Reddit marketing has a reputation — and honestly, it’s earned.
Do it wrong and you’ll be ignored (or worse, publicly dragged). Do it right, and Reddit can become one of the most valuable platforms for audience insight and trust-building.
In this guide, we’ll break down how Reddit marketing actually works, plus nine practical tips to get started.
Key takeaways
- While Reddit isn’t a fit for all brands, it offers exciting opportunities for those looking to build authentic connections with niche communities.
- Reddit’s organic discussions are full of unique audience insights, making it a valuable tool for social listening.
- Engaging in Reddit communities by sharing expertise and being genuinely helpful — rather than explicitly promoting your brand, product, or service — builds trust and brand loyalty over time.
Is Reddit a good platform for marketing?
Short answer: Yes, if you’re willing to show up authentically.
Reddit is a forum-driven social platform built around niche communities called subreddits. And Redditors? They’re famously opinionated.
As a Redditor myself, that’s part of the charm. Reddit is humor-driven, deeply specific, and filled with real, down-to-earth people who definitely don’t respond well to obvious marketing.
But for brands that understand the culture, Reddit can be one of the most powerful platforms for building trust, credibility, and brand awareness.
For other organizations that are a bit more serious— central banks, the World Health Organization, etc — Reddit is probably not the top choice as a digital marketing channel.
What kind of brands succeed on Reddit?
Reddit tends to work best for brands that:
- Have a clear, niche audience
- Can provide genuine value (insight, expertise, transparency)
- Are comfortable with conversation, not just promotion
- Don’t take themselves too seriously
For example, SaaS companies, creators, and startups often see strong results when they participate thoughtfully.
Audience fit matters, too. On Reddit, 37% of users are ages 18–34, and the platform is evenly split by gender (50% men, 50% women), making it a strong option for brands targeting younger demographics.
Essential Reddit terms marketers should know
Before diving into Reddit marketing, it helps to understand some of its lingo:
- AMAs (Ask Me Anything): A Reddit-born format where experts, founders, and public figures answer questions. Even former U.S. President Barack Obama has hosted an AMA.
- Karma: A score based on upvotes and downvotes across your posts and comments. This is a representation of how helpful/funny/probably cool you are. For brands, it can be a trust signal.
- Original Poster (OP): The user who starts a discussion.
- Thread: A chain of replies under a Reddit post.
- Novelty accounts: Accounts created for one specific joke or purpose, such as u/look_of_disapproval.
Key Reddit usage and advertising stats
Here’s why brands continue to invest in Reddit marketing:
Ready to dive into Reddit marketing? Here are 9 tips to get started.
9 tips for Reddit marketing (that Redditors won’t hate)
Reddit requires a different playbook than other social media platforms. It works best when brands understand the culture, play by the rules, and participate thoughtfully.
Here are nine Reddit marketing best practices to do just that:
- Understand Reddit norms
- Use Reddit for social listening
- Avoid being too promotional
- Share your expertise
- Use a personal account (and build Karma)
- Focus on building community
- Invest in Reddit ads
- Track your Reddit ROI
- Be open and honest
1. Understand Reddit norms
There are over 100,000 active subreddits on Reddit, so chances are one (or several) are relevant to your business.
But before you hit Post, you need to understand how they work first. Take a good look around.
How to do this well:
- Join subreddits relevant to your industry or audience
- Start with your city’s subreddit if you’re a local business
- Look for niche communities tied closely to your product (e.g., tools for creators, founders, developers)
- Read the rules, top posts, and comment styles before engaging
Remember: Reddit norms are different from other social platforms, and each subreddit has its own culture, rules, and tolerance for marketing. What flies in one community might get removed instantly in another.
If you’re brand new to the platform, r/NewToReddit is a solid place to learn the ins and outs.
2. Use Reddit for social listening
Reddit is incredibly valuable for social listening, which is the practice of monitoring and analyzing conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry trends.
After all, people gravitate to the platform to:
- Ask for recommendations
- Share unfiltered opinions
- Research (and sometimes complain about) products and brands
For marketers, Reddit threads can tell you what your target audience wants most, why past customers stopped using your product, and what made people buy from you in the first place.
Manually digging through posts can work, but it doesn’t scale. Social listening tools allow you to track conversations automatically across platforms, including Reddit, so you can spot patterns, pain points, and opportunities faster.
Hootsuite Listening bakes the best social listening capabilities right into your Hootsuite dashboard, allowing you to uncover what people are saying about you and your competitors — automatically scanning over 2 billion sources every month, including Reddit!
