When it comes to social media advertising, advertising on Reddit is one of the least popular marketing channels.
Even though Reddit gets over 1.6 billion unique visitors per month, it’s still kind of the wild west when it comes to social networks. This scares a lot of marketers off.
But advertising on Reddit can get you impressive results if you do it right. Here’s a quick guide to effectively advertise on Reddit.
5 steps to start advertising on Reddit
1. Find your niche
One of the greatest things about Reddit is the potential for ad targeting. There are subreddits for everything.
Subreddits are threads on Reddit, and Reddit users make subreddits for very specific topics. Subreddit names are typically preceded with “r/”. For example, the subreddit for advertising would be written like this: r/advertising
Start with a broad Reddit search for your industry, then check the related subreddits for the specific subsets of your industry that are most applicable or profitable for your business.
As you know, targeted advertising is more effective than general advertising. So, these specific subreddits are where you want to run your ads.
Make a list of cool subreddits, focusing on the ones that have the most active users. This list will come in handy when you start setting up your ads.
2. Set up an advertising account
Using a personal Reddit account for advertising is a bad idea. Reddit doesn’t have a whole lot of rules, so it’s best to avoid mixing your personal and professional Reddit life.
When you create your business account, give it a name that makes it easy to identify as a business account. Redditors don’t mind seeing ads from businesses. But they’re abjectly averse to seeing ads posted by businesses pretending to be people.
Be transparent when you name your account. Redditors will appreciate it.
3. Create your ads
Reddit is set up like a forum. When you purchase an ad on Reddit, you’re essentially paying to be shown as the first post in that forum. This means that you should write your ads like forum posts, so they’re not invasive to the Reddit experience.
Since subreddit topics can be so specific, it’s also best to write tailored ads for each subreddit so your ad delivers what people expect to find in that subreddit.
4. Set up your campaigns
Reddit’s advertising interface is pretty streamlined and easy to use.
Here are the two biggest parts of setting up your Reddit ad campaigns:
- Audience.
- Mobile or desktop selection.
First, audience…
You can select groups of subreddits based on predefined categories. But the best way to target your audience is to use your list of subreddits from earlier and manually select those subreddits for your ad campaigns.
Next, mobile or desktop…
The most important thing here is to avoid sending mobile traffic to a landing page that’s not mobile friendly.
If you have landing pages for both mobile and desktop, awesome! If you only have a page for one or the other, be sure to specify which one you have when you set up your ad campaigns.
5. Optimize your ads
One great thing about advertising on Reddit is that it’s super easy to test and iterate your ads.
The best way to optimize your ads is with split testing. To do this, create two versions of a single ad. Run both ads for a set period of time. Whichever ad performs better is the winner. Keep running that ad.
If you want to really perfect your ads, you can write an improved version of the winning ad and run a split test with the improved version and the original. If you do this with all your ad campaigns a few times, you’ll start seeing the benefits of the huge Reddit user base that makes advertising on Reddit so attractive.
There you have it.
Advertising on Reddit is actually really simple. And if you do it right, it can be just as safe and effective as the more tightly managed social media platforms.
So give Reddit a try or send this guide to some friends so they can find out how effective advertising on Reddit is for you!
