Startup founders that don’t research their customers end up like musicians playing to a room full of empty seats. Customer research fuels lead generation. So now you need to discover your customers in more depth, to find leads that will convert at a much faster pace.
All thanks to the magic of personalisation. How do you start personalising your digital marketing messages? A few hours of Reddit research/week is a good start. I’ll show you exactly how to do it, with a handy spreadsheet to document your results.
Once filled out, you’ll use it to personalise your messaging and improve conversion rates – it’s quite simple, action-wise. I’ll also share our spreadsheet for this with you, it’s pretty useful. Since we use it to improve cold emails, we’ll focus on Reddit digital marketing tips for cold emailing in this article.
But you can re-use the spread to document data for other strategies (and data sources) as well. This is about discovering how to connect better with your B2B customers, regardless of how you actually connect.
B2B customer discovery with Reddit marketing – find similarities and get closer to your real customers
A few hours of online research a week can be very fruitful. You want to get as close to the language your customers’ speak as possible. That’s the basic gist of personalising cold emails, and doing it will increase the number of responses you’ll get.
Before we get into this, remember – the best way to really discover your customers is to talk to them. Never forget that. These are just additional things you can do to tweak your strategy and master the right style of copywriting for cold emails.
It’s important that you keep some form of documentation from this, that’s why I prepared a spreadsheet. Once filled out, you’ll use it to personalise your cold emails and improve conversion rates – it’s quite simple when you break it down into actions.
Click right here for a clean spreadsheet, and here to get one with examples.
Okay – Reddit digital marketing is browsing, starting topics, answering and writing messages, documenting insights
I’m sure you’ve seen tv ads for pain meds. Some boast about chemicals that hit exactly in your pain spot, eliminating your suffering – visualised by some magic power eliminating a red spot in your body.
Well, that’s what precise targeting and detailed personalisation do when you add them to your cold email strategy. You can approach a relatively small number of people (like 300 a month) and expect good results if you target and personalise.
Here’s what we do:
Browse Reddit (and occassionaly post new topics)
Reddit marketing strategies generate a lot of customer info. Unfiltered information, admittedly – redditors are vigilant to even the smallest hint of bull, and won’t wait to correct you. Plus they often don’t care about grammar, style, etc, so it’s raw, but I’m confident it’s one of the best communities online regardless of all that.
There are so many insights to be found here, nuggets of wisdom to re-use later on. Lately I read straight through nearly 200 comments in one thread. The thread now has over 500 comments and it reads „You want to start an online business but haven’t yet… Why not?”
In this thread you can learn a lot about what first-time founders experience when starting a business. Hundreds of pains described by your potential customers in their own words. Is there someone who wouldn’t dig into it? I mean, B2B goldmine alert!
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- Huge number of pains in one Reddit thread
To find what you need, you want to search for reddit threads created by customers that fit your target group, or closely related to them (so they would comment).
Also, browse and comment “hot” and “top” threads every once in a while to:
- validate your ideas with potential customers and other entrepreneurs
- ask for feedback
- discover new product/service/marketing/business ideas
I recommend sticking to 2 of the best B2B-centered subreddits:
Okay, that’s all for the introduction and TL;DR version. If you already know what to do, I’m not gonna stop you – grab your spreadsheet and start discovering more about your customers.
But hey, you! Hey there! Yeah, hey you knowledge hungry entrepreneurial beast. I know the next steps are kinda confusing, so let’s explore Reddit together first, and see what fruit we reap in the example spreadsheet.
Check it out – I filled it out with 3 examples of customer pains, and came up with multiple cold email copywriting ideas based on them. Keep reading to see where I took the data from. It’s just an example, so you won’t find the secret sauce to cold email success in there. But you can get closer to it by requesting contact from a RightHello consultant right here.
Looking for founders of SaaS startups
That will be our target. Start with the most general keyword. It might be enough – sometimes you’ll have to go deeper though, and experiment with search terms.
For instance – in the spreadsheet you’ll see that the final goal is to close new deals for a lead generation service. So we’re going to keep an eye out for for threads were software startup founders talk about obstacles in generating leads.
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- Cold calling comment
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- Searching for general keyword first when you use reddit to digital marketing
Cold-calling apparently frightens first-time founders to the point that they fail to launch their business as a result – first pain for our spreadsheet – cold call lead generation is a big problem. Plus keywords – hurdle, frightens, working up the courage.
We do cold emailing which is a substitute for cold calling – more efficient, more scalable, less effective short-term though. All this already tells us what value proposition and what customer benefit we can offer in cold emails.
Now for the moment where it all comes together – take the pain and under “Cold email ideas:” start mixing:
- pain description
- keywords
- value proposition
- customer benefits
Add it all together into 2-3 sentence messages that enclose how:
- big the pain is and that it doesn’t have to be that way
- you can solve it and provide a good experience and results
Come up with as many of these per each pain, as necessary to write a chain of up to 8 emails. You can use these ideas as the core message of your introduction email or one of the follow-ups. Use the data from your spreadsheet to also come up with subject lines, CTAs, any ideas you get – and also write them down in the “cold email idea” section.
I went through a few pages of threads, opened the most relevant ones in new tabs and got to reading. It didn’t take long (10 minutes) to take 2 more example pains from the comments you can see in the screenshots below.
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- reddit result
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- Cold-calling comment
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- comment about marketing budget
Check out the results in the example spreadsheet.
One more tip – engage with the community to build karma. Karma allows you to post threads and links. When you can post your own thread, you can ask the community of over 100k entrepreneurs just about anything.
A lot of them might fit your customer profile, so make sure to keep your threads relevant to them and you can get plenty of direct customer feedback. We also post articles every now and then – in a different format, and without many links back to our site.
It’s not for promoting, it’s about validation and gauging the community and our customers. One thread that we’d startedgave us a pretty great idea of why our website isn’t converting well. Which is great, because inbound is super tricky!
Tl;dr
- download the customer discovery spreadsheet (and example)
- do Reddit marketing and browse subreddits (Startups and Entrepreneur) for threads directly related to your B2B product/service, using appropriate keywords and search filters
- find customer pains and document them in the customer discovery spreadsheet along with related keywords, your value proposition and customer benefits
- use that data to generat ideas for short, clear, pain-specific, benefit-oriented cold email copywriting
- to get more you can create an account and start posting threads asking direct questions to your customers/competitors/advisors
Do more personal B2B digital marketing with a few hours of research/week.
This will improve your copywriting, give you a better idea of what your customers need and, all in all, boost your sales.
