But compared to other channels where brand accounts and corporate content has become the norm, Reddit remains a haven for peer connection. Here, the voice of users reign—and they aren’t afraid to be vocal when other users (brands or not) violate community guidelines.

Success on the platform requires ongoing research and a thoughtful approach to content creation. Keep reading for a step-by-step guide to building your Reddit marketing strategy, with tips our social team has learned from our foray into the network.

Why brands need a Reddit marketing strategy

We frequently advise social teams against jumping onto a new network just for the sake of it, especially when resources are stretched thin. That said, recent audience shifts and the ongoing evolution of search point to a future where Reddit will play a vital role in brands’ marketing efforts.

People are opting-in to community-driven spaces

One of the top things global social users want brands to prioritize in 2026 is interacting with audiences in smaller spaces, according to the Q4 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey. Users no longer settle for just being posted at—they want brands to interact meaningfully on social, and create spaces where they can connect with other individuals around shared interests.

Subreddits and AMAs naturally scratch this itch, giving audiences a place where no topic is too niche for rich conversation.

Audiences are already talking about your product there

Reddit has quickly become a top social network for product discovery. The company estimates that roughly 40% of all posts and comments on the platform are product-related.

The two top ways audiences want brands showing up on Reddit is by providing customer service and sharing educational product information, according to Sprout research. This makes Reddit a wealth of insights to better understand how your brand and products are perceived, and a forum for connecting directly with active buyers.

Reddit plays a key role in social search and AEO

Social search is growing fast and Reddit is a huge factor: More than 40% of Gen Z turn to social media when searching for information, their #1 source over traditional search engines and chat-based AI tools. The platform is in the top 10 for websites visited worldwide, and #3 in the US alone.

Reddit’s API partnership with Google has resulted in an explosion of organic search traffic to the network, not to mention it is becoming a top citation source for AI engines like ChatGPT. Large language models tend to favor recency and length when it comes to the content they cite. The long-form nature of many Reddit posts make them even more valuable answering users’ queries.

Reddit continues to roll out new brand-facing features that prove the network’s commitment to social search. For example:

• Reddit Pro Trends launched in 2025 to help marketers stay on top of trends and conduct keyword research across subreddits.
• The recently expanded “Smart keywords” tool makes it easier to detect brand mentions accurately. Our team noticed a 40% increase in Sprout Social mentions since this rolled out, helping flag subreddits we need to pay attention to.
• Reddit Ads (including the newer AMA ad format) show up directly in discussions people are already having, naturally weaving your brand into the conversation.

Ensuring your brand is discoverable on Reddit ultimately has implications for your reach beyond the network.

4 steps to building a Reddit marketing strategy

Here are four actionable steps brands (regardless of industry or audience) can use to create a strong Reddit marketing strategy, informed by our social team’s experience building our presence there.

Step 1: Outline a “crawl, walk, run” approach

It bears repeating: Reddit is incredibly community-driven, and each niche within the platform has its own norms and expectations for brand involvement. You can’t expect to go from zero to engaged Redditor or subreddit moderator overnight.

We recommend developing a “crawl, walk, run” approach, with distinct goals and plenty of time in each phase to test and iterate before progressing. This might look like:

• Phase I: Set up your account. Decide if it makes sense to create a branded user or an individual “persona” to build your presence around. The bulk of this phase should be spent researching and listening. Find the subreddits where your target audience or existing customers are active, and get familiar with the community guidelines, moderators and active voices in each. Monitor conversations already happening about your business or industry, and start compiling relevant insights to share back with other teams internally. You should start commenting or answering questions to build Karma (Reddit’s proprietary user reputation score), so long as you’re not doing so to plug your product or service.
• Phase II: With plenty of research under your belt, you can start becoming a more active Reddit contributor. This is where the experimentation truly begins. Start posting original threads (e.g., comment on trending topics relevant to your audience, share proprietary survey data or insights). There are a variety of formats to begin testing here, including AMA-style prompts, resource breakdowns or case study stories. Begin tracking engagement metrics like upvotes, comments, shares and saves to identify what’s working best.
• Phase III: This phase is all about running with what you’ve learned and scaling up. Now is the time to tackle larger content opportunities (e.g., hosting your own AMA with a company leader or brand ambassador) and formalize your internal Reddit workflows. You might also consider paid Reddit Ad opportunities.

