4 Reasons Why Community Matters for Brands
Uncover how Reddit communities can be your biggest advocates and accelerators, and how to cultivate relationships, listen to feedback, and incorporate ideas to benefit your brand.
If you owned a restaurant and noticed that for every 100 people that came through the door, only 2 people looked at the menu, and only 1 of them actually ordered food—most everyone would call that business a huge failure. After all, only 2% of potential customers are looking at the menu and 50% of those people are placing an order.
In advertising, a 2% click through rate and a 50% click to conversion rate would be considered a massive win.
Most people don’t click ads, but there are still many marketers who are using clicks as a proxy for success.
Savvy marketers know that clicks are only one of many signals, and often those clicks may not even correlate with their best performing strategies; a flashy ad might get a lot of clicks, but if no one actually signing up for your service, that experience doesn’t benefit your bottom line.
The value of a view
On Reddit, 96% of down funnel Reddit user actions happen after a user saw an ad but didn’t click. This includes things like viewing different brand websites, visiting product pages, adding products to cart, and ultimately converting.1 What does this mean? Clicks are important, but views on Reddit are more important given the informed decision that comes from the research and reading that happens after ad exposure.
There are innumerable solutions out there to make sense of this all—lift studies, incrementality, sophisticated modeling, etc. All of these solutions represent tremendous progress around how the digital ads market has evolved, but we still have a long way to go to properly convey and measure the true value of an offering.
Why community matters for brands
On Reddit, we’ve seen that the communities themselves have immense power, and why they should matter to any brand.
- Communities are Vocal - On Reddit, you never have to worry about what a community might think about a brand—they will tell you. Over 100,000 communities exist full of passionate individuals who want nothing more than to talk about the topic they’ve joined for, share their experiences with other passionate Redditors, learn and contribute to growing the community they love.2
- Communities are Innovators - From sponsoring NASCAR cars, to creating tracking for egg inflation, we will never be more creative than the communities themselves. With passionate users of your product willing to give feedback and contribute ideas to further the success of your service - these communities offer a huge opportunity to listen to exactly what your customers are pining for, and where the future is headed.
- Communities are Accelerators - Did you know there are entire communities dedicated to helping accelerate brands from the ground up? Communities like r/streetwearstartup exist to cover topics ranging from design feedback to Shopify integrations. Brands like Supreme were catapulted to the name they are today largely from communities just like this on Reddit.
- Communities are Defenders - Something you won’t see play out on other platforms - communities defend what they love, and Redditors love brands. Specifically, they love brands that invest their time with these communities doing the above. Cultivating relationships, listening to feedback, incorporating ideas and breathing new life into the solutions these brands are bringing to the communities that support them right back.
So back to our struggling restaurant!
What would happen if that restaurant listened to the people interested but not ordering food? What if that restaurant doubled down on what people loved about them? How could our restaurant design a menu with community feedback in mind and benefit?
The answer isn’t far away, you just have to ask.
Sources: 1 Luth Research, 2021, US. Lifts = Reddit ad viewers vs. Social Platform ad viewers. Social Platforms = Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok