#marketing-creatives-lp
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Hi all! New founder here! We recently launched a powdered oat milk (higher protein, more nutritionally balanced, no seed oils & lower environmentally footprint 🙂 ) and are selling mostly DTC with a few boutique retail stores in LA. We are completely bootstrapped and are all unpaid organic right now (tested paid ads for two weeks but turned that off while we figure some things out). Someone recently told us to definitely get on Reddit. I don't really understand what this looks like for brands like ours so just wanted to reach out and see what success via Reddit lhas looked like for others. Have spent zero time there. Would it be interest groups, ads, threads? Would love any thoughts or advice. Our brand is if you wanna check us out. Thanks!
Hi Danika, from my experience Reddit takes a while bc you have to get pretty involved in any given community before you can even mention your product - if that’s your end goal.
It works well for research and feedback though, too, so not a bad place to visit. I wouldn’t depend on it for sales for probably a few months after you start engaging.
That said, my partner and I grew for 3.5 years (we left 2 years ago in April).
My partner was the CMO (I was the COO), her main focus was influencers on social media with a main focus on IG/FB then she expanded out to Pinterest and YouTube and started on Tik Tok before we left. We took the best performing content on IG/FB and ran ads to grow sales, but that was a treadmill.
We never really did anything with Reddit, but that’s mainly bc our focus was on content creation. Though, we did seed + grow a FB community group, which was super beneficial and helped a lot with comments on IG/FB and for general customer feedback + product development.
Of course, the market has changed even within the last 2 years since we left, but the strategies still work, except influencers have been replaced by Creators + UGC and Tik Tok has a massive impact, especially if you work with affiliate creators there and use Tik Tok Shop.
You can repurpose that content over to YouTube and even IG for added reach, so long as you get the rights + agreement from the creators to do so it, just takes a little extra time to do so. As well, with YouTube, you don’t have to keep posting in order to keep getting views like with IG/FB and even Tik Tok.
All said, it really comes down to your content strategy - i wasn’t able to see any of the content you’ve posted on IG, FB or Tik Tok so can’t say much there, but hopefully what I’ve shared helps. Happy to answer any questions you have, as well.
coincidentally, i’m cleaning out my email and came across this link that’s very relevant -
I’d make a list of all subreddits like r/vegan; r/PlantBasedDiet; r/healthyfood; r/Oatmeal; r/ZeroWaste, anything that your customers might resonate with. And just test different angles. Nothing salesy works on reddit though, people like honesty & value. A couple of years ago I managed to grow a legal tech startup on reddit by simply helping people out with their legal questions. These types of posts work too:
Chris! This is extremely helpful. Thank you so much!! And your experience is obviouly the most relevant to us given what you helped grow. Appreciate you taking the time. @Chris Mitchell
Fantastic! Thank you
Thank you @Marcin Mleczko this is helpful!
+1 on what Chris said.
Don’t dip your toes in paid marketing till you have product market fit tbh, only use paid media to amplify the product once you’ve found PMF. Perhaps, you can set up basic Google ads for brand keywords (“maker milk” “maker oat milk” etc) that way at least the users looking for you don’t get lost— assuming the brand is new and brand name will compete with generic links). Google will offer $500 free credit as well.
Reddit strategy can be slow and one should know what they’re doing to get the max out of it. If you guys are a lean team, I wouldn’t prioritize it at this stage.
For a new brand, product sampling is your best friend. Double down on it. Since you’re in LA, focus on this market. Find more cafes who can carry your product, partner with best cafes to do pop-ups and create samples for people to try. Maybe fund the first 100 coffees made with Maker Milk at each cafe pop-up, cost to you will be $500 but you’ll get people to experience it. Go within one neighbourhood then expand.
Find food / coffee creators online, reach out to them offering a nice box of Maker Milk with goodies + recipes, no strings attached. Out of 100 you reach out 20 will say yes to receiving the gift set. 5-7 will end up posting about you on their social. Go deep in one category to create awareness. Repeat every day.
Lastly, organic content is your cheat code. Keep making engaging content. It’s a volume game. You’ll be surprised when one of them goes viral. Learn from content creators in the space, observe which content is doing well.
@Chris Mitchell mentioned going big on organic social - very cost effective way of doing this is influencer seeding.
Would recommend sending your product out to nano and micro influencers on social, and using this to get content with which you can flood social and ad channels!
Also gives you that great bit of feedback at the start.
Thanks @Aditya Mahapatra appreciate your response.