Step 2: Conduct keyword research to find your niche

To break through on any platform, you have to start with research. Make this step more manageable by identifying a short-list of the subreddits most relevant to your brand, rather than only investigating specific keywords. Within this list, there may be some subreddits where you primarily listen and others where you’ll want to actively participate.

Our team has primary and secondary subreddits. Our primary subreddits (6 total) are where we want to become known as valuable contributors. Our secondary subreddits (7 total) are solely for Karma building and monitoring industry conversations. This works for us, but 10-15 is the sweet spot because it gives you a wide enough net to learn, explore and test.

While this research can be done manually, there are a variety of tools available to expedite the process. For example, Reddit Pro’s Trends feature lets business users create and monitor both standard and Smart keywords. The latter (which are only currently available for certain brand names and categories) offer expanded insights such as conversation volume and related keywords.

Tools like Sprout Listening and NewsWhip by Sprout Social scale your research over the long term. NewsWhip by Sprout Social helps teams catch emerging conversations about your brand or products before they make their way to other networks (or the media). With Sprout Listening, you can monitor conversations and brand health trends over time.

Step 3: Master community guidelines and remember the 90/10 rule

Once you start actively posting on Reddit, be prepared to follow community norms. Users who don’t risk having comments removed or being banned altogether.

Follow the 90/10 rule: Aim for 90% of the content you share to be educational, and 10% promotional. Once you’ve done your research, it will be tempting to weigh in on every thread that mentions your priority keywords—resist that temptation. Sharing relevant content is more important than hitting a certain number of posts or upvotes.

The tone of your posts is equally important as the content itself. Messaging that you used to share a corporate update on LinkedIn likely won’t land with Redditors. Relying on AI-generated responses sends another red flag to users already skeptical of bot-driven posts on the network.

Astroturfing (posting content that appears to be organic but ultimately is self-promotional content) is also largely discouraged across Reddit. Some communities may be more accepting of brand interactions than others. If your research into a specific subreddit doesn’t turn up past posts or comments from brand accounts, you may not want to break that precedent.

Even if you do follow these guidelines, there’s a chance your comments might get removed or your account could get banned—it’s the name of the game when experimenting. But you can work with your Reddit Pro rep to appeal if you think your content was wrongfully flagged. They can also help navigate your overarching strategy and Reddit Pro functionality.

Step 4: Resource your strategy appropriately

You should consider how you’ll resource your Reddit research, content and engagement plans on top of other team priorities.

At Sprout, we established rotating Reddit shifts across our in-house team members. This gives everyone an opportunity to get comfortable with the platform’s community expectations and content nuances. As a small team of three, shifts help us not only manage the workload but also understand our audience better. This setup also enables us to maintain a strong relationship with the Product team, with our learnings informing the Reddit product roadmap at Sprout.

Brands whose Reddit marketing strategies we admire

Looking for inspiration? These are some of our favorite brands that have embraced the power of Reddit.

Grammarly (now a part of Superhuman)

With 13,000 weekly visitors to the r/Grammarly subreddit, it’s no surprise that the AI writing platform has a multi-pronged Reddit marketing strategy. This includes two corporate accounts: u/GrammarlyOfficial and u/Grammarly_Support.

Through u/GrammarlyOfficial, the company hosts AMAs with executive leaders including their CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, and Jenny Maxwell, Head of Grammarly for Education. The account has earned over 600 Karma in less than a year.

The u/Grammarly_Support is one of five moderators of r/Grammarly, where their team frequently responds to product questions and feedback. In just one year, the account has made over 1,200 contributions and racked up a 100 Karma score.

Dove

In April 2025, Dove rolled out a branded subreddit for a specific purpose: the Dove Hot Seats campaign. To drive awareness of their new Dove Whole Body Deo collection, the company launched a Reddit-based scavenger hunt. Audiences were directed to the subreddit to pick up on digital clues that would lead them to a chance to win tickets to Charli xcx concerts, Lollapalooza and more.

Beyond this particular campaign, the u/Dove account has since started experimenting with Reddit to source feedback about new products.

Litter-Robot

Pet tech company Whisker is on a mission to make life better for cats and their owners. Their Litter-Robot product was one of the first-ever self-cleaning litter boxes to hit the market.

Cat parents are fanatical about taking care of their felines, and Litter-Robot mirrors that support for their customers on Reddit. The company maintains a corporate account that serves as co-moderator of r/litterrobot, which sees 66,000 weekly visitors and nearly 2,000 weekly contributions. The content ranges from troubleshooting questions and cat pics to folks swapping litter brand recommendations.

