Today on second growth, we've got experts Evan Hughes, Ciara Hopkins, and Melinda J. Nica talking about Reddit ads. Are you using Reddit for your B2B strategy? If you're not yet, you might want to listen to this episode to think about how you could leverage this really incredible platform if you've got the time, patience, and right strategy to make it work for you.
They cover budget, they cover reach, they cover creative, they cover all of the pillars that you'll need to think about before starting on this strategy. Enjoy. Today we're going to dive in all things paid social, Reddit ads related. We're joined here with Ciara, Melinda, who really are going to help us just chat through conversations we're having with clients, some of our best practices and recommendations.
Really how we view Reddit as a tool for B2B and when we would not potentially use it with clients, I think that's often times the common thing we hear is like, Reddit might not be for us or why should I use Reddit? And so going through just understanding how to identify certain aspects of the channel that would be valuable, talking through different objectives, that's really the purpose of today is just open on a dialogue. So for any questions to pop up, feel free to drop them in the chat. Steph will help us monitor those as well.
But yeah, I say let's just kick it off. I want to start with one thing that's super interesting as we think about Reddit from a channel perspective. For a long time, there was limited discoverability of Reddit as a channel in Google. And I think the data agreement they formed in February of last year was a huge milestone for us to think about the channel differently and to recognize that the search exposure for Reddit in Google search results is actually a driver for more awareness of the channel itself, the topics itself and the content.
So that's where we've started to see the shift of more people talking about it a little bit more. It's starting to show up more of my own personal search results. And so I think that this is just the perfect segue into like, okay, we're entering about a year and a half in or so, like are we starting to see that change? And that kind of got me excited about it.
But with that, you know, I'll kind of turn it over to CR and Melancho. Jump in. Yeah, I can preamble and I'd love to hear your thoughts. But I think that's a really good point about the partnership that Reddit and Google have and kind of what we're also seeing just like on the agency side with Reddit is that they're taking a lot of strides to improve their ad platform.
There's a lot of new features coming up. They're really trying to provide some of the similar experiences we're seeing on LinkedIn and meta. And so they're really trying to double down on getting more advertisers on the platform. I think another interesting thing about Reddit is that it's just a little daunting because there's so many subreddits.
And I know personally I go on to Reddit, I would say like quite often for any questions I have, it's nice, a nice little compliment to some of the AI searches that I use with chat GPT, maybe perplexity. And especially with the Google partnership, I know that like Reddit searches are showing up at least more organically, but also in their AI, like in Google's AI Gemini kind of excerpt at the beginning. So really to stay present on Reddit is a good brand strategy for you. On the page side and the organic side, we're not going to talk too much about organic today, but if you do have questions about that, there's also a lot of opportunity for you to get your business involved organically and start to enter some conversations around what your industry is talking about.
And on the page side, there's just a bunch of different cool strategies you can run with Reddit that allow you to get a little bit more creative, allow you to get just a little bit more intentional about your targeting. It takes a lot of research in time to figure out what subreddits you want to go after. It's a little different than of course, like your meta or LinkedIn, where you can just go after your kind of your ICP, but Reddit, it's like you really think about what they're searching for. So it's kind of a fun opportunity for you to get really intentional about what you want to say to who you want to say it to.
So that's just my kind of preamble about Reddit. I think a lot of our clients internally utilize it. It's more very much brand awareness, top of funnel, create demand strategy, but it does really complement nicely into kind of an integrated, of course, you know, all around demand generation strategy. So that's really my spiel on it.
And Melinda would love to hear your thoughts. And then we'll kind of dig into some of the specifics of how to utilize this platform and you know, what different strategies to deploy with some of the different options that they have in the platform. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you too touched on it.
Like I think not only just that partnership with Google, that aside, Reddit threads just happen to rank super high for top of funnel informational question based searches. They've always captured this intent traffic, right? A little bit higher, of course, in the intent funnel, but they're so good at like just ranking at the top and people now enter that Reddit ecosystem to spend all the more time now I'm getting other sub-readers or communities or threads and they spend more time on their. And so I definitely think that it's such a viable and recommended platform for BDB companies to expand and expand their network to.
And not only that, I think we're just at a point now where like just user consumption on the internet, like Facebook has such a vast audience Reddit. I read somewhere as like one of the bigger audiences as well in the top five for sure for generating traffic. So it's definitely a place where a lot of people go to to get breaking news, world advanced, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of activity happening there.
And I think there's been a sentiment in the past where BDB companies don't prefer Reddit because they don't see how we can reach BDB audiences on there. It's just one of those vast big social networks similar to Facebook, right? Where there's everyone there, of course, there's a lot of irrelevant audiences there too, but your audience is there. And so that's why I'm super stoked to have this conversation today so that we can dig deeper into this topic about Reddit and why we're recommending it for our clients.
So you jump in at a campaign objectives. I think that's the first thing is like when we figure out like what to do on Reddit, you kind of think about the objective of the campaign. Well, and I think it could be great if we just pop into, yeah, so we kind of recommend. And if you want to see this and then I'll kind of pepper in with you some of my thoughts.
Yeah, so there's definitely a lot of different options for campaign objectives. What we recommend is that you sort of off with brand awareness, reach and reach. And this is because this campaign objective allows you to penetrate the largest portion of your audience with the cheapest delivery costs. And so what I mean by that is that Reddit as a platform and user engagement as a platform, people there tend to click less on ads than they do on channels like LinkedIn.
With the clients I've worked with in the past, we see click-through rates on average around a 0.1 to 0.2%, whereas on LinkedIn, for example, for comparison, is around 0.4 to 0.5 on the high end. So Reddit as a channel is a place where people don't necessarily like to directly click on ads. So when you select engagement specific objectives, such as traffic or conversions, you're not serving ads to people who are less likely to click on it, right? When you select an engagement based objective, it's going to focus your ad delivery to only people who click and engage with ads in the past.
And so for dealing with a user base where people don't tend to click on ads, you're going to be limiting your reach drastically. So that's why I recommend starting off with brand awareness and reach. And this is kind of a similar approach we take on LinkedIn. So we can maximize delivery to those users on the platform that we consider a dark social who don't click on post, but will still receive the message, my stick into the brain, and then I think on it.
So starting off with brand awareness and reach is a go-to in my recommendations, especially when you're targeting a prospecting cold audience. And then once you've built up a warm audience of people who visited your company page on Reddit or who visited their website, some retargeting pools, we then suggest moving on to a traffic or conversion based objective to just re-engage those audiences and help drive the maximum amount of clicks and traffic as possible from a warmer audience pool. When I think it's interesting to make a good point about brand awareness versus engagement, and I'm curious your perspective of what you've heard, but I know that there's been some hesitation on a couple of clients I've worked with because a lot of Reddit users can sniff out a lot of bullshit. They don't add heavy marketing heavy and I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit too, but what's your perspective as well as bots?
I know it's a common conversation point, a lot for Reddit, and I feel like I've seen anywhere that they estimate between 40 to 60% of accounts can be some form of a form of a bot. So do you think that's part of the reason the engagement objective isn't necessarily the right one for this channel in general as well, because there could be a hyperpensity to click via a bot so that you're not necessarily driving the right traffic, or am I thinking about this incorrectly? No, that's a valid point. I've actually dealt with some Reddit reps who mentioned to me that, hey, there's a refund in your account because we tracked that some of this activity was bot traffic, and so Reddit, as time as they are, they take that charge off our account.
So certainly I think there is a propensity for bots to infiltrate when you're using traffic based objectives. We've seen this in the early stages of Google as well. I don't know quite well how Reddit's been combating it from being completely honest, but yeah, there's definitely that angle as a reason to why we want to stay on brand awareness and reach the most part on Reddit. I don't know if you want to go into, as we think about audience components here as well, or if there's another touch point of view on the objectives.
No, I think this is right. And I think Reddit also is starting to add some more options and objectives. I know they're like, they're lead gen is in beta, they're doing a few different things, and we're going to still recommend some of the similar strategies that we do for some of our other create demand channels. Especially with Reddit, it's really focused the objective on reaching more folks, getting more eyeballs on your ads instead of converting those folks through a lead gen form or just the normal conversion objective.
And then great points, evidently, on the traffic objective with the lower clicks, obviously the lower optimization there. So one last point, the song, Legion, I would say that because the audience targeting on Reddit is less focused on B2B, from a graphic type of targeting, you're going to get a lot of junk leads of unfit leads that are coming in because the audience is a lot more broader. So that's another just a reason why to avoid Legion on Reddit. There's a CR I had mentioned in you as well, there's about a Brazilian sub-readed or forums or any sort of community that you can tap into and targeting criteria.
But how do we think about it or how do you think about it from like what audience targeting methods do we recommend and why, especially for B2B specifically? Yeah, so on Reddit, there's two categories of targeting options available. And it's kind of similar to the other social platforms. There's a native targeting, which is utilizing Reddit's targeting capabilities.
And that's the three categories in the native targeting option. This includes, and this ranges between broad and super narrow. So on the super broad end of native targeting on Reddit is the interest groups. And this is just like generic categorization by Reddit on certain interests.
So business interests, technology, animals, and pasties are some of the broader categorizations leading to very large audiences. On the opposite end, super narrow would be the keyword targeting, which is where you specify exactly, you know, contextually, I want my ass to show where people are searching for these specific types of topics. So you'll specify keywords. And you don't really need to add any intent modifiers there.
