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Why Reddit Deserves a Spot in Your Media Mix | Colin Belyea
35 Plays1 month ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers manage their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of The Efficient Spend Podcast, Colin Belyea, growth marketer and Reddit strategist, explores how Reddit is becoming a high-leverage growth channel. Colin breaks down the shift toward zero-click search, why Reddit content ranks so well in AI and Google, and how to balance paid and organic efforts for long-term brand trust. He also shares tactical advice for measuring impact, building reputation, and avoiding common Reddit pitfalls.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven $250M + in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Colin Belyea is a growth marketer and Reddit strategist with over 20 years of experience, leading performance for 15+ VC-backed startups through his work at No Growth, Karmic, and Telescope Digital. He helps brands turn Reddit into a scalable acquisition and trust-building channel by blending paid media expertise with deep community-driven strategy.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH COLIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinjamesbelyea/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://www.nogrowth.ca/our-work
https://ads.reddit.com/
https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/
https://news.ycombinator.com/
https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot
Recommended
Transcript
Reddit's Emergence in Search Results
00:00:00
Speaker
I was doing some research on some work that trying to do. And i just suddenly realized after like 10 straight Google searches that every single search that I had returned Reddit threads. It returned Reddit threads in the top five positions.
00:00:12
Speaker
It returned Reddit threads a above, you know, the very expensive content marketing that I know, you know, some other brands have invested in that was now ranked below like an offhanded comment that someone made on Reddit. And it just made me realize, like, I think a lot of marketers have this experience. we We're just like, how do how do I take advantage of this? This seems like a sea change in how acquisition works and how organic is working, specifically around search.
AI Influence on Reddit Marketing
00:00:43
Speaker
Colin, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hey, Paul. Happy to be here. Thank you for the invite. I'm excited to chat about Reddit and all things growth. It's obviously a very exciting emerging channel that a lot of folks are thinking about.
00:00:57
Speaker
It dovetails lot of things that that are happening in the industry right now with AI and and changes to search, changes to to macro trends and consumer behavior. We'll get into that, but I want to contextualize this for folks because this isn't something that you've kind of thought about doing overnight.
00:01:14
Speaker
um You're an experienced tactical full funnel marketer with with a lot of experience. Can you just kind of walk through your career and how you've worked with startups and kind of what led you to this conclusion of, I'm still going to manage paid, I'm i'm interested in growth, but Reddit is this thing that's really exciting for me.
Reddit as an Organic Marketing Avenue
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So my background is in being head of growth and venture-backed startups. I said we grew up at a company called Bungalow, remote year before that, in between a company called Outsight.
00:01:46
Speaker
They've mostly been like a higher consideration consumer startups, but I've also worked freelance for all manner startups from c to series b and in 2024 sorry early 2024 so like about a year and a half ago i was i still technically i still am partner at a meta agency called no growth i was doing some research on a on some work i was trying to do and i just suddenly realized after like 10 straight google searches that every single search that i had returned reddit threads it returned reddit threads in the top five positions it returned reddit threads above
00:02:21
Speaker
You know, the very expensive content marketing that I know, you know, some other brands have invested in that was now ranked below like an offhanded comment that someone made on Reddit. And it just made me realize, like, I i think a lot of marketers have this experience. We were just like, how do how do I take advantage of this? This seems like a sea change in how acquisition works and how organic is working specifically around search.
Integrating Reddit into Paid Marketing Strategies
00:02:44
Speaker
So that led me to dive deep and that kind of eventually led us have this conversation. And it's interesting that you kind of bring a growth marketing and paid marketing lens into this because you think about things perhaps a little bit differently than then someone from like an organic side might think about it, or even from a a social side.
00:03:07
Speaker
You're keenly aware of the importance of managing a budget and managing revenue expectations from that that budget. And so I wonder, you know, as you started thinking about this, did you have that in the back of your head of, I'm going, if I'm going to have to kind of vie for media budget and go to a CEO or CFO or CMO, I'm going to have to sell the fact that we should be trading dollars from other channels into Reddit.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yes, that is definitely a part of the of the equation. So coming from like a paid media background, like the way that I first started thinking about Reddit was through the paid media lens, right? Like how does the ad product work?
00:03:51
Speaker
What is the audience like? How does the audience act How do you create a system of dollars in, more dollars out, hopefully?
Zero-Click Environment and Data Management
00:04:00
Speaker
But I think where I landed over time is that kind of aligns with this this new idea that we've seen floating around, around Vibe Marketing.
