How Brands Gain Authenticity and Credibility With Influencer Marketing on Reddit

Key Takeaways

• On Reddit, marketers can diversify media strategies and directly target niche audiences. So, with around 1.9bn visits in August 2023, the platform has a huge potential for Influencer Marketing.
• Reddit is divided into subreddits, which cover specific topics and make longer user engagement likely.
• Effective influencer marketing on Reddit means active participation in the community, although simple promotional content is out of place here.

For marketers, the Reddit social network, founded in 2005, can be an effective channel to diversify media strategies and build a new community. In 2017, it was mainly 20- to 29-year-olds who used Reddit in Germany; in August 2023, the “social news aggregator” was visited around 1.9bn times, an increase of 4%. Undoubtedly, Reddit is not as “built out” in terms of Influencer Marketing as Instagram, for example, it could be a way for niche products and messages to reach a diverse audience.

Digital Marketing on Reddit: How Does the Platform Work?

The name of the network is made up of two English terms and is thus a play on words from “read it” and “I have read it” respectively. This alludes to the dialogic character of the platform, with users also being referred to as “Redditors”.

Insiders expected the network to go public in 2022, but it was repeatedly postponed. However, Computer Bild reports that it will be completed in 2023 and, with an estimated value of 15bn dollars, will be one of the most important of the year.

In general, Reddit is organized in so-called subreddits, which can be seen as discussion rooms with different areas of interest. The users themselves determine the topics, highlighting that the subreddits are also managed by them. Individual posts are rated by upvotes and downvotes and thus classified in terms of importance. Topics vary from gaming, sports, business and crypto to celebrities and stars.

The homepage shows the current, positively rated posts from the subreddits subscribed to by users. Reddit also plays with bots, which can interact with users as automated programs. Some scour the network for keywords, others correct spelling mistakes or provide additional information on specific topics. The bots can also be rated as good or bad by the community.

Social Media Marketing on Reddit

The second and thus essential step of any influencer marketing campaign, after defining the goal, is to identify the appropriate influencers for collaboration. This can be a bit more difficult on Reddit than on Instagram, as some communities are more partialized.

Timo Pelz, VP of Business Marketing, and Oliver Wendt, Head of DACH at Reddit, explain in an interview with the online magazine “Online Marketing” that Reddit is not a classic social network. Google, for example, is said to be taking more content from the platform to curate search results, while sharing Reddit content has already been simplified.

Pelz goes on to explain, “Beyond that, we’re noticing that there’s an increasing awareness on the advertiser side to spend money where you also feel a little bit better morally. I never get tired of saying it: what I find so exciting about Reddit is that we’re able to build an advertising business while maintaining the privacy of our users”.

What Does It Take To Do Influencer Marketing on Reddit?

Reddit automatically helps with audience segmentation because you can track highly social niche communities through subreddit threads. This generally underscores the trend towards more niche and micro-influencers who share highly specialized content, thus having a smaller audience, which in turn is more engaged.

Reddit also stands out for the very high average daily time spent by users, which is eleven minutes longer than other platforms.

As soon as users open Reddit, they are shown their favorite communities and topics, which – if brands get it right- can be the user’s first contact with them as he or she begins their Reddit day. At the same time, you have to be careful with niche communities; advertising is out of place here. Content must have an added value for the users.

Read more about the generally stricter laws regulating Influencer mMarketing in France. In the neighboring country (and the headquarters of Kolsquare), a new law was passed in the summer of 2023 that obliges influencers to label themselves more carefully and also makes brands and agencies more responsible. The latter are now also liable if influencers do not follow the rules in a post that is created in collaboration.

To effectively position your brand in subreddits, you should aim for real participation. So instead of flooding users with promotional content, you (marketers, brand representatives or agents) should dive deep into the comment threads, giving them the lingo. Each subreddit is unique and deserves individual attention. This way, you will gradually find out which content and which users are the most popular and develop a deeper understanding of users’ preferences.

Strategies for Content Marketing With Influencers on Reddit

Once you’ve registered on Reddit, you can start by acting like any other user. Subscribe to subreddits relevant to your brand message and discover your target audience, their concerns and questions. The focus of the platform is on the interests of the communities, not the individual users, says Wendt.

The motto should be “stop selling, start asking” – on Reddit more than on any other platform, as TikTok and Instagram users have become accustomed to promotional content. Reddit, on the other hand, plans to monetize the power of user numbers in a different way. Pelz says, “We feel validated in what we’re doing. And from the customer perspective, from the advertiser perspective, we’re a reliable partner because we’re just not dealing with fighting any problems that we’ve created for ourselves”.

Wendt, when asked if they could say anything more about advertiser growth, vaguely replies, “Maybe as an addendum, without giving numbers. We have teams working with small brands, in the SMB space. We have teams that work with mid-sized companies. To that, we have teams that work with large customers, Fortune 500.”

Who Uses Reddit?

While Reddit does have an advertising platform, the nature of the platform is that tools evolve quickly. This makes it difficult for marketers to find stringent strategies or even measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Nevertheless, targeting ads to the community has shown promising engagement rates, which is why more and more brands are looking to Reddit. Examples include the following:

• KFC’s Valentine’s Day campaign: KFC held a drawing, writing and Photoshop contest for Valentine’s Day that targeted the most creative Reddit communities. Users actively participated in discussions while KFC answered comments and shared original content. This fostered a more personal relationship between the fast food giant and Redditors.
• Audi’s “Think Faster”. Audi streamed an AMA thread as celebrities live-streamed testing the manufacturer’s latest cars, while the brand simultaneously answered Reddit users questions.
• Lemonade Inc: The insurance app called Lemonade created a Promoted Post with video content targeting fast food subreddits. The brand was able to communicate the brand message directly to a specific target audience and niche community.

About Kolsquare

Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders).

Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.

Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of  KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.