Like we do on Google search, you know, you don't have to add like software or a demo or to end of these kind of product solution based searches, where you can just broadly type those keywords and contextually are at your as will show in post related to those keywords. And then what I prefer on the native targeting front is somewhere in the middle is this community targeting, which is basically you select subreddits and communities of where people are either subscribed to them or people are actively engaging in those communities. Or just even if they're not subscribed, they're recently visited those subreddits. And so this kind of strikes a balance of trying to focus in on a specific niche, but also opening it up so that it's not, you know, contextually being placed only on a very limited ad placement.
And it's opened up to a slightly larger audience than what keyword targeting offers. And so that's on the native targeting front, which is what we typically recommend as a first step when you launch on Reddit is to launch natively using subreddits and community targeting. The second option is custom audiences, all right. So custom audiences is where you provide as an advertiser first party data that you can retarget with.
So this includes customer lists that you can upload. This includes retargeting lists on the website and also retargeting on your Reddit company page. Typically, we don't see that great of a match rate when you upload customer lists or any sort of open opportunity list, contact list on Reddit, as well as we do see on LinkedIn. So we typically tend to stray away from custom audiences.
But we definitely leverage the retargeting links that are available to hit them with a little bit more middle of funnel or even potentially bottom of funnel messaging as a second step when you launch on Reddit. What's the matter? You typically, I feel like it's been a little bit a minute. Usually, it's like 30% is what I've done a few custom uploads, but do you see similar to you?
It's been really bad in my recent experience. I had a customer that I was helping launch on Reddit and it was just like 10, maybe 5% for this particular customer. But 30% seems a little bit on the high end to me, in my opinion. I'd be happy to get that actually if I could, but it's been very low.
Yeah. It makes sense of size, audience too. Exactly. Melan, I think it's important to talk about the audience research.
In your experience, someone hasn't done Reddit ever. We're launching for the first time, which is really a lot of our clients. We bring a lot, like, all right, you guys should be on Reddit and they're like, what? We're going to create this account.
So it's very new. And so I'm curious in your experience, what does the research process look like for mostly the subreddits and interests and keywords a little bit different? But I think for the subreddits, there's just so many. How do we figure out where to start and how narrow to go or how broad to go?
That's a great question, Sarah. Honestly, that's the number one component to success on Reddit, in my opinion. It's the targeting. How well you're doing that targeting?
It's a lot more creative than you are on a platform like LinkedIn, honestly. I think B2B companies, the first platform that we tend to steer towards and we want to advertise is LinkedIn. That's because they're firmographic targeting, right? We've gotten so accustomed to super simple targeting options where we can literally narrow in exactly on job titles, exactly on industry.
And it's great. But on Reddit, those kind of firmographic options are not available. So you have to be a lot more creative. You have to spend more time thinking about your audience, not only from a business perspective, but on a personal level too, like what are their general interests?
How else can we reach them? So spending time doing some creeping on LinkedIn, looking at some of your prospects, just trying to figure out maybe some of their other interests that might be applicable on Reddit, sorry. And just gathering that research using some AI tools to also help understand your ICP. I've used TAP GPT quite often to give a description of my ICP on LinkedIn and then ask it to kind of suggest Reddit threads or Reddit subreddits that are related to that prospect on the business side, but also on a personal side what they might be interested in.
So looking at that, AI information also helps accelerate my research into subreddits, but here's if anyone else here has had any other useful tools they use to research on for Reddit communities. Yeah, I spoke with a Reddit rep a couple of years ago. I don't know, maybe it was a year ago, I can't remember, but it was a while ago. And it was kind of before we were using chat GPT to do some of this research.
And they gave me a link that was essentially like, if you have one subreddit subreddit that you know that you want to target, you can type that in and it would tell you all irrelevant subreddits. And I think it's linked there, I believe. I don't, I hope it's like there, but that's another good option to utilize too. I do think chat GPT is or any AI is such a good starting point and it'll just kind of help point you in the direction of, all right, what should I be thinking of for this research?
And then what really like, what are the options because there's so many subreddits, you just don't even know like what options there are based off of kind of a few that you've already called out. So I do think that's a great idea, Melan. And I think this link where it says this one down there is also another resource you can utilize. I think also when just thinking about what you can research, there's of course like a lot of different angles you can go, but this is a little bit different than a LinkedIn or meta because the creative also really matters.
So you kind of, yeah, this is the nice, this is the looks like my brain. I know I was like, look at this amazing UI. Yeah, you can just go and type in a subreddit and it'll tell you all of the ones that like relate to that subreddit. Yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah. So there's a few of you guys. Yeah, I know I love it. So make sure to drop this in our recap link because not everybody's gonna have access to the whole deck.
