How to find relevant conversations related to your brand or category on Reddit

If you have had a conversation about your gut health, poop schedule, stool quality, pro biotics, Gut biome, Blood sugar et al in the last month... you're probably getting wiser with age as we are all obsessing about what's going on in the magical world of our digestive system.

One of my former Lady Bosses recently started a gig at ZOE Health and I thought I would use them to illustrate - "How to find relevant conversations related to your brand or category on Reddit"

What is ZOE?

ZOE is a health science company founded in the UK that is currently running one of the largest in-depth nutrition studies in the world. Part of their thesis is that your biology and state of your gut health should drive what you eat. They believe that everyone's response to food is unique and are using science to prove it.

What do they sell?

You get an at-home 3 part test kit that tests your poop sample for gut health, blood fat tested with a specific meal and blood sugar sensor worn for 2 weeks along with an app that tracks spikes in blood sugar as you eat. This is part one after which you get test results that point to the foods you should be eating to get to optimal levels and even lose weight. With the purchase of the membership you get nutritional education on the foods to each and the tips to swap or combine foods to have less spikes in sugar levels. The ZOE app enables you to track your scores and maintain your health with the right foods. Members can redo the tests to see if their scores are improving.

As a ZOE marketer or researcher, Reddit is a great platform to understand the conversations related to the ZOE brand or the relevant categories. The ultimate goal for marketers should be to develop a social selling or community building strategy that positions your brand as a helpful advisor or category expert - whichever aligns with your brand.

Finding the conversations:

Start with your search keywords - brand related/ category and competitive. For example for ZOE we used ( ZOE, ZOE test, Tim Spector Diet, Gut health, Improve gut health, Microbiome diet, personalised nutrition, diabetes diet)

As you can see there are plenty of conversations happening related to the brand and the category.

Then you also want to look for specific relevant Subreddits/Communities for example for ZOE there are a few relevant to Gut Health where there are plenty of active conversations where a brand can be helpful and find organize authentic ways to provide information or advice.

There are also tools you can use to find relevant communities where there are thousands of potential customers. In the example below you can see "Gut Health" related communities

Or even when you go super broad you may find communities that would be open to hearing about your products and services like when we look at the broad "Diet" and "nutrition" related communities.

Each of these are communities on Reddit where there may be relevant ways for a brand like ZOE to participate in or target Advertising or AMA's

Reddit is also a great way for product marketing teams to get insight into competitors for SWOT analysis and tests for messaging and refining positioning. In the case of ZOE a search of other gut health test companies like VIOME result in relevant conversations that can provide insights.

So now you have discovered that there are active conversations related to your brand, category or competition. What do you do?

Over the course of my career I have had a few social command centers reporting into me. For example at Microsoft or at Sprinklr who had large 40+ and smaller 10+ community managers respectively who were operationalized to engage and respond in social media channels like Reddit. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Recognize that these conversations are happening with or without you and are essentially a help or a hinderance to the most powerful form of marketing WOM. Do you want to be proactive or passive as a brand?
2. If you decide you want to be proactive and you have the resources - hire a community manager to be responsible for engaging. If you are a startup and cannot hire, you can operationalize responding and community management in general to everyone on the team like DEEL did. DEEL in 2021 was one of the fastest growing startups in the world and they used Reddit as key growth channel engaging in relevant conversations to drive awareness, trust and thought leadership.
3. Use your existing blog, knowledge base, FAQ as content to point people to when it makes sense to do so otherwise route relevant posts to internal SME - subject matter experts to answer questions and engage on Reddit.
4. Make community management part of your companies DNA empowering the employee base with the right training, content and internal tools to become helpful members of any of these communities.
5. If community management is not feasible leverage Reddit's Advertising capabilities to target relevant conversations and people based on their relevant interests.

These are just a few things to consider. What do you think marketers? Have you considered the relevant conversations that are happening right now on Reddit related to your brand or category?

To learn more about Reddit marketing book a call with me here and to get on the waiting list for our deepdive course click here.