Use the data you gather from social listening to inform and adjust your social media marketing strategy, including how you show up and market your business on Reddit.
To take listening to the next level, higher tier Hootsuite plans come with advanced capabilities like measuring your brand sentiment over time, identifying top influencers, and more. Book a free demo to see these features in action.
While Hootsuite Listening includes Reddit, you can also install the Reddit Hootsuite app to manually search keywords, or expand Hootsuite’s native Streams functionality with the Synapview app to monitor hashtags and competitors across Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube.
#1 Easy Social Listening
Brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment at your fingertips. Enhance your social strategy with the insights that matter.
3. Avoid being too promotional
If your content feels salesy, Redditors will call it out immediately.
Instead, focus on genuine conversation. Encourage real customers to share their experiences. Ask questions, request feedback, and respond thoughtfully.
Peak Design is a great example of balancing self-promotion with authenticity and engaging customers without hard selling.
Source: r/PeakDesign
4. Share your expertise
People often go to product-specific subreddits to get advice.
That’s why one of the most effective Reddit marketing strategies is also the simplest: Show up, be helpful, and expect nothing in return. (Yes, that means deleting the call-to-action at the end of your post)
Reddit marketing is a long-term game, not a place to blitz generic content and get quick leads. You need to be here because you want to be here, or because you’re already a Redditor at heart.
If you can be genuinely helpful, Reddit is a great place for driving brand loyalty and conversion over time.
As Redditor Perllitte advises, “Pick a niche, dig in, and you’ll find tactics.”
Source: r/marketing
Sharing high-quality content on Reddit also comes with mega SEO perks.
In 2024, Reddit partnered with Google, making Reddit discussions more visible in Google’s AI-powered search results. That’s a big reason why Reddit content appears more often in traditional search engines and AI overviews.
In practice, this means ranking well on Google is less about keywords and fancy SEO tools, and more about sharing useful, original advice people actually want (which is exactly what Reddit posts are).
5. Use a personal account (and build Karma)
Using a personal account can feel more natural and less promotional, especially if you already enjoy Reddit, know its lingo, and contribute to discussions.
It’s not that you can’t be successful using your company name — many brands are, such as dbrand, Mint Mobile, and Nordstrom — but if you aren’t a well-known brand name already, personal may be the way to go.
You can still create a subreddit for your brand, and then use a personal account to interact with others in that subreddit and elsewhere on Reddit.
Redditor u/secretagentdad does this well with their company, Keyword Sheeter. They regularly post in large, relevant subreddits like r/SEO, and contribute to the brand’s subreddit with the same personal account.
Source: r/Sheeter
At first glance, this looks less overtly promotional than a brand jumping in to respond to posts. However, as with most things, the quality of your content matters much more than your name.
TL;DR: If you focus on being genuinely helpful, people will respond positively to you, whether you use a personal account or brand name.
6. Focus on building community
The biggest secret to building a strong community as a brand on Reddit is to be helpful, engaging, and consistent.
Dbrand is a standout example. Their community thrives because they’re responsive, consistent, and unapologetically on-brand, even when that means gently roasting their own customers (who love it).
Source: r/dbrand
Encourage your employees who are already Redditors to respond to posts in your organization’s subreddit too. In some cases, they can even operate as moderators. This helps build community and shows your subreddit is active.
7. Invest in Reddit ads
Give your marketing campaigns a boost on Reddit through paid ads.
Reddit offers a range of ad placements, including:
- Promoted posts (text)
- Image and video ads
- Carousel ads
- AMA ads
- Conversation ads within comment threads
There are a variety of audience targeting options similar to other platforms, but there’s one feature that really stands out: you can target ads to run on specific subreddits.
Sell hiking boots? Run a paid ad on r/Hiking. Boom.
Reddit ads fit seamlessly among organic posts. Besides the small “Promoted” text at the top, it’s really difficult to tell them apart.
Source: r/Notion
Reddit ads can feature large images or videos, which still look like organic posts but offer a splashier way to capture attention. A bold graphic with a strong headline is your best bet for an image ad.
Source: u/Official_Captions_AI
8. Track your Reddit ROI
Reddit marketing ROI can be tough to measure. A good place to start is by defining your goals.
What do you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts on Reddit? Is it to build a loyal community of brand advocates? Increase leads or sales? Get feedback from new customers?
Once you have your goals in mind, map them to the right metrics — and keep track of them.
You can track progress in a spreadsheet (we have a free social media goals template for that) to get a picture of how well your current Reddit marketing strategy is performing.
Regularly reviewing your analytics is critical for ad optimization (if you decide to run paid ads), and for fine-tuning your content marketing strategy.
9. Be open and honest
Reddit is all about discussion. While you should aim to be open and honest across all your platforms, it’s critical on Reddit.
Being open and honest is an important building block of any community. By replying to every post and comment in your subreddit — and joining discussions on relevant threads — you demonstrate openness and highlight the personality behind your brand.
That includes how you respond to negative comments or feedback. Insta360 handles that well here by investigating, apologizing, and clarifying next steps.
Check our social media customer service guide for more tips on handling tricky online interactions.
Source: r/Insta360
4 Reddit examples from brands that get it
Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of brands using Reddit to build community, earn trust, and connect with customers in a way that feels natural.
1. Mint Mobile’s customer-driven subreddit
Mint Mobile’s subreddit has over 50,000 members, and it’s not even run by the brand.
Customers built it themselves. Instead of trying to control the conversation, Mint Mobile leaned in: employees regularly jump into threads, post updates, and respond to comments.
While plenty of posts center around tech support, the real win is the organic brand love. Customers regularly share positive moments, like the free jacket post below. These moments turn customers into real brand advocates.
Source: r/MintMobile
Steal this strategy:
- See if there are already customer-led subreddits about your brand. Instead of creating your own, partner with them.
- For positive posts with photos or video, ask for permission to repost it to all your social channels as user-generated content.
2. Semrush’s helpful Reddit home base
Source: r/Semrush
Semrush is actively involved in their official, branded subreddit, regularly answering questions from customers and prospects. But what makes their subreddit unique is the focus on education.
They link detailed how-to guides in the featured section at the top as well as share blog-post style product updates to keep users informed.
Steal this strategy:
- Reddit can be a long-form content channel if you regularly share things like product/feature updates or news. Don’t be afraid to publish longer, informative posts.
3. Patagonia’s cross-promotional events
Sustainable clothing manufacturer Patagonia puts their money where their mouth is when it comes to supporting the environment. They regularly post content to educate consumers about environmental issues and outdoor sports.
To promote these initiatives, Patagonia hosts AMAs (Ask Me Anything threads) with notable people, like this event with director Stacy Peralta.
Source: r/Surfing
Steal this strategy:
- In addition to sharing events in your own subreddit, promote it in relevant subreddits, such as r/Surfing (since this was a surfing-focused event).
- Consider hosting an AMA as part of a launch strategy for a new product or event.
4. Cultivating community with Procreate
Source: r/Procreate
iPad art app Procreate goes to great lengths to engage their community of artists on the platform. Besides encouraging Reddit users to post their work, Procreate offers a tagging system (known as “flair” on Reddit) to browse by different types of art.
They also have a unique sidebar feature that shows the most upvoted (a.k.a. “liked”) artworks of the previous month.
Steal this strategy:
- Focus on your customers: What value can you give them in your subreddit? Make your content all about them and watch engagement grow.
FAQ: Reddit marketing
What is Reddit marketing, and how does it work for brands?
Reddit marketing is when brands use Reddit to listen, join conversations, and share value with specific communities. It can include both organic participation and paid ads. When done right, Reddit marketing builds trust first, leading to sales over time.
How can brands market on Reddit without breaking community rules?
The best way for brands to market on Reddit without breaking community rules is to learn how each subreddit works and focus on being helpful instead of salesy. This means reading the rules, understanding the lingo, and paying attention to how people talk and post. Brands that do well on Reddit usually comment more than they post and avoid obvious promos.
What are the best Reddit marketing practices for businesses?
The best Reddit marketing practices focus on understanding the platform and adding value before promoting anything. Successful businesses start by lurking and learning subreddit rules, tone, and culture. They stay honest and transparent, share real value, and respect each community’s norms.
Is Reddit marketing effective for B2B and B2C companies?
Yes, Reddit marketing is effective for both B2B and B2C companies. In both cases, success comes from finding a niche subreddits and showing up consistently. B2C brands often succeed in product and interest-based subreddits where people ask for recommendations. B2B companies see results by sharing expert advice in industry or job-related subreddits.
How do you measure success from Reddit marketing?
The best way to measure success from Reddit marketing is to track the goal you care about most. That could be brand mentions, community growth, product feedback, website traffic, or sales. Because Reddit marketing works over time, success often shows up first as better conversations and trust before it shows up as direct conversions.
Uplevel your Reddit marketing with automated social listening tools in Hootsuite to discover what people are saying about you. Plus, handle scheduling, advertising, and analytics across all your social platforms in one easy-to-use dashboard. Try Hootsuite free today.