Yeah, but this is great. Yeah, I just, you bring up a very good point. And I think sometimes we get so like deep dive into like chat GBT or finding the subreddit communities that we almost forget what our intention is. I think that's one thing like we really have to ground ourselves and recognize like from my perspective, I assume like Reddit users are really early stage.
They're problem-aware solution aware, but they're typically going to the platform to do some sort of discovery or research about a problem they have. So it's not necessarily specific. So kind of searching those queries within the platform and understanding what is the conversation that's had around those. I think that's one of the most valuable ways to not only like mine for content creation and ideation, but also the ability to find what communities are actively having engaged conversations that are relevant to that.
Because this can tell me that there's 35 subreddits that are fit the niche, but there could be really two that are actually having dialogues that I care about that I want to hyper focus on. And obviously we recommend starting a little bit more broad and understanding that, but I think just understanding how people use the tool or think about how you use Reddit as a channel without advertising mindset, but more of an organic content discovery is the right way to frame any sort of like audience creation or ideation. Totally. Well, that's a really great point.
I think that that idea that you're speaking to can really help shape not only organic strategy, but actually your ad strategy as well. What if an idea I had, I can say your core ICP is IT professionals. This is, this is, I mean, is one of the most popular sub-readers for that core ICP going in there and looking at some of the most trending threads that may be question based or people just having a general discussion on a recent trend, being able to just spot those threads and just making ads about them in some regard. Like maybe it's just a top of funnel type of ad.
Hey, question, you have a question about this. Well, like, you know, we have a solution for that right here. Now as simple as that, like just, you know, creeping into those threads just to sort some of the ad content is a really good approach and like an idea to a lot. Yeah, approach it.
You can copy and paste a good chunk of those threads that are having like, let's say it's like within the last two months and then use that, drop it into some sort of AI tool and like have me summarize the common themes or what's the most recurring conversation or key we're taking place, right? So use the tools to do it with speed, but do it with accuracy. So you're actually pulling those words and you're not making assumptions. So I think we see what we want to see sometimes when we're creating like ads for our audience because we're so used to just like assuming this is what their expectation is, but identifying like the word count of what, you know, what common phrase we're used consistently over the last, you know, however long we pull that data that that tells me that that is a term that's trending right now.
And that's why I want to incorporate that. So it's been mindful of thinking about organic as the paid component. So you're really showing up authentically. And I think that that's so important from audiences, every ad creation and kind of trickling down the line.
So so many good points there. See our, yeah. Well, I think we could talk about to, we could talk about creative. I think we were kind of already on the creative lens.
So yeah, I'm going to let you chat about creative, but I'll preamble it. Essentially creative on right. It's going to be much that strategy on right is be much different than LinkedIn and meta and something I see, you know, businesses clients do wrong is utilize the exacting creative that we use on LinkedIn for Reddit. And it just, it doesn't hit.
It doesn't hit. It's a different audience. It's a different, you know, like a different interest. And so that's why sometimes it's hard for folks to start on Reddit because it's a completely different creative strategy, which increases the need for additional creative resources.
But once you figure it out, and once you have that strategy in place and you're kind of figure out how to do Reddit creative versus your other like LinkedIn or meta creative, then it's a really, you know, it's really successful on the platform. So we do have a lot of thoughts about creative, but one, I'll let you kind of expand a little bit more into what we think. Yeah, unless you're like a super big brand with a lot of local recognition, we don't recommend just, you know, copy tasting ads from other platforms like LinkedIn over to Reddit. You know, if you are a big brand that could work for you, it's just a matter of seeing your logo and reminding them of the message.
But for lesser known brands in different verticals, like you really do, if you want to have success on Reddit, not only do you need to have proper targeting, but like you said, Sierra, you need to tailor your ads to Reddit. Reddit is much more deeper internet culture than other platforms, less professional. So you want to be a little bit more humorous, more playful, you know, be relevant to more recent trends, like memes and that emoji, that sort of thing. So we have some examples here, just of things that just catch the person's eye on Reddit versus, you know, something like on LinkedIn where this wouldn't be as well received.
So you definitely want to, the biggest takeaway is not just copy paste ads, just to save time. You should actually spend time to develop creative specifically for Reddit. And as we were talking about earlier, researching into the specific sub-readits that you want to go after seeing some of those discussion topics and using them and getting AI is help to summarize them and then making some ad content around them with the recommendation. Yeah, another thing too, I think just to build on that, Moen, it's like some of sometimes if you're linked in your Reddit creative, it's, you know, you have your brand name on it, you have like a really like beautiful icon, you have like a nice kind of headline that stands out in your face, it's like scroll stopping.
