Written by Tash Clifford
Senior Account Manager
How to use Reddit for research
Imagine if you could be a fly on the wall, when your audience moans about your competitor’s product. Or if you could listen, when a potential customer shares advice about which brands to buy – and why.
This, literally, is Reddit. It’s a gold mine of honest opinions. No sugar coating. No rose-tinted spectacles. Just what your audience thinks, in their words.
But how do you use it for research? And how can you turn random threads into the kind of insight that makes great marketing possible?
Step 1 – Hello? Is my audience out there?
Reddit is a collection of over 100,000 communities known as subreddits. Each one has its own rules of engagement and is actively moderated.
Some of these subreddits are broad: covering, for example ‘manufacturing’ or ‘engineering’. These are a good starting point for researching verticals or job roles, to see who is engaging with which topics and what your audience cares about.
Other subreddits are more specific to the products or solutions you might be selling (for example, automation). These will help you understand how the audience perceives your brand – or the category in general. But make sure you check posts and comments for job titles and focus on the opinions from your target audience.
The key is to surf a little at first, then home your search. Get a broad picture by reading many subreddits and don’t ‘zoom in’ too fast.
Sell tech and engineering? Try these subreddits.
- r/manufacturing
- r/engineering
- r/industrialengineering
- r/automation
- r/leanmanufacturing
- r/industrialautomation
Step 2 – If it’s hurting you…
First, search for within your subreddit for words that flag challenges. You’re looking for things like “struggle,” “problem,” “issue.” Set results to within the last year, to make sure you’re seeing recent opinions.
Then, read the results. Like really read them. They’ll give an idea of the top priorities for your audience. Some of these priorities will have nothing to do with your product – hell, your product might be useless at solving them. Unsurprisingly, you’ll want to keep a beady eye out for issues which you can help solve.
Then, search for a keyword relating to your category of product or solution.
What problems are people talking about? Is your audience crying out for what you offer? Or does cynicism drip from every word? Do people even seem to understand what you do?
Once you’ve completed the initial research, keep monitoring your subreddits. Keep an eye for recurring issues, questions or complaints.
Step 3 – Does it even matter, anyway?
You’ve monitored subreddits and you’ve found an audience pain-point that overlaps with your product’s benefit. You’ve also found some comments about what the audience likes and hates about your product category.
Hopefully, all this research has given you a clearer picture of the day-to-day working life of your audience. The ‘oh shit’ moments, the camaraderie, the frustrations. This is crucial – it’s what you need for great creative or sales messaging that makes people go ‘wait, you actually understand my job.’
Now, check how widely these opinions are shared.
- Depth of issue: How emotional is the language? How long are the posts (more effort put into posting generally means someone really wants help)?
- Resonance: Check upvotes/downvotes and replies to assess whether it’s a shared issue within the community
- Frequency: Keyword search to assess whether it comes up often
- Validity: Cross-reference with other platforms like industry reports, media publications or LinkedIn subgroups
You can also (subtly) engage posts to ask for more details: this works best through a non-branded username, without attempting to sell products or promote your business.
Step 4 – Crystallise the insight (with caution)
Now you’ve found widely discussed issues, put context on your audience’s struggles, understood why they might not be purchasing your solution, and drilled down into the beliefs which might explain their decisions.
Now, what do you need to prove to your audience, to win them over? There’s no magic bullet for this. But it should become increasingly clear, the more you understand your audience’s day-to-day life.
Once you’ve crystallised this insight, you’ll want to frame it as clearly and simply as possible. But there’s a golden rule for presenting these insights to your peers.
Don’t just summarise. And never sanitise.
Sure, distil your insight into a simple message. But always retain some real customer quotes for context, and to shed light on how your audience talks – not just what they talk about.
Why? You need to speak in your audience’s language – whether you’re crafting a sales deck, an email chain, or a whole marketing campaign. Turning their honest, no-shits-given assessments into corporate niceties will only make this harder. It’s impossible to empathise with someone from banalities like ‘they prioritise efficiency,’ ‘need to reduce their overheads’ or ‘want to leverage innovation.’ And if you can’t empathise, crafting your marketing will be much harder.
One for the road: It ain’t always easy reading
Reddit is full of what your customers say about you, and your solution category, behind your back. That means it’s not always a comfortable read. In fact, it might make your ears burn a little.
But facing uncomfortable truths is the first step towards great creative work that really moves the needle for your brand.
If you want more support using Reddit to understand what your customers really think, we’re happy to help.
Drop us a line at here.