00:04:06
Speaker
I think the emergence of Reddit and the way that it is informing Google search, it is informing and AI search, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. It's kind of, I think it's leading the great marketing world into much closer to like a zero click kind of environment where dark social is going to become and is becoming much bigger. We're going to have less data, less data pipeline for like understanding where users came from, all the steps in the journey that they took before leading to purchase.
00:04:39
Speaker
This is especially true with products and services with longer buying journeys. Basically the idea of the in-person referral, you know, yeah when the internet started that got kicked out to like media websites, right? So all referral was trackable by like Google analytics.
00:04:53
Speaker
You saw where traffic was coming from when other gatekeepers were like getting traffic and sending it to you. But now the emergence of like bottom up community marketing, there's a lot more that's happening just in mentions, not direct, not direct links, just people talking to about brands and about recommendations and trying to do their own shopping.
Investing in Untrackable Channels for Competitive Advantage
00:05:13
Speaker
Before, you know, and what we see on Reddit specifically is like those conversations happen, you don't see them happening. And it ends up coming in as brand search eventually. So I think of Reddit as investing in Reddit in particular, like, you know, we can get into paid and organic and how how we think about splitting that up.
00:05:32
Speaker
But I think in general, like brands are going to have to start allocating much bigger portions of their marketing budget across the board towards like vi vibe marketing channels or like what I like to think about them as untrackable channels.
00:05:47
Speaker
And I have a pretty strong idea that like if you can make these like less trackable channels work for you, there's much more arbitrage to be had because what's happening in paid is everyone in your market is bidding on the last click. That's happening at Facebook now too because the algorithm is so good.
00:06:04
Speaker
And essentially, like your your margins just get get eroded. You have to just stay a fraction ahead of your competitors to like keep keep your keep your ability to like keep buying customers at the rate that works for your business.
00:06:17
Speaker
But if you're not consistently investing in other places where you know have opportunity and maybe they're less trackable, You have a lot, you basically have no chance of like creating some kind of breakout moat from an acquisition perspective.
00:06:30
Speaker
Sure. but Let's talk about that arbitrage for a second. So imagine that I am a startup CMO. i am managing a million dollar multi-channel media mix.
00:06:43
Speaker
I'm spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on TV. I'm spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on Facebook, direct response ads. I'm doing some paid search. And within each of these individual channels, I am buying impressions into what I'd like to think is my target audience for a given CPM.
00:07:04
Speaker
But there are diminishing returns within each of these channels. And like you said, I'm also competing with different competitors, other advertisers. And so there's ceiling there.
00:07:18
Speaker
If I continue to spend dollars on those places, there's going to be a ceiling and have to find dollars elsewhere. And so I say to myself, you know what?
00:07:29
Speaker
I want to shift this. You know, I'm spending $200,000 on Facebook and generating 10 million impressions. I want to take 50 or a hundred k and I want to try to get some impressions somewhere else.
Unique Audiences and Cost Benefits on Reddit
00:07:42
Speaker
Talk to me a little bit about why that is an arbitrage on on Reddit, because I think that's really interesting. Yeah, there's there's a few reasons. So particularly from the Reddit paid side of the world, there's there's a couple estimates here, but between 30 and 45% of Reddit users aren't active on other on other social platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram.
00:08:05
Speaker
So from an incrementality from an audience incrementality perspective, Reddit is like an obvious choice. I think like once you start pulling back and thinking about spent from the impression level. like i mean Once you have like a mixed media mix mediaia model like across multiple channels, like obviously you have to have a specific attribution model set up.
00:08:28
Speaker
I think that, and through experience, we've found that there there's basically one model that works for Reddit. And like, once you kind of implement that, you can kind of get a lot more signal on like where the demand is coming from. Typically we use like last touch from a digital perspective from capturing bottom point of demand and self-reported attribution to capture like where people heard about us.
00:08:51
Speaker
But yeah, but what where exactly did you wanna go with that? So so you're were you're thinking about where How to reallocate money away from Meta. Can you just a little bit more into that?
00:09:02
Speaker
For sure. I, as a paid marketer, still think about organic marketing in terms of trading dollars for impressions. Now, with paid marketing, you are spending money on one-time impressions and you can kind of calculate your CPM.
00:09:23
Speaker
If I'm going to take, you know, let's just call that example, $50,000 of that $200,000 in Facebook ads budget, I'm going to think to myself, what type of impressions can I get for that over what time period? Now, organic generally as a bucket, I'm going to have kind of like,
00:09:42
Speaker
a lower ah longer time period over which I'm getting impressions and I might be getting a higher CPM. But I'm also kind of that bet to think to myself, you talk about kind of like the the leverage behind behind it.