I think Reddit can be a little bit more like Moen said, playful, but it doesn't have to be as like produced, like it doesn't need to be this whole, you know, amazingly beautiful graphic. It can just be like a really funny meme that speaks to a problem that you solve for your clients. I did this for one of my clients that was in the finance industry and which is interesting because finance maybe seems like a little bit of a stuffy industry, but we made it more playful, more funny and having that comedy aspect to the creative really worked whereas our creative on LinkedIn was completely different. It wasn't funny.
It was very, very just clear and specific, but Reddit was more of that like comedic kind of here's how you can use this platform to solve your problems and make the problems kind of silly and funny. So I think Reddit doesn't need to be like as much produced, you can have like a little bit less of a, I don't want to say like poor quality, but it doesn't, you could do something like a can but it could be something with some more turnkey than maybe a LinkedIn ad or a meta ad. I think speed matters so much when it comes to Reddit, right? Cause you people forget that, or at least some of the conversations I've had, people forget that Reddit's like a conversational driven community.
And that is the, you have to match that tone. Otherwise, there's no point you're just wasting your time. And when you have these six to eight week creative cycles, it's like who gives a shit because by the time you post it, it's not going to matter anymore. And I think it's what like 50% of US Reddit users are between like 19 and 26 kind of that Gen Z millennials.
You think of like a consumer, even though sure you're advertising for finance, you got to think about that person that's coming in that's doing a lot of discovery, the research for their brand kind of positioning that in front of the leadership team. They are the ones kind of in the grind in the zone. You want to match that. And so if it feels Polish, like nobody likes that, we grew up, they grew up, we have H myself out of that, but like with just branding in your face so much that it's just like easy to ignore it.
And it really is a turn off. And I think that that's one thing that can get a little daunting with people trying to just duplicate across social platforms. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
And I know there's also an option too with Reddit is when you build your ads, you can have the opportunity to allow comments or not allow comments. And with Reddit, it depends like if you have someone to manage that, like definitely allow the comments because that's where you're going to get a lot of insight. Like you want people to respond to your ads and it's much different than LinkedIn. Where's like, you look at the comments, but you know, you're not like responding as much, but in Reddit, it's like, it's like, it's a conversational platform.
And so build ads where folks will respond to you. So then you can have a conversation and then you can start to build more of that like brand recognition organically, essentially through that word of mouth and conversation style communication. Yeah. I'm something I want to something I want to explore in the later half of this year is just how effective video ads reform on Reddit.
I think we've gotten used to Reddit being like, you said, conversational, a lot of just image and text based kind of posts. So I know they have a video like advertising format. So I'm just curious because I haven't read any myself yet. Just I want to explore that in the back office here, how well video performs there versus LinkedIn versus Instagram reels.
That would be a pretty cool thing to test out. Yeah, actually, that's a really good point. And to anybody that's going to copy their webinar and drop it on their please don't like have definitely an authentic conversation, teach somebody something. But anybody listening to has tested or experimented with video.
I'd love to hear more. So feel free to kind of send lens, yarn, myself, a message because such an interesting thing that I hadn't even thought about. And so I love bringing that up. Well, we kind of talked about ads, creative audience building objectives.
I think that the one kind of elephant in the room is how to help I measure this or like, what are the KPIs I should think about? And I think we all can assume, but it's nice to just like say them out loud and talk through them. So let's go into like some of the key signals that you look for, recognizing the objective here is really kind of a branding play. Yeah.
So when looking at KPIs on Reddit, there's there's three buckets and like we've broken up the cadences here for people who are here able to see the slide deck, but basically the three buckets are on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis and a core of the basis. And so it's different when you're, whether you're at in the stage of checking your KPIs on a weekly level, what you're really looking for is just pacing on spend and what you're looking at is frequency on your delivery. So just seeing all your ads, you know, getting fatigued or not, like, is it reaching too high with frequency? Well, here's the need to pause it or refresh the creative.
Moving on to a monthly cadence is where you'd actually look at more higher level in-platform metrics related to like impressions and engagement, reach those sorts of things to understand trends with audiences, understand trends with creative themes and then setting benchmarks to assess whether you know, if this month's performance is any stronger or worse than prior months. And then quarterly is where you'd look at the full funnel reporting. So this is where you tie in, you know, platform engagement to CRM performance. Are we seeing an uptick in conversions and, you know, high, high in tech conversions, pipeline influence, that sort of thing that people mentioning Reddit as a source of how they heard about you and they fill out your form, those sorts of KPIs.
