The Project
Our client is the software development service provider specializing in mobile and web development. The company’s target markets are the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Western Europe.
The Starting Point
After the COVID-19 outbreak, the sales team was struggling to acquire new clients and attract loyal clients. Our team set an objective – finding a shortcut that would generate relevant traffic in a short period of time. We found it on Reddit – a network of communities based on people’s interests.
There was no editorial team to supply link builders with content – that’s why Chanto marketers had to build an editorial calendar and write posts that ignite discussions and promote sharing.
Collaboration with the sales team
The company had a strong sales team and infrastructure. As soon as our team came in, we aligned our processes with sales managers’ efforts. The company’s HubSpot account was a well of insights our team used to find out which services were the most popular, which requests prospective clients made, and what are people’s objections for marketplace development.
Sleek interface
As soon as Chanto marketers joined the team, we were lucky to use a good-looking corporate blog and a well-set WordPress infrastructure for publishing (the company had already installed Yoast SEO and other helpful plugins). Given the high readability of posts, the team could be confident that, once Reddit users click the link, they’ll spend 3-4 minutes on the target page.
Full autonomy
The main team did not pressure marketers to deliver immediate results. As a result, we had enough time to research top Reddit threads for promotion, boost karma, and create a reliable profile for the company’s representative. Had we moved hastily, perceptive Reddit users would’ve called the team out in hours.
Around-the-clock monitoring
Chanto marketers chose to play it safe on Reddit by limiting campaign tracking. We purposely avoided placing UTM tags in the links to make sure it’s not a turn-off for subreddit users. However, we kept a careful eye on tracking incoming sources and monitoring bounce rates. This data helped us develop a granular understanding of what type of content Reddit users resonate with and fueled the team’s content strategy.
Our action Plan
The X-Factors
All in all, Reddit is a lucrative terrain for software development vendors. It’s a popular platform in the tech community – hence, there’s no shortage of relevant threads. Of course, staying “legit” was the main concern of our team – eventually, we did have developers calling out code errors and had to learn how to address in-depth criticism.
We had two key goals for Reddit promotion – raising brand awareness and driving traffic from target markets to the website and onboarding prospects directly on the platform. The first was rather straightforward, the latter – quite complex. After about 4 months of consistent promotion, Chanto marketers could confidently say we achieved both.
engage audiences with increased Online Presence
The process of Crowd Marketing
Getting To know The Audience
Before shifting the focus to Reddit, our team was set to discover the pain points and frequently asked questions of the company’s clients. To that end, we collected all requests logged into the HubSpot account starting from 2015. Our team discovered the most popular niches and understood the entry points for the sales funnel.
As Reddit users and fans, we were familiar with the tone of voice and types of content that generate the most buzz on the platform. Nevertheless, we shortlisted top communities in business and tech, assessed their relevance to the client’s niche, and developed an actionable strategy for promoting the company on each of these subreddits.
Building Credibility
A wide range of interests in gaming, tech, and music and a high karma count – this is what a credible Reddit user’s profile is like. The team chose to build a new account for the client instead of using credible accounts we created to promote other companies. We wanted to make sure that, over time, this profile can become a powerful brand representative online. On top of that, we gave the main team full ownership of the account, meaning they can use it when they no longer collaborate with Chanto.
The goal was to build a three-dimensional account with a distinct personality. We created a full-fledged persona with interests and started collecting account karma by posting on various threads (most of which had, for now, nothing to do with tech). The team discovered that threads like r/kpop or r/art yielded hundreds of upvotes per post.
Company Strengths at a glance
Writing in-depth Content
Along with building a credible Reddit account, the team had to create a library of shareable blog posts that would resonate with the tech community. We grouped all posts into topic-based clusters like Java development, marketplace development, how-tos on software development, and others. For each of these, our team wrote a series of insightful posts based on detailed research.
to summarize the results, we start
Publishing and monitoring
Armed with a list of subreddits suitable for promotion and a catalog of valuable posts on Java, Python, and Ruby, our team hit the platform. Generally, there are two ways to promote a brand on Reddit – posting and commenting on popular posts. In our experience, by making posts on your own, users have higher odds of generating a buzz.
There are various ways to make Reddit posts – our favorite one is a catchy headline and a link.
- The number of comments is one of the criteria determining how high the post is on the thread.
- To get ours to the top, we kept discussions in the comment section alive. After the post is on, Chanto marketers checked in on the response it generated and addressed constructive criticism from tech-savvy Redditors.
What the team accomplished
Tangible results
Our breakthrough posts like “How To Build A Python Assistant” generated impressive traffic outbursts. The post about a new Agile approach generated a particularly impressive wave of resonance, bringing in over 1,500 unique visitors in a day and collecting 120 upvotes.
During this time, we developed a Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn management strategy, successfully ran 27 cross-platform advertising campaigns.
Snowball effect of backlinks
Once Reddit posts started blowing up, journalists and niche podcasts picked up on them. The client’s post was mentioned in a high-authority tech podcast and multiple news outlets – the team got over 15 high DR backlinks without an ounce of link-building effort.
- Getting organic back links
- High-quality traffic: business owners, startup founders, CTOs
- Creating a reputation of an expert of off-shore software development
Leads and Conversions
Chanto marketers leveraged Reddit chat to connect with users interested in marketplace development. We onboarded prospects on the platform and shared their contact data with the sales team. In 4 months of Reddit activities, the platform brought forth over 35 qualified leads.
- The company drove 2X monthly leads number in a week
- Pages promoted on Reddit became a starting point for a client journey, according to the HubSpot report
- Improved recruiting: once the company established its expertise, the engineers were highly motivated to join the team
