Long walkthrough of a Reddit marketing strategy for B2B and SaaS companies

the cheapest way in that olena bomko lays out with sam dunning is just social listening. put your brand name, category, use cases and competitors into a free tool called F5Bot, and it emails you whenever someone mentions them. when someone asks for a tool recommendation or complains about you, you jump into that thread. if the subreddit allows promotion you can suggest your product, but say who you are. she says people react fine to "i'm the founder, so i'm biased" and badly to finding out later.

her playbook is three tables: the keywords, the subreddits (small niche ones, big ones, and build-in-public ones that allow promotion), and a list of existing reddit threads already cited by chatgpt, google or reddit answers. if a thread is still open you can add your tool to it, which she says is easier than writing a new post. she thinks around 15 of those conversations is enough to get cited. she did that audit manually.

the warnings are blunt. reddit hates promotion, vote manipulation and alt-account rings get you banned, and she says a whole website can end up blocked. a friend of hers got permanently banned from a subreddit for naming her tool with no link. she also mentions a 9 to 1 rule (nine useful posts per promo), filters that remove posts if your account score is low, and no VPN. she thinks starting with reddit ads is a bad move when you don't know the audience yet, though promoted posts through Reddit Pro are fine by her.

on time, social listening can be a couple of times a week. running your own subreddit can turn into a full-time job. one client's community got to the top of reddit answers for "best tools in this category" within a month, and short posts linking to blog posts got the most shares there. most other subreddits don't allow links.

what i'd take from it: pick one goal first (citations, community, or build in public), set up keyword alerts, read the rules of each subreddit before commenting, and be useful far more often than you promote. it leans toward product-led companies, but she says sales-led teams still get value from watching pricing and review threads about them.

video by Sam Dunning - Breaking B2B on YouTube, the original.