But as far as signals go, when you start off on Reddit, you know, what you're looking for to see if it's having any influence is really, aside from engagement on the platform itself, right? Like seeing if the followers are going up or engagement and comments, reactions on the ads themselves going up is directed organically, website traffic, seeing an uptick. So anytime you launch a branding channel, especially with a lot of investment behind it, you want to keep a close eye on website activity. Are people that are coming in, not only is it volume of traffic increasing, but is equality improving as well?
Are people spending more time on certain pages? What does the site activity look like? Are they filling out high-intent forms more? They're just trying to correlate the, you know, those kind of signals with the time that back to your launch on Reddit would be a key signal to look at.
But as I mentioned, just looking at, you know, your Reddit engagements and mentions of your brand name on there and other self-recorded attribution, as I mentioned, on forms where the people are mentioning seeing you for the first time on Reddit or not are all key signals to watch. Everything else that I'd add? Yeah, Melan, I think these are all great, great options. And everything too is that the Reddit reps are awesome.
Like we have, we've used the Reddit reps across many more clients that use utilized Reddit and spend on Reddit, and they have access to data that you won't see in the platform. So they can tell you like what your competitors are on Reddit and like, honestly, some of the subreddits that they're on, they just have all a lot of access to data that they're able to give you. And so really utilize them, ask them questions about, Hey, like should I be on this subreddit or this subreddit? Like where's my competition?
A lot of that is a really good kind of just, you know, benchmark, if you should be on the platform and where you should be on the platform. And then another thing too is like really wanting to hone in on the self-reported attribution. We've seen this work over time when Reddit comes in over time. And then I've used this with one of my clients where I've seen a lot of LinkedIn mentions and then a decent amount of Reddit mentions over time.
So that's a really good indicator that folks, at least are hitting the right people on Reddit. And that's the goal is to at least utilize Reddit Reddit to hit your ICP with unique and different styles of creative. So those two things are really important is implementing that self-reported attribution and then really utilizing your Reddit reps and asking them questions that, you know, data that you can't see in the platform, you might be able to get from them. Totally.
And hopefully everybody here has access to Reddit rep, but that is a challenge too, right? Because they're slowly broadening out, but I think it's such a good reminder that it goes beyond the lens. And I think we have to trust our gut a lot too, and especially in this channel, but I know that's people are going to have, well, I can't do that I have to show it to the board. No, I mean, at the end of the day, you're not going to match one impression to one engagement and tie back to link debt or see the Reddit.
It's just not not the reality here. Like understand how you use the channels, understand what signals that are important to you and to your points here are like the how we even read it is shown, caseing the value driven is outside of a numerical value because they're talking about like signal growth or community growth and using that as levers of like topic ideation and topic growth. And that shows that you're like putting yourselves in the right position at the right time. And I think that those are the strong conversations to have internally and be sure your managing expectations, because if you go into it and say, we're going to pilot this for 30 days, what signals are we going to look for?
You might as well just let your money on fire. There's no real point because you don't have a strong runway to prove that effectiveness optimized and start to see some of those signals. I mean, I will stop my rant, but I think that's just a challenge. It's like so important to recognize that it's not a one to one.
Oh, for sure. I think another thing too that's not in this guide because it's more recent Reddit, but they are also in some of your conversion API, which I know, you know, we all have like thoughts on a conversion API, but it at least makes things a little bit more targeted. We still have yet to approve the accuracy of this and understand if it's, you know, going to improve performance and I haven't tested it before and after, but they're launching this. It's going to be live for folks.
And that is another way to just get a little bit more accurate with some of the targeting. Very cool. Well, budget, you know, how do we think about, as I say, 30 days won't work and here you are going to probably prove me wrong and be like, test it for 30 days. So let's do that.
But how do you think about optimizing budget within Reddit or what are some of the, the ways you do this or think about both from like the creative and the budget standpoint? Yeah. So we recommend at least, you know, $500 or $2,000 as a test monthly budget, as a test, and if you're going to launch on Reddit, but the true way to optimize your budget is to look at your Reddit, subreddit audience size, right? And like look at the other targeting criteria filters you might apply on top of the subreddit, get your final audience size and then how to target frequency.
And how often do you want each and every person in this audience group to see your ad and be how kind of set targets for those, but basically on a logo level in a one month, you want to target for like eight to 10 frequency on a logo. So keeping that into consideration, you can calculate, you know, the audience size, times the frequency, you want to reach times the CPMs that Reddit estimate is giving you, that will give you a rough idea of like that actual, you know, budget that you, that we recommend to go with, which is going to be quite large, but at least we want you to start off with around $500, $200,000 a month. I see what kind of reach you get, what kind of frequencies you get in a scale from there. If that amount is not enough to reach the desired logo frequency of each attend, then we recommend you increase that budget, right, to improve your frequency.
