Reverse Engineering a Brands Activity on Reddit

Is Reddit a smart marketers secret weapon? It's the channel that some marketers are investing resources and time So unless you know what to look for you can completely miss it in your competitive analysis.

Let me show you what I mean. One of my favorite examples is EZtexting.

Plenty of people are already searching for EZtexting as you can see in search above and many of them want to know what the Reddit community has to say about them as you can tell from the image above so ofcourse they should want to be present in the buyers journey where people are having conversations about their brand and topics relevant to their category.

Who is EZ Texting?

In their own words "Since 2004, EZ Texting has served over 230K customers, setting the standard for business texting in the U.S. and Canada."

I wanted to see how long EZ texting has been using Reddit to market their service, what their most recent activity had been and most importantly if we can surmise a "Reddit Strategy"

You can find 2 branded accounts for EZtexting r/eztexting that has it's Cake day August 6, 2010 and another r/EZ_texting that has it's Cake day January 28th, 2020 which indicates that EZ Texting is no rookie to the Reddit community and have been engaged in community building since at least 2010. But it looks like the journey has been off and on with a recent re-activation of activity perhaps triggered by what most plugged-in data driven marketers are asking themselves "what the hell is going on over at Reddit?"

Here's what you can learn from EZtextings activity on Reddit:

1. Assign a Team Member - In reverse engineering their strategy it looks like they have operationalized someone in their Content Marketing team aka "MR" who is responsible for inbound marketing strategies.
2. Set up alerts or Social Listening - A look at their comments you can see that they are answering questions related to their brand or category as any good social seller should.
3. Be Transparent - They are fully transparent that they are EZtexting when they are answering these questions or contributing to conversations
4. Do not Sell or Link bomb - as you can see from most of the questions they answer they do not link to their website but rather simply answer the questions.
5. Be helpful, Be the Expert - because they are not at this time focused on driving traffic they can provide good advice and position themselves as a trusted resource without having to pepper links in their conversations. However note that they can always go back into their comments at a later date because the content is evergreen.
6. Open your DM's - the CTA is "our Dm's are open" encouraging readers to message them directly on relevant comments.
7. Be timely - MR must have some motion in place to check the alerts and check relevant subreddits for conversations to participate in daily so that they can engage in conversations within 24 hours.
8. Keep an open mind - you never know what subreddits relevant inquiries will come from. In the example below you see a Sysadmin asking his peers for a mass texting tool to inform customers of outages... sysadmins in not likely to have been on the marketing teams top persona's and yet its a very useful usecase and opens up a whole new set of potential customers.

What do you think of EZ Texting's activity? Is this something you could experiment with? If you are interested in learning more about how to operationalize Reddit Marketing join the waitlist here