Taking it a step further, Whisker CEO Jacob Zuppke gets in on the conversation as u/CatPoopMan. Zuppke has gone so far as to offer his own email address to help get customer issues taken care of and share company updates (like Litter-Robot becoming HSA/FSA eligible).

Toronto Public Library

Libraries continue to write a new playbook for how traditionally offline organizations can engage audiences online—and the Toronto Public Library’s Reddit account is no exception.

The library is an active contributor to a variety of local Toronto subreddits, including r/Toronto and r/Torontoevents, where they regularly share upcoming free activities across their various locations. They also tap into their vast physical and digital archives to spark conversations around timely moments, like when they showcased this 1977 Blue Jays ticket during the 2025 World Series:

They also use the platform to respond to local patrons’ questions and shed light on internal processes (like ebook and audiobook purchasing), proving that a branded subreddit is not mandatory to delivering thoughtful customer service.

Get closer to your audience with a Reddit marketing strategy

If peer connection and smaller community spaces are the future of social, Reddit is where brands will need to be. No topic is too niche for the platform, and the depth and breadth of available subreddits means no brand is off-limits for user conversation.

But remember: This is not a place marketers can rush into. Instead, take the time to learn Reddit’s nuances and audience expectations. Then you can start building a long-term Reddit marketing strategy that brings your brand closer to customers, and to insights that can impact your entire business.

Ready to get started? Take a deeper dive into these strategies for Reddit social listening.

The post Building a Reddit marketing strategy: Lessons from Sprout Social’s team appeared first on Sprout Social.

Consumers’ appetite for niche, community-based experiences on social media is behind the steady growth. People are hungry for intentional, slower-paced feeds. Sprout’s Q2 2025 Pulse Survey found that 41% of global social users plan to spend more time on Substack. That rises to 52% for Gen Z and 53% for Millennials.

As Substack becomes a powerhouse platform for building hyper-engaged audiences, brands from all sectors are getting in on the action. Read on for a step-by-step guide to launching a brand Substack, with tips we learned from launching Sprout’s Substack, Social Futures.

What is Substack (and why should brands care)?

Substack is a hybrid newsletter, microblog and social platform where creators (primarily writers, journalists, and—increasingly—brands) publish editorial content and directly connect with their audiences. On Substack, you have both subscribers and followers. Subscribers are people who have shared their email address and opt-ed in to receive your posts. Followers are a broader audience who have chosen to follow your profile to see your activity, like Notes, within the app.

On Substack, brands share exclusive content their followers won’t find on their blog or social, and that content is often long-form and personality-driven.

Substack has a distinct, writer-driven culture. Developing a content strategy that feels native to the platform is crucial for success. Which is why it’s important to clarify what Substack is not. For example, Substack is not a replacement for your current blog, a vehicle for campaign assets, product releases and event promotion, a competitor to your existing newsletter, or an email list builder for other channels.

Types of content Substack supports

To create a Substack content strategy, it’s important to remember that the platform revolves around posts. Posts are the foundational building blocks of the Substack ecosystem.

Substack offers two core post types:

• Standard posts: A standard article or essay format that features long-form writing. While the post is predominately text-based, it can include multimedia content like images, videos and audio recordings.
• Video posts: A post where video is the main focus. A video post typically includes a transcript or text summary, and can be live or pre-recorded.

To promote their posts and presences, Substack users can tap into a variety of in-platform features, which include:

• Newsletters: Authors can host, publish and send their posts directly to subscribers’ inboxes from the Substack platform.
• Notes: Short-form content, including text, images, quotes, videos and links, that appears in the Substack feed. Notes are critical for in-platform discoverability.
• Chats: A group chat feature within the Substack platform that allows users to host live, interactive conversations with subscribers.

The benefits of Substack for brands

Even as Substack’s user base continues to grow, teams and leaders are unsure if their brand has a place on the platform. It’s distinct from other social networks, and requires ample effort and resourcing. Will those investments pay off on a platform that’s still relatively uncharted territory for brands?

When balancing the Substack scales, consider these benefits.

Build a direct, owned audience

When our content team pitched launching a Substack presence to our CMO, we positioned it as a salve to the sting of traditional search trends. As organic search behaviors increasingly result in zero-click outcomes,  brands need to diversify their distribution and discoverability channels to engage future customers and cement their authority. Substack offers the perfect opportunity.

On Substack, you can tap into a direct, owned and highly engaged audience—