And then also it also depends on just your audience size. If you have a pretty small mirror audience, you might not need to spend that much to get the desired frequency and to get everyone in the audience. But if you have a very large audience, then you're definitely going to want to test around, scale it as a budget permits to see how well you can penetrate that audience. Any other points to add to that?
What's, I mean, it's a good testing ground, right? We are seeing your standard data nets Reddit from a budget perspective, because it is a little bit more affordable to test and to kind of verify or validate messaging is that a fair assumption, depending on kind of your initial observation. Yeah, you don't want to draw conclusions on targeting and on creative without enough data. So like the frequency is pretty important.
I think if the message is received enough times, the target frequencies we have here listed, you should be able to make a better conclusion on natural performance. So you want to give it some bandwidth, you want to give it some budget to run. And so once it starts hitting these thresholds, then you can really have a better idea of a true sense of performance. So yeah, we have, you know, for a logo, we have five to nine for a theme, three to seven, for individual ads, we recommend one to four just to prevent ad fatigue, which is a good reminder on just the, you're going to pilot this, make sure you have the internal resources to kind of optimize whether it's your creative or the tools just to like manage the platform effectively, because you can learn pretty quickly if an ad isn't really being engaged with, and especially on Reddit, you don't necessarily want that.
I don't know, it's just a bad look. So I think that's a good reminder. Yeah, definitely launched with multiple creative, like we recommend at least a minimum of three ads per campaign, but try to test more if there's bandwidth, right? I think we touched on some of the creative ideas earlier, but like test various different themes with the different creatives.
You can have one that's just a mean, one that's not a mean, one that's more LinkedIn-esque, right? And just let the data speak for itself and unlock those those gems that you can expand on and scale and future rounds of career. So definitely have a variety of ads, at least three in rotation at a time. Step brings up a good comment in the chat.
And I, you know, do you think or kind of both your perspectives that ad fatigue is more prevalent on a site like Reddit, since people are typically more suspicious of anything content in general? I see some more. Good question. That is a great question.
I'm, I'm stopped. I think there is just a general banner blindness on Reddit. Compared to like a LinkedIn, I think people tend to scroll past ads rather quickly unless you do capture their attention and stop the scroll. But like if you are successful at doing that, and that's the only ad you keep showing to your audience, you definitely will build fatigue.
They'll get the gimmick will run out. It's not a gimmick, but you know, the attention will be lost, right? Like the magic of using a mean-based ad will resonate at first, but then it'll run dry. So there's definitely going to be a little bit more fatigue, I'd say, on, on a platform like Reddit where there is increased banner blindness, which point you might want to refresh created a lot more frequently and not let, you know, memes and, you know, trendy moments kind of run too long and where people move on to the next kind of trend, right?
So definitely that's a good question. I always get trolled because everything I see on Instagram is like a week later than TikTok and everybody's like, well, yeah, we've seen that. We played that meme out. So to that point, exactly.
It's like just kind of staying relevant to the time, I suppose, is really important when you're trying to, depending on the tone again of the subreddit or the forum that you're engaging with. Awesome. Look like Anna had a question in here. Do we think it's necessary to have a strong organic presence on Reddit to run paid programs or can they be two separate things?
What do you think, Sarah? Yeah, I think it can be, I think it can be two separate things. And I also think it depends on like your internal structure. Like sometimes there's an internal team that runs organic and an internal team that runs paid.
Of course, I believe that those should be integrated and you should communicate and collaborate and have kind of like a married strategy across not just Reddit, but other paid social channels. But I do think that I think if you have a strong organic presence on Reddit, your paid performance will perform better. And so that's what I, like, I think it's a really important compliment, but I don't think it's like absolutely necessary to run paid. And some people just like, organic takes a little more energy.
Like you're going out here, you're commenting, you're like, you need someone to be on there and like really focused on it. Paid is a little bit more like you can, you can set the paid program. You can look at the comments if they're already comments, but it's not as interactive as an organic strategy. So if you have the resources to do both well, then absolutely.
But I don't think that should stop you from running paid if you don't have organic. What do you think, Melan? No, I think you hit it now on the head. Like, I think it's complimentary, but not necessary to have both.
And organic will consume a lot of time. You got to be in those threads, commenting on things, responding to things, maybe trying to ask questions in there as well. I think if you did, if you were very active, organically, people will recall that name, the brand name, the profile name, when they see an ad. So that's what I mean by it.
I think it'll really help paid if you do have an organic influence, but not necessary to run paid ads. Yeah. I think it might be a hot take, but I haven't seen an organic, organic strategy on Reddit done well for a B2B company, B2B's asked company yet. B2C is of course like a very different beast.