00:09:55
Speaker
I'm thinking to myself, like, I'm not only getting these like one-time impressions by just doing a post, I'm getting a longer term foundational competitive moat here that's going to pay itself back and compound interest over time.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yes. So let's let's draw the distinction here between Reddit paid and Reddit organic. On the Reddit paid side of the world, ah big reason why it's it's it's valuable is like CPMs are low. And, you know, there's a lot of stories out there about like the way that people think about Reddit traffic as being like different or different.
00:10:29
Speaker
In general, like lower intent and or like there's a higher level of like bot traffic compared to other channels. there's There's a lot we can get into there. But in general, CPMs are much lower. And if you think about like quality of impression, I think there's like a qualitative angle here because you know if you're an e-commerce company, like you're probably not going to be able to buy a better impression than like Facebook Reels placement for high-quality video featuring your product.
Building Organic Reputation on Reddit
00:10:53
Speaker
But once we start thinking about brands that are like service brands, software brands, brands that have a product that you can't just like show in visual first formats, the Reddit impression is much more interesting because you have an audience of people that is, it's text driven. Like people read, that's why people go to Reddit.
00:11:13
Speaker
They're not there for images. they're not there for for videos. So if you can make quality Reddit native ad content that that is text first, I think there's a way to, I think you can layer on like how you think about the quality of an impression based on like, what are you able to communicate about your product or service through text that you can't maybe do in a video or at a much lower cost for like actually like producing the content.
00:11:38
Speaker
um because you don't have to do a shoot. You don't have to do anything anything. You just have to write something. On the organic side of the world, there is it is definitely like a longer pipeline for thinking about return on investment.
00:11:48
Speaker
It takes time to, you have to actually like build Reddit accounts that have reputation. Otherwise, like your content will get taken down. You probably are going to get shadow banned. You can't even promote your brand directly for like three plus months.
00:12:00
Speaker
You need to have a longer term lens. So when it comes to thinking about how do I measure the effectiveness of a Reddit organic program.
Leveraging Long-Form Content on Reddit
00:12:08
Speaker
There's a few ways to think about it. First is like just making sure that you have straight up like survey data coming in from people because you're not going to be able to.
00:12:16
Speaker
Organic, the only thing you'll know is how many impressions your comments are getting. That's like leading indicator. Secondary is definitely going to be like asking people directly as much as you can. Like was Reddit a part of the user journey?
00:12:29
Speaker
But the reason why you might want to invest there and how it kind of favors, i think favorably compared to like other social media platforms, two reasons. Reddit threads are ranking in Google search super highly. They are also the primary, I should say it's, it's the biggest single source of citations.
00:12:45
Speaker
So there's this world in which you build a brand Reddit account, you take part in conversations, you focus on giving value. And the goal there is to make everyone in that community like know, like, and trust you to see future mentions. So there's a potential like exponential curve that a weeds out competition because it takes work to actually add real value.
00:13:07
Speaker
And it takes like a long-term lens on understanding where your customers are, how you want to reach them and how you want to and invest. But luckily in general, like the cap for paid on Reddit before you start hitting like limits of of like available volume happens way sooner than on Meta. So the the investment yeah that you would have to make to kind of saturate your core subreddits and your core keywords is not as big as you maybe think.
00:13:35
Speaker
Um, let's talk a little bit about kind of like the content bell curve, because I think that's really interesting. i was listening to to somebody that the other day kind of discuss this, the idea that there is a kind of content length bell curve where on one end you have three hour podcasts, you have kind of long form content.
00:13:58
Speaker
And then on the other end, you have short form tech, 10 second TikToks. And there's kind of like nothing nothing in between. i think I want to talk about this in a few different areas and get your perspective.
00:14:11
Speaker
I want to talk about it from kind of just consumer purchase psychology and how these different types of content ultimately lead someone to making a ah purchase action.
00:14:22
Speaker
But before we do that, one interesting sell on this, as you think about organic marketing generally, one of the things that I've always thought about is, and I learned this from Tim Ferriss, the importance of kind of evergreen content that lives over time.
00:14:41
Speaker
You could, so i love talking about this from an investment perspective, right? You can invest $100,000 in a bunch of short form content, or you could invest $100,000 in type a couple of like evergreen anchor pieces.
00:14:55
Speaker
And i wonder if we're thinking about like long form content on Reddit, right?
Reddit as a Database of Human Opinion
00:15:00
Speaker
Similarly, the short form content on TikTok is going to have a much shorter shelf life akin to paid marketing.
00:15:07
Speaker
But that long form content, those responses, the long form podcast, whatever, that might live for years and years. And also, like you said, kind of seed into ChatGPT and be part of part of a generative AI engine optimization, right? So...
