reception which affect feedback.
I think Reddit ads in-effect are not worth it.
I try to do two things, one commenting on redditors having a problem and looking for a solution that I might provide, this usually brings 1,2 leads nothing special.
And posting in subs where it is allowed to a certain degree to self-promote.
The other thing is your own profile. Having the most important post pinned, gives more credibility and when users visit your profile, they see your promotion
This is basically how I do it. I am currently working on https://memoiri.app check it out and leave a app store review! Would appreciate it
So what has worked for you?
I do all three, its the combination, i try to use my account for promo and engagement, you have to put out work. I try to engage in subs with high amount of users, sofar I had only one viral post
Ohh, is it worth it though?
Well i learned, what is more/less effective. Currently I try to simple engage in content, and add my own value to subs, which usually turns into visitors to my profile and to more downloads
Yeah...that is what worked for me as well.
Reddit is a beast I've yet to learn how to conquer. As a newbie there, top barrier for me is low Karma - I've written a couple of interesting alcohol-related posts (my product is an alcohol tracker) and tried to share them on popular subreddits, but got banned immediately because of my low karma. So basically I would need to spend a lot of time browsing Reddit and commenting to gain karma, while these posts of mine could get me points themselves by starting a discussion.
PS: tried to use your tool, but keep getting "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred" when attempting to search leads by keyword..
Hey, let me check that out. Can you dm me on twitter?
Sure, check your dms
Content policy. My product is in the adult (BDSM) niche, and while there are some subreddits for this, they mostly forbid self promotion/ads. Reddit's ad content policy is also pretty strict.
Your product seems like it would help though.. I'll try it out!
Great, with NSFW it's relatively easy to get customers.
Hey, I tried your product, but there was a slight issue, I cannot give an empty value as an input to make a list. For example, I want to make a list of ALL active users( someone who commented or posted) in a sub, and I was not able to do that, could you help me with that 🙏
Sure, just dm me on twitter
This is cool! I do this manually. I think the most challenging thing is that you really need to understand Reddit's ecosystem as a whole and it's sub-cultures that are sub-reddits. If you've seen people roast others based on their post history, it's because it's easy for people to see through your BS. If you're going to do this at scale, I would love to see how you think about bringing value + being authentic + getting scale.
That is where we are headed. Making things authentic is a challenge but we are working some ideas through.
Reddit is very tricky and we hired a guy to do this for us. He goes slow and careful, or all will be lost. Experience with Reddit is everything. I can tell you Reddit has the most traffic and will send your page clicks.
Great, so is it bringing you any business as of now?
A few
Hey there! First of all, kudos for taking the initiative to create a solution that can help fellow Indie Hackers with Reddit marketing. It's great to see someone tackling this challenge head-on.
As for the challenges we face, I think the biggest one is understanding the unique nature of each subreddit and their respective audiences. If you can create a platform that helps users navigate these nuances and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly, you'll be making a huge difference in the community. Keep up the great work and I can't wait to see how promotee.co evolves! 🚀
interesting, how do you market on Reddit as of now?