But I maybe you guys have, but I personally haven't seen like a company do this well yet for B2B, SaaS on Reddit. Do we think that it's because there's more likelihood of like trolls or like, you know, pretty harsh and negative replies that there's a possibility of that. Right. It's a little bit more with lists with them and they're more direct and their comments.
I would love to jump in here. Yeah. That's all right. All right.
All right. Um, just because I've been working on organic credit a lot, I think that organic credit is possibly the most time consuming organic strategy platform for organic strategy out there because everyone is more suspicious of being salesy. You really have to do the work to offer valuable resources consistently, engage with those threads and, uh, Melin, like you were saying, engaging with the folks who are more truly or who are more negative that that negative food builds your reach, but it also can discredit your original message a lot faster. So it's kind of like a constant, you have to have a constant eye on it and a constant like dedication to pushing through that noise with valuable resource after valuable resource, after valuable resource until you can build the trust to become a respected account.
And stuff to you, because you're building, it's like a LinkedIn community, or see me at like a business page versus like an individual page. Are you building from like an authentic, I don't like that word in marketing, authentic, any more it's played out, but are you building from a place like, just being honest and real? And if you see it coming from a brand, does that feel that way? I have seen, which I, I speculate that this is probably going to become more common is businesses will pay one to three different like contractors or folks on the side to engage in Reddit and to kind of keep like tying back their brand somehow in these common themes.
Cause there's, I can't think of the name off the top of my head, but I was searching a tool for just kind of a, I can't say it, because I'm going to give it away in terms of who we're going to move to or using now and I don't want that to be the case. But there was way too many consistent comments that sounded the same, but from different accounts. And I understand some of those would be bots too, but I think that that will be a strategy that people will lean into, especially as Google is becoming more prevalent of like holding those SERPs in the organic results. So all of the sides back to be, I think it's super time consuming.
And I don't know that you can really learn a lot by just testing it quickly. You kind of really have to get into the lead them over a period of time. Yeah, that's a really great point of it can't be like a one and done kind of thing. But I do think that the potential for growth and visibility is so much higher on Reddit organically than it, than maybe some other platforms, unfortunately.
Cool. I always like to close out. I think this would be an interesting question for both of CRM and to, you know, from your perspective, and kind of working with the clients you do and thinking about B2B in general, is Reddit a worthwhile strategy in 2025 and 2026 planning for B2B? What do you want to go first?
Yeah, absolutely. I think it is. I think it's a massive network. It has a lot of B2B buyers actively in their certain industries and certain type of roles definitely spend more time on Reddit, like, for example, IT engineering type folks.
So if that's your core ICP, then yeah, Reddit is a very valuable place to show your brand and your ads. And I think it's definitely a complimentary piece. Like if you're, if you max out, you know, or you're linked in and Facebook ad placements, Reddit is a really good third option to compliment that mix and have more of a fully omni-channel kind of approach when you're reaching the same audiences. So having a fully integrated is my recommendation.
And Reddit is very cheap. Like when you compare CPMs on Reddit to CPMs on LinkedIn, it's a very cheap platform, not quite as cheap as Facebook, but you know, it's cheaper than LinkedIn. So if you're trying to reach some of these key audiences, especially in IT, engineering, operations, project management, there's a lot of those folks on there as well that I've seen, then it's a really good platform to extend to. Yeah, I would second all of what you said, Melin.
And then also let's just not forget that a lot of our AI tools currently are scraping Reddit for information. And so the more that your brand can be on Reddit and like even in the threads and whether it's paid organic, like if your brand is on Reddit, AI tools are going to see that and grab it and serve it in the AI, you know, functionality. So it's also just like a useful tool to be able to show up in other parts of digital. So in the like Melin said, it's cost effective.
And it's also a really different and unique channel. I think there's a lot to be learned from Reddit and a really good compliment to a world-related demand strategy. Awesome. Well, any questions from anybody listening?
I'm feel free to drop this into the chat. And if not, you know, this is, this is good. This is a great conversation. And I think it's one that, you know, even if you do a little research on Reddit and be to be, you don't find a ton and because people aren't really talking about it, because I do think it's a little bit more of a nuanced channel.
So maybe we can have, you know, we can revisit this at the beginning of next year and kind of explore what are some of the learnings that we've had. Now that we've deployed this with some of our clients, we've seen some of the integrations going. So, you know, Melin, we would be back. That'd be awesome.
But for everybody listening, thank you very much. We will be back next month. You can see what our topic's going to be on the Refine Labs events page. And if any questions come up, like I said, we're always an open door.
Feel free to reach out, whether it's on LinkedIn or emailing us directly at marketing or fine labs, but we're better here. Have a good afternoon and thank you all. Thanks everyone. Thanks everyone.