00:15:26
Speaker
and we maybe Can we maybe talk about just like the the importance of like Reddit long form and how that is kind of like a long-term investment from like GEO perspective, you know?
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, I would kind of break down. There's a couple ways to think about content on Reddit. Like you can think of a Reddit thread as being like a blog post on its own. And there's a bunch of different contributors to that blog post. And they more or less are competing for the top rank when people are actually reading through it.
00:15:58
Speaker
You can think about it that way. You can also think about the the comments that your brand makes on other threads as like discrete, like tweet, like pieces of content that build up over time. When you think about organic on Reddit in particular, like the first three months in almost every case is like the only thing that you can do is comment on other threads. So you're basically forced to become very good at like, oh, you have to overcome the kind of but the brand defensiveness that that is inherent in the the network.
00:16:28
Speaker
And if you need to get really, really good at like knowing what people are looking for and like how to kind of meet them where they are. So instead of like the feedback loop is there is very quick and the feedback loop is like you get trained to produce content that actually makes sense because you're automatically at a disadvantage because you're speaking from a brand a branded account in most cases.
00:16:49
Speaker
I think like the in general, like the ceiling is lower. like you're In almost any case, you're not going to have a comment. A comment can't go viral unless the thread it is a part of also gets viral. And once it goes viral, brands are definitely deprioritized.
00:17:02
Speaker
the actual The actual play is like you want broad surface area over... your core keywords so that when people are searching and ending up on Reddit threads, they see you more often.
00:17:13
Speaker
And like one to two core subreddits where people are visiting often to build trust with those particular groups of people. So it was like kind of like a bit of a matrix and how, how to think about surface area, but it's,
00:17:25
Speaker
It's definitely like, a in terms of like the content that you produce on an organic site, it's a lot more like just responsive, tool like tweet replies, I guess would be the closest like a parallel, but it's, you're not gonna be looking at massive virality numbers in most cases, but the intent of those people, like you're playing a different game. You're you're talking to people that are talking about the topic that you really care about.
00:17:48
Speaker
Whereas, you know, when you're trying to go viral, like you're you're usually trying to reach like a much broader market. And when you're focusing on that tighter audience of people, like you can you you have implicit permission to, for lack of a better word, like nerd out, to like to to add as much value as you can that's as niche as it needs to be to sit the the needs of the the conversation that's at play.
Text Content's Role in Consumer Trust Building
00:18:10
Speaker
Which is so different, such a different medium than basically any other channel. And when you think about brands that are high consideration, there is a need to provide them with answers and value that eventually results in them making that end decision.
00:18:32
Speaker
and the assumption that you can just run a TikTok ad and give them enough in 30 to 60 seconds to then click on a landing page and convert right away is probably a wrong assumption.
00:18:47
Speaker
So what is your perspective on the role that like that long form like text based content plays? Because there's so many but folks that are talking about video, video, video, right as the move. But what you're saying is ah ah maybe a little bit different.
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, there's a few ways to think about it because like part of the reason why video works is because, at least in the past, to do good video, you had to invest a lot. And there was this implicit idea that like if the video is good, the company must be resourced well enough to go and make this video, which means the company must be doing well, which means I should probably trust this company.
00:19:27
Speaker
I think AI concept production is breaking that whole cycle down. Like that that will not hold in the ai world. So like that is kind of happening in the background.
00:19:38
Speaker
And the other side, like that that works really well for like e-commerce brands or like personality driven brands where, you know, you just want FaceTime or you want to see the product in action. But when you have a product that, you know, like if you're gonna ask someone to spend a couple hundred bucks a month on a subscription that they're paying for out of their own pocket,
00:19:56
Speaker
Like a video is not going to do that. They're going to research. Like, and think a big part of this is just zooming out of like this lens that I think paid media people get into, which is like, I'm tracking purchases that's attributed to ads.
00:20:09
Speaker
How do I like tighten the cycle as much as I can to convey to C-suite like that, what we're doing is effective. But in that mindset, like it doesn't, at least like once you have a longer buying journey, like you, you're not taking into account the actual way that people act.
00:20:25
Speaker
they can they They hear about a product, they consume information, they do research, they compare, and then they buy. Or they don't buy, and they buy from somebody else. The question is, how are they comparing?
00:20:37
Speaker
I think like there's an argument to be made that when it comes to e-commerce or like visual products, like people do people are more often going to like visual social social networks to see like how other people using the products. But like when you're looking for the complex experience of somebody else that you can't convey in a video, like everyone is ending up on Reddit because they're Googling or they're asking ChatGPT.
00:21:00
Speaker
Reddit is supplying the content that we're then consuming.
Trust and Community Engagement on Reddit
00:21:05
Speaker
So in that world where you have product that's maybe hard to convey visually, you have people who are absolutely comparing before buying, there's this space in which like you have the opportunity to either like secure that trust while you're securing that trust, like building this army people that also will kind of bring you up when the conversations go your way.
00:21:26
Speaker
And then you can also, on the other side, like use the Reddit ads product to not necessarily like promote your product, but to produce and curate content within those communities that that community deems valuable.
00:21:40
Speaker
So it's it's a lot more, it sounds trite to say like it's a trust building channel because like everybody says that about everything. But it's more of like a like building channel. Like they you want people to actually like you and know you and feel like there's there's no reason to go with anyone else because they'd be taking a risk.
00:22:00
Speaker
They're not taking a risk with you because they know empirically because you you've competed through your own content to like rise to the top on some of these threads that you are investing in them.
00:22:11
Speaker
It opens up this reciprocity angle that I think does not exist on the other platforms. Yeah, I mean, I think I've kind of come to the conclusion that every single product has a demand spectrum.
00:22:23
Speaker
And if you're on the high in the high demand, you don't really have to be told much to convert. But when you're on the low and medium demand demand end of the spectrum, you have to be told a a little bit more.
00:22:34
Speaker
um And each channel, different ways that it plays into those different aspects of of the the demand spectrum. I wonder, you know, there's so much there's so much being made of Reddit as this perfect platform to c seed into AI.
00:22:51
Speaker
Why Reddit specifically versus other social media channels or other content
Authentic Engagement and AI's Role on Reddit
00:22:59
Speaker
mediums? Why is AI savoring Reddit?
00:23:02
Speaker
I love this question because it kind of goes back to like, you know, like I like to start thinking about this with like the original Google algorithm. like How did Google start to like rank the pages of the internet? How did page rank work?
00:23:16
Speaker
Essentially, the way that that evolved over time is like they try to pick up signals of trustworthiness. And that goes back to domain authority and like the link structure and backlinks, and that's kind of operating the background.
00:23:29
Speaker
The way that from what we've seen so far, which, you know, it's it's early days and things are changing to fast. The way that most LLMs work is they're looking for, they they have their own algorithm for figuring this out. But the way that I've been able to see it is you have the top down, what I think of as top down trust signals that they use.
00:23:46
Speaker
And think about that as like media gatekeepers. So, you know, your CNNs, your your news websites, your media. non affiliate spammy kind of like high, highly valuable, like blogs and media sites.
00:24:00
Speaker
ah basically like our single people who are trusted making recommendations and are they referenceable? And then you have what I think about is the bottom up angle, which is like crowdsourced wisdom.
00:24:13
Speaker
And those I think of as like four basically forums across the board, any kind of like public forum. So a message boards, community sites like Reddit and Quora, and there's a handful of other ones. Reddit has emerged as like,
00:24:25
Speaker
by By and large, the biggest piece of the bottom-up side of the world. um There's a few reasons. I think the one is that it's way hard. like People will laugh at this. Reddit is way harder to spam than any other platform.
00:24:38
Speaker
There's a few different reasons for this, but basically... it's it's harder for companies to spam it. And we know this because we've seen so many companies get their accounts banned just for being and for not even mentioning their brand name. It's really tight.
00:24:54
Speaker
And the other part, I think, is that just the way that the content is organized, it's much more structured like like a database of human opinion than than some of the other ones like quora and i think frankly one of the other parts is that reddit is like america centric it's uh it's focused on people in america obviously it's international they've been breaking out internationally the way that facebook did But you know most of the LMs that we use are based here, and most of Reddit's users are based here as well.
00:25:21
Speaker
So you have this like inherent trust-building mechanism that filters out bad actors and weighs the opinions of different people within the ecosystem as being more valuable or less valuable based on their own reputations.
00:25:37
Speaker
So you kind of have this like free market of opinion that's sprung up on Reddit that makes it, I think, inherently more trustworthy than basically every other community website that there is.
00:25:48
Speaker
I love that. I think a natural ah natural conclusion to this so then would be, and this is, I think, where marketers probably make a mistake, brands make a mistake. okay, I get it, I'm bought into Reddit, I realize that we have to build a ah community there, we have to ah build a reputation there.
00:26:07
Speaker
How do we automate this? like How do we just, you know let tell me, Colin, I know that you know I'm gonna ask ChachiPT, what are the keywords I have to rank on? And then can i can't I just like plug this into to an agent that then automatically responds to clients? Let's do it, easy.
00:26:22
Speaker
So you can try that. you will almost definitely get your account shadow banned. You will get your content taken down. It will not work well.
00:26:33
Speaker
If we're talking specifically about Reddit organic, the best workflow that we've seen is human powered, but like basically AI running in the background and like processes that leverage AI to more quickly make you able to add the right content in the right place at the right time.
00:26:49
Speaker
So basically there's there's a few
Organic and Paid Strategies for Long-Term Success
00:26:51
Speaker
ways to think about this. Like you want like your, you want like your trigger set up so that anytime there's thread that's posted, actually I should back up. This is talking specifically about like,
00:27:00
Speaker
future when you start working on Reddit, like you're not, your account won't be in a position to like manage past brand mentions. For example, like you won't be able to do that because you won't have enough reputation. Assuming you've built some reputation and you're now capable of posting on all subreddits without having your comments blocked, which happens all the time.
00:27:19
Speaker
Basically you want to make sure that you have like triggers in real time for any thread mentioning the keywords that you deem important. A few easy ways to think about like your brand terms, non-brand terms, competitor terms. making sure that you are alerted as soon as that happens. You basically have to be ready to like fire off a response as quickly as you can, because being in early with a good comment is better than being in late with an even better comment because it allows you to catch some of that initial momentum, hopefully get comments under yours, get upvotes, end up near to the top of the grid.
00:27:48
Speaker
Make sure your triggers are set up. daily, if you have like one subreddit that has high like alignment with your brand, go there daily, read, contribute, even if it doesn't ah touch on your brand keywords.
00:28:01
Speaker
That also helps like leverage credit for the other main purchase or the other main purpose, which is just customer research. Like if you have a subreddit that's highly aligned with your brand, like, You should know everything that they're talking about. You should know what their concerns are. It's going to help you build your product and it's going to help with your marketing and other channels too.
00:28:16
Speaker
Once you have that, the way that we do it when we run Brother Organic for Brands is we have like a multistep multi-step AI process, which is analyzing the thread, pulling out like the the core, like underlying questions, the comments that have been made, looking for gaps in the existing comments.
00:28:33
Speaker
Running that through a document that we have that focuses on like, what are the core messages that the brand cares about that it wants to get out into the world? And then we run that response through redditification copy process where we basically take brand copy and turn it into something that feels like a real person about it.
00:28:51
Speaker
You know, it strips out, it strips out like explicit brand references because that's a safety factor. I'm ready. You could, your account could be jeopardized by that. It uses the word i instead of we. It makes like oblique references to expertise that you might have because of your position in the brand.
00:29:06
Speaker
And then you just run that process and learn based on which comments end up getting highly ranked and which comments end up getting a lot of impressions. And through that, you start building your reputation. You start kind of like triangulating on like, where, where's the value actually being produced, but it has to be run by people. It's very easy.
00:29:23
Speaker
Even just somebody else logging into your account from like another another state could easily get you totally banned. And every piece of content that you've produced will suddenly become invisible. So yeah it said safety is like number one priority because otherwise it's really hard to justify any kind of investment into retroorganic.
00:29:40
Speaker
um when ah When a brand comes to you, and again, just use the example of like, they're running a multi-channel mix, you have both paid and kind of organic services.
00:29:52
Speaker
How do you determine what mix of that makes the most sense for a given brand? In an ideal world, we always want to start with organic first and layer on ads later for a couple of reasons.
00:30:06
Speaker
First one is you need to know the people and the communities that you're advertising to. Otherwise, like your, your, your efficiency goes way down. People don't like it. you It's easy to get dumped on in that way. Although we have like a bunch of processes to like make sure that you don't get dumped on, but basically you want to reduce that risk.
00:30:21
Speaker
The issue is. you might not have like a six-month time horizon right so the second way that we think about that is like how long of a view do you have here if you need to prove short-term revenue ads are the only option really if you know that your market is talking on reddit and you know that six months from now they'll still be talking on reddit It makes sense to start there first and layer ads after.
00:30:46
Speaker
It will make your paid media much more effective because the people you're advertising to are also going to be seeing that you're posting organically. They click your profile, they'll see you're contributing to the communities that you're part of. The sum of doing both well is greater than doing either one in isolation. the The only time we would do run ads not to organic is when you, the only way that you're going to be able to convince the higher-ups to invest in Reddit is by proving ROI right away.
00:31:12
Speaker
But that's usually a losing battle anyway, because it takes some time to build out a robust tracking a system for Reddit because you're not going to get direct click throughs in the same way.
00:31:22
Speaker
You're going to get way more view throughs. You're going to have to implement conversion API on top of the pixel. Basically requires some investment to make sure that you're able to to track properly a little bit more than other channels because there's less out of the box solutions.
00:31:38
Speaker
But organic ideal scenario, organic first, layer on ads a couple of months later start them both simultaneously.
Reddit Insights for Broader Marketing Strategies
00:31:45
Speaker
Sure. I mean, it's very dependent on, i think, company stage an individual and individual goals.
00:31:53
Speaker
Obviously, i sit in kind of like a more later stage growth that is running a multi-channel mix and can start to think about what to do with incremental dollars and the way that i have thought about framing this is not only the kind of like long-term foundational organic traffic that you might get from this but there's also i think like there's a value in qualitative data feedback from certain channels that you can't get anywhere else and like to your point the way that
00:32:31
Speaker
people are talking about your product or service or industry on Reddit is inherently valuable as like a feeding mechanism and to inform your strategy, the ads that you're running in other channels, your product development, et cetera. So there's a lot to be gained there.
00:32:50
Speaker
And I think about this also as kind of like a long-term system. Something that I'm working on right now is kind of like, owning our overhaul of how we're adopting AI in the marketing organization.
00:33:05
Speaker
And i think about all these different streams of data that finding a way to automate these into an LLM that then spits out like very contextual recommendations again on the product and creative. Because if you have an automated system for collecting and ingesting like feedback on Reddit,
00:33:27
Speaker
ads from what your competitors are saying, ad performance, et cetera, et cetera, right? All these different data sources, your output is going to be much better. but So it's a very important input in my perspectives.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yes, I totally agree. It's like but you can do customer interviews and those are great for going deep with small groups of people. But if you want to take the temperature of the entire market, not just people, your own users, but people who are using your competitors, people who are in the consideration. phase Like, you know, people that never buy, you don't really, you never hear. from Yeah, exactly. Then you don't have like $20 Starbucks gift card waiting on the end of the the customer interview, which often happens.
00:34:06
Speaker
And also just like hearing from the people that don't buy, because like that's, that's, that's always marketing's like Achilles heel, right? Like you hear from the people that are in your pipeline, maybe. You don't hear from the people that landed and bounced and never came back, but they're on Reddit. They're talking about this. They're talking about, they're comparing you. They're comparing others. They're talking about the market in general.
00:34:26
Speaker
And there's not really, I mean, i think there's there's nothing to replace, like just choosing to become active within like a particular community that's highly relevant to your brand just like forces you to just internalize like what's happening but there's also a role for like you know monthly polls of like brand mentions from reddit like sentiment analysis like fully like organize these into tables builds around like what are the problems that they're stating about your your competitors and yourself and how are they thinking about comparison like that's invaluable for your product marketing team
00:34:57
Speaker
Do you think that Reddit places a emphasis kind of like security and authenticity than other platforms?
Role of Community Feedback in Consumer Decisions
00:35:06
Speaker
there There's two sides to this question because it is true.
00:35:10
Speaker
There are a lot of bots on Reddit. I mean, i make that like, I'm constantly asking GPT to go and pull a bunch of data from Reddit. That is absolutely true. It's like, ah it's it's a database essentially, but, and and and also Reddit is like not exactly incentivized to not have bots because, you know, more content equals like longer time on site, you know, allows them to sell more ads, just like, just like all of the social media platforms.
00:35:36
Speaker
I think all of their incentives are the same. think Reddit was flagged more for this in the beginning, Reddit and Twitter, because it was text-based and it was a lot easier to automate text with bots than it was to do like video and imagery.
00:35:47
Speaker
But I think like all the platforms are pulling equal now just because like ai imagery and videos now basically can't AI text. I think you to run your own analysis on like how does your user journey look and how does Reddit actually fit into it? Like the easy, the dumb, dumb way of doing this is just going to Google and looking up your brand name, looking up your brand name plus reviews, looking up your brand name plus red, just seeing what shows up. Because like if your customers are doing their due diligence because your product is like, you know, a high enough price point,
00:36:19
Speaker
you can see what they're coming across. And you can, at the very least, qualitatively imagine that if someone who's sensitive about spending money is about to buy from us, like what are they going to come across?
00:36:30
Speaker
And for a huge portion of those businesses, and they're going to be in Reddit threads. That's just, you can test it yourself. You don't need ai to do it. That's why i kind of lean a little bit on the idea of you have to have a little bit of like a vibe marketing mindset or Reddit because like it's just so qualitatively strong in some cases and so like tangential sometimes to measure empirically.
00:36:54
Speaker
Some brands it's just unignorable. Yeah, I think about my own psychology and you know I find out about products and services through a variety of channels and means, right? Just like anybody else.
00:37:05
Speaker
Sometimes I find out about something on TV. Sometimes I have a conversation with someone.
Managing Brand Presence and Preventing Negative Impact
00:37:09
Speaker
Sometimes I ask chat GPT and I get a response. But pretty naturally, like I will come up with my own perspective on like the the product.
00:37:18
Speaker
And then a lot of times I'm using Reddit as like like an affirming mechanism of like, okay, yes, I am correct in my assumption of this. like oh, i like i you know we were talking about, I'm planning a heli snowboarding trip and it's like, okay, I will ask ChachiPT, what are the best destinations? I will find out a great destination in Western Canada to go heli snowboarding. I will read the reviews and then I will ask Reddit, like tell me about this company, like are they legit?
00:37:44
Speaker
And then it's like, okay, like I've done my research. And I think sometimes like maybe like checking Reddit is almost like a required checkbox in a lot of people's like purchase decision.
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. there's There's like a few layers. Like there definitely is discovery that happens on Reddit. There's a huge amount in the consideration phase where people are just like, I have this problem, like what are my options?
00:38:06
Speaker
But I think like what you're referring to is the vetting stage where like you're you're more or less decided. But like you you want the insurance. and It's the the same reason why people have like brands have logos and testimonial quotes on their websites. And think trust for those things is at an all-time low.
00:38:23
Speaker
And consumers are looking for a way to outsource multiple opinions of other people who've been in your shoes before. And the only way to do that in a way that's not mediated by the brand that you're that's trying to get your money is through communities and Reddit being at the at the center of that.
00:38:39
Speaker
So i think I think the vetting... angle is like a huge part of it because like you can lose a lot of deals there if people have excuse me bad things to say about you we didn't even talk about like the brand defense angle but like there's a lot of brands that just they they don't think about reddit and the top three threads are things from threads from three years ago where someone had a bad experience and incites a bunch of other people to tell them people tell reddit about bad experience with your brand and then you just have this drag on conversion rate across your entire funnel
00:39:11
Speaker
because of this thing that you haven't taken control of and like the community just decided that they didn't like this thing that you offered three years ago that you might not even have anymore. So, yeah, I think that is another huge angle.
00:39:23
Speaker
do you... know how do you How do you quantify your spend in Reddit organic when you're really just like managing the negative experiences some people have? That's that's another piece around me to the vibe.
00:39:37
Speaker
Like, of course, if people are reading a bunch of bad stuff about you, when they look up your name posts for views, you got to manage that. i've seen I've seen this mistake before, I think, with more inexperienced marketers or founders, where there's like the assumption that you can just you know have everything on your website and like pick your you know cherry pick your best reviews, and like that's all people are going to look at.
00:40:00
Speaker
And it's not the case, because people are going to Google you and then read. so And it's less and less the case, the more the more your product costs. Right. Exactly. for consumers specifically, or the more trust that is required, like, you know, in self's case, like the more trust that they must have for you before trusting you to have access to, you know, financial information or health information or something like that.
00:40:24
Speaker
Cool. I know we have a a few minutes left. I kind of want to hit hit you with some rapid fire questions, really simple kind of fun questions. I'd love to get your your perspective on. Quick hitting. So yeah, favorite book that all marketers should read.
00:40:40
Speaker
It's so cliche to say influence, but I think that's the first and the last book that marketers should read. If for no other reason, then it actually teaches the fundamentals behind marketing instead of you know focusing on channels, which I think our generation has gone way too far into.
00:40:57
Speaker
I would add to that, like if you are listening to this, read Influence, take all of those psychological principles and then feed that into your chat GPT to some extent so that when you're creating ads and content, you are saying, hey, use this this principle of sunk cost bias or whatever psychological principle because your content going to get a lot better.
00:41:18
Speaker
biggest mistake big's Biggest mistake companies make when thinking about Reddit. The biggest one is ignoring it means that it won't impact them like the example of the the older threads with a bunch of negative comments on them yeah that's by far the biggest if you have skeletons in the closet they will come after you what is one very simple task that a startup can do tomorrow i guess tomorrow saturday but when they're listening to this it might be whatever
00:41:52
Speaker
that they can do tomorrow to improve Reddit? ah If they're already doing it, I would say focusing as much as possible on writing like a real person and not a marketing organization seen through immediately.
00:42:07
Speaker
And you'll see negative results in your, you'll see drastically better results if you speak like a person behind a brand, even if you have brand as your handle. Sure. Sure.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's just like an overarching tip too, with everyone trying to automate away and subcontract out so much of their brand communication, authenticity and acting like a person goes so far.
00:42:36
Speaker
Cool. Colin, thank you so much for for joining the show. It's been great. This was very fun. Thank you, Paul.