Marketing Examined - 🔍 The Components Of A Viral Reddit Ad

Hello, Marketing Examined community! 

I am Chi. I'll be working with Alex to help bring y'all that marketing heat as we build out a growth marketing universe for you, hence the new header image.

Alex ‘discovered’ me through my blog post on MSCHF’s campaigns. So you can see how I love collecting unconventional marketing examples, yet still tactics you could start testing for yourself. An idea is only as good as your execution. I hope these case studies inspire you with ideas and equip you with actionable next steps. 

Now onto the good stuff. I am very excited about today’s case study — not enough people talk about this.

Let’s say you have an email list with 100,000 people on it, your current open rate is 25%, and your click-through rate is 2%.

That means you can always count on 25,000 people opening the email and 500 people clicking a link.

Let’s say you’re directing those 500 people to your landing page, which has a 3% conversion rate for your product that costs $250.

So, now you know every time you send an email, you know you’ll do $3750 in sales.

Now, imagine if you used a specific strategy to double your open rate to 50%, and now 50,000 people open your email.

Without your click-through rate or conversion rate changing, you just doubled your email revenue by improving your open rate.

This strategy is exactly what Inbox Mailers will walk you through in its guide.

And even how clients have tripled their email open rates, improved email deliverability, and re-engaged dead email lists.

You can snag the guide here.

To marketers, Reddit is still an outlier. Compared to its social media peers, it occupies a tiny portion of the media budget, if any. Most marketers I’ve talked to said they’ve tried but had mediocre results — not enough to have a permanent space for Reddit on their media plans.

I have spent more time on Reddit than any other platform and have seen plenty of ads on the platform, so imagine my surprise (and excitement) when I spotted a fitness app ad from Caliber Fitness that now has 15k* upvotes, 5k comments, and more rewards than most Reddit posts. Redditors also flooded the comment section. They raved about this being the best ad they’ve ever seen, saying they’ve shown their support by downloading the fitness app or joining the brand’s Reddit community.

What did Caliber do to achieve this rarely-seen success with one Reddit ad? 

Spoiler alert, the playbook is different from other platforms’. 

*To put this into perspective, 90% of Reddit posts have less than 1k upvotes.

The first step to a successful ad campaign is to get users to stop and read your ad content. 

And as cliche, as it now sounds - the best ads, guess what? Don’t look like ads.

So, creative and ad formats that blend in well on Instagram or TikTok look intrusive on Reddit. 

Redditors scroll through or downvote these ads because they interrupt their experience. 

Look at Caliber’s ad, other than the light gray ‘Promoted’ text, it looks like a regular plain-text post in the feed, in contrast to HBO Max’s.

Caliber also allowed comments. Many advise against turning on Reddit ad comments in fear of negative comments and ‘hurting the brand image’. However, not only do comments make your ad look more like a regular post, but interacting with users and addressing their concerns (there will always be some) in the comments also shows your transparency and authenticity as a brand — you have nothing to hide — crucial to a successful ad on Reddit.

There’s a difference between ads and content. Redditors dislike ads because they think Reddit should be for content. Do that!

For this ad, Caliber’s founder Justin wrote a candid piece like any other Reddit post:

End with asks from readers (more on this later)

Justin wrote everything in plain English without marketing jargon. He communicated like a person, not a business, which is not tolerated on Reddit.

Candor is very disarming. By admitting they are not perfect and are seeking feedback, they won readers' attention and support. Many tried and even came back to give feedback to help him out.

Instead of pushing readers to download the app right away from the ad, Caliber first asked readers to join their subreddit, a more common next step for Redditors after seeing a post, so less friction for them to do so. 

Their strategy paid off. The community now has 16k members (top 5% community by size) — giving Caliber plenty of benefits in the long run.

It’s a focus group where they can collect feedback and product suggestions.

It is an unbiased review site for future customers. The size of the community would also give people confidence in the brand.

It’s a group of people they can continue to engage with and turn into brand evangelists.

What about app downloads?

Interested users can still go through the link in the ad or through their pinned ‘get started’ post in the community.

Reddit has long been viewed as a tricky platform to crack. Caliber’s success shows that if you want to make a successful ad post, this is the way to do it. 

To quote a comment from Caliber’s ad post:

Honesty is the best policy and it shined through with this ad.

So, what do companies like Super Coffee, Imperfect Foods, Care/of, and Topicals all do exceptionally well?

They leverage UGC to fuel their paid media and organic social.

And they use MiniSocial, and here's why:

• All the content from their campaigns is fully licensed right out of the box.

• Campaigns are fully managed and designed to take 10 minutes or less to spin up.

• Activations on Instagram or TikTok match or beat traditional influencer activations in terms of reach and engagement.

• MiniSocial is accessibly priced, starting at $1.7k thanks to your Marketing Examined discount 😌

• Reddit can also help brands predict future consumer trends
• For the untapped market - a 85 year old gaming influencer with 1M followers
• Why brands cast older celebrities to court younger consumers
• Shopify has the crystal ball - 2023 commerce trend
• A new McDonald's commercial without the food or restaurant

*Want to sponsor Marketing Examined? Fill out this Typeform.*

We are of course eating our own dog food and testing these tactics for Marketing Examined on Reddit - will report back when we have enough data.

Curious — have you had any success (or fails) with Reddit ads? Reply and let me know . You might be featured in our future case studies!

And we'll let you know how it goes.

Until Thursday,

Alex & Chi