The Ultimate Guide to Guerilla Marketing on Reddit

Reddit marketing has been cracked open… 👀

But it’s not really something people talk about much…

Reddit marketers have never banded together in communities like they did for SEO or Facebook ads.

Probably because it’s harder. 

Whenever you guerilla market on Reddit you have to convincingly look like you’re not marketing.

And that’s where this guide comes in!

We wrote this guide for entrepreneurs and marketers who are looking to promote themselves on Reddit.

Keep in mind though…

At the end of the day you can’t polish a turd and get a diamond.

Cause… you know. It’s a 💩.

So make sure your product or service isn’t a turd before you start pushing it.

So now that we got that out of the way…

Sit down, grab a coffee and let’s get cooking with some good old Reddit guerilla marketing.

 

What you need to know before marketing on Reddit

Reddit really doesn’t like to be marketed to. 

If Redditors figure out you’re marketing to them… You’ll be thrown to the wolves.

So stay subtle and keep a sense of plausible deniability for your brand.

In order to succeed, you need to be able to sound like a normal redditor, and if you can’t do that…

You’re gonna have a tough time.

You’ve been warned.

What’s the first thing you need to do if you want to market on Reddit?

Pretty simple…

Step #1: Find your target subreddits

Depending on the products or services you’re pushing, you’re going to have to find the right communities to promote them in.

Depending on your business, whether it’s SaaS, local, publishing, ecommerce or something else — you’ll have different target subreddits.

Here’s a sample table that breaks down some popular ecommerce product niche’s and their respective communities.

Ecommerce Category	Subreddit	Subscriber count
Male Fashion	/r/malefashionadvice	1,400,000
Female fashion	/r/femalefashionadvice & /r/frugalfemalefashion	627,000
Gardening	/r/gardening	1,100,000
Nootropics/Supplements	/r/nootropics	155,000
Skincare	/r/skincareaddiction	742,000
High quality goods	/r/BuyitforLife	512,000
Parenting	/r/parenting	509,000
Computer hardware	/r/buildapc	1,200,000
Games and gaming	/r/pcgaming	923,000
Apps for iOS	/r/apple	869,000
Apps for Android	/r/android	1,400,000
Music	/r/music	17,800,000
Books	/r/books	15,300,000
Cool tech	/r/gadgets	14,300,000
Fitness	/r/fitness	6,600,000
Travel	/r/travel	1,600,000
Beard products	/r/beards	158,000

You can use Redditlist and Metareddit to create your own “list of targets”.

Once you’ve found your target subreddit, you have a couple of options you can take….

Step #2: Build reputation in the community (or buy it)

Your account needs 3 things before it can start promoting any kind of product or service in a subreddit.

1. Sitewide reputation

If you want your promotions to look realistic, your account needs to have a diverse posting history across different subreddits.

You need some karma from lots of subreddit – this is basically your “general reputation as a redditor”.

The more karma your account has from general subreddits like /r/askreddit, /r/history, /r/worldnews the better.

We recommend at least 2,000 karma and 1 year on the account before starting to promote your product.

2. Community reputation

Community reputation is the karma you make within the subreddits that you’re trying to promote to.

It’s really important for the communities you’ll be posting across to see that you’re one of them.

It’s the whole social categorization principle.

The more meaningful the posts you’ve made within your target subreddits, the higher the reputation you’ll have within that community.

Worth noting:

If you’re promoting your content on /r/malefashionadvice and you’re not sure if you can enter /r/frugalmalefashion before having built up a reputation – worry not. Closely related communities are fine to cross promote to.

Don’t want to put in the time to get a bunch of karma?

We recommend gaining that karma yourself to start off.

If you can’t get to 2,000 karma – chances are you’ll have trouble organically promoting anything across Reddit.

Then again… The lazy man (or woman) always finds a way to get more karma😉

Now that you have an account with which you can post… It’s time to start marketing.

Step #3: Use these guerilla marketing strategies

You have loads of options when it comes to how you promote your product – and ultimately…

Your success will depend entirely on your ability to build reputation and post in a way that looks organic within the community.

Here are some tactics for building your campaign:

Basic Tactics:

These are pretty easy to get started with, all they take is some effort and strategic upvotes/downvotes.

Tactic #1: Find a product recommendation thread

A lot of product-focused communities on Reddit have a weekly recommendation or questions threads.

For example – /r/MaleFashionAdvice has a Should/Shouldn’t buy thread 2 times every week.

That’s 2 opportunities a week to do something like this:

1. account #1 asking whether you should buy a product from store x or store y (one of these should be yours)
2. Reply to the first comment from account #2, show support for your own store
3. Add a few upvotes to the parent comment to get the ball rolling

To avoid suspicion, I recommend mentioning other companies in the same comment as you mention- at the very least you’ll have plausible deniability for your company!

Tactic #2: Tell a story

One of the most successful methods for entrepreneurs to gain traction on reddit is to turn their venture into a “subreddit case study” – this is when they progressively engage with a community with a story.

Ever heard of beardbrand.com?

