Cosmetics play a crucial role in how businesses are portrayed to the customers. Many serious businesses are vary about the social platforms on which they operate so as to not to hurt the Brand image. This may be a key reason why many business lose out on the opportunity to use a cheap, dirty and hipster web interface (Reddit) and fail to maximize their marketing spend. However, Reddit is not called the “The front page of internet” for no reason.
The aim of marketing with Reddit is to get enough upvotes to be a featured content and watch as millions of users bring your web server down. The great thing about Reddit is that there are many subreddits and they are communities that bring people and interests together. And all one has to achieve is to be relevant in the appropriate subreddits to be successful.
There are 4 key ways in which companies can use subreddits to grow their business
- Engage and interact with your market
The hardest part about this approach is to find the relevant subreddit category where your company should engage. Once this has been established, companies can use various methods to generate responses from the community. Topgear is the best example of a company that is using subreddit to engage with its customers. Every week, users are encouraged to submit a picture of a car and prizes are given to the submission “Car of the week”. This approach creates both brand awareness and brand advocacy.
Subreddit groups
- A new Customer Service Channel.
It costs less to maintain a customer than acquire a new one. Companies can benefit a great deal by leveraging subreddits for customer support. For a company to do this effectively, they must identify a clear purpose for their subreddit, provide cross-links and outline directions. They must also be quick in responding and acknowledging the complaints. However, the benefits provided to the customers will far outweigh the costs since customers now have easy access to the support staff and have ease of sharing videos, pictures etc to get a response. Companies like Xbox and Tesco have been using subreddit for a few years and have reported increases in customer satisfaction and greater enthusiasm among the subreddit communities for new product launches.
- Creating a network
Networks are created around ideas and passion and not around industries and businesses. This is the concept “Game Of Thrones” has leveraged upon, with different subreddits for each character and dynasty, they have a big network of users sharing insights and possible plot twists. Game of thrones has the highest user community and network in reddit history. Businesses can learn a lot from this strategy and create user networks around ideas rather than product/companies. This will enable greater industry insights and will also enable the companies to crowd source ideas for subsequent products and releases.
TopGear group engagement
- Promoting events
While platforms like Facebook and Twitter enable a high reach to potential event ticket purchasers, the growth is primarily organic, meaning that the visibility of the promotions will first, reach your followers/fans and then, is propagated to a greater number of people through them. Though Facebook and twitter lets promotions reach non-followers through use of hashtags and by methods such as the paid “Boost post”. These methods are not as effective as can be done through subreddits. Subreddits enable a community of users who are constantly engaged and ready to take action. This unique positioning is different from other social media platforms because the action is immediate and the flow of information is dynamic. This provides event managers with a special tool that can reach more at lower cost and also better the conversion rate.
Overall Reddit may be overlooked as an Internet marketing tool in many industries but the main strengths of Reddit is its extremely engaged and passionate user base. As social media marketing evolves, I am sure that Reddit will evolve into a very powerful research data collection tool and will drive many major decisions.