They started off by constantly engaging the /r/beards and the /r/entrepreneur community about their business idea and concept.

This is absolutely free marketing and free feedback about your venture.

Here are some subreddit posts that have done well following this format.

1. “From an idea to replacing my full-time salary in 4 months. How I did it, and what’s next!”
2. “4 months ago I quit my job to start a brewery, I’ve been waiting for this photo…”
3. “I quit my dead end $60k sales job and started a marketing firm. Today I closed my books on my sixth month.”
4. “Just finished my first attempt at making my own bag. Any and all advice is greatly welcomed. :)”

Take note! – None of the top threads are directly asking for a sale.

They’re all following a piece of advice that floats around in founder <> VC circles which applies to community marketing as well…

“If you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money”

Tactic #3: Insert mentions of your products into your post

The most common way people try to market themselves on Reddit is just blatantly inserting links into comments.

This has about a 85% chance of blowing up in your face, but if done correctly and with the proper approach – this could work.

It’s OKAY to try this in the following circumstances:
1. When the product you are promoting directly answers a question that’s being asked
2. When you include 1 or 2 links to products belonging to competitors. I recommend specifically choosing competitors that are more expensive or have a worse website. You want to promote yourself after all 😉

Advanced tactics

These advanced tactics are less common and more complicated to execute, but if done right will help you build a community that loves your product.

Tactic #4: Create controversy

This one is perhaps one of the most fun tactics to execute, it’s tricky to do correctly so be warned!

1. Create a post on a subreddit promoting your product/app
   1. “Hey /r/xxxx I spent 20 hours making this handbag… What do you think?”
2. Choose 2 sides of an argument and start arguing through those accounts in the post.
   1. A: I’m so tired of these obvious promotional posts…
   2. B: I dunno we should probably be encouraging artisans.
3. Escalate the argument and selectively add upvotes, downvotes and other comments to introduce virality.
4. Watch as other people join in, if you create enough drama you’ll get linked from /r/subredditdrama.
5. Or maybe you’re the one who put that in subredditdrama…

Tactic #5: Ask a leading question

Did you just finish designing your business cards for your new company? Great!

What a great opportunity for free promotion from the /r/design subreddit.

Why stop there? Throw it over to /r/marketing to review as well!

Other ideas:

• Did you just finish building your website or logo? – Ask /r/web_design for a review
• Did you just finish getting photos done of a model in your t-shirt? Ask /r/design, /r/entrepreneur for a review
• Did your store just start to accept Monero? Share it over at /r/monero
  You get the idea

Tactic #6: Use mention monitoring software to look for high-interest phrases

Have you heard of Brand24 or Mention?

They’re kickass brand monitoring tools that allow you to get notified whenever someone mentions your brand name or target keywords on Reddit.

If you want to kickstart your Reddit campaign, keep track of the keywords related to the main product you sell and comment when you see them mentioned on Reddit.

Tactic #7: Tell an authentic story about a competitor

Note: Do not make up stories – they will be found out and it will be obvious that you are shilling your company.

1. Retell a negative experience about a competitor
2. Leave a comment on the thread agreeing with the negative experience and mentioning your brand and a couple of competitors.
3. Buy some timed out upvotes all around to make everything seem more popular.

Tactic #8: Insert photos of your product as the feature

If you sell a product that’s highly photogenic, or that has a twist which makes it stand out in some way – it could be a great candidate as a photo post.

Want a shortcut to building community reputation?
1. Browse a subreddit by “new”
2. Pick 5 threads, buy 1-5 upvotes per thread and leave a comment.
3. Buy 5 upvotes for your comment

The tools of the trade

These are the “must-have” tools when you’re engaging in guerilla marketing on Reddit.

Later For Reddit

Meet LaterforReddit

LaterForReddit is a subreddit analysis and post scheduling tool. It’s got lots of great free features, and is a strong addition to any reddit marketing arsenal.

The most useful tool is their post scheduling tool – it’s the perfect way to find out the best time to post on a subreddit, and allows you to schedule that post as well.

Snoopsnoo

SnoopSnoo is perfect for narrowing down the subreddits that are most relevant to your niche.

After you enter your target subreddit, it’ll generate a cloud map of similar subreddits.

Cool isn’t it?

Reddit Insight

Meet Reddit Insight –  a full featured analytics suite for reddit marketing campaigns.

Reddit insight is a brilliant little tool that allows you to easily track the success of a submission or a user. Use it to see upvote trends and patterns.

Upvotes.io

WARNING: We’re going to plug ourselves a little bit here…

But it’s only because we’re actually the best service out there for your grey-hat needs.

Read why:

1. We’ve got instant delivery for upvotes, downvotes, accounts and even free upvotes (limited to 2 per person)
2. We only use aged accounts for everything
3. We allow you to post comments through our accounts
4. We have a 100% satisfaction guarantee
5. Live chat support
6. Crypto, Paypal & Stripe payment options

Basically we’re pretty great. If you’re in the market I’d highly recommend checking us out.

Okay, enough self-promotion *Shivers*

Here’s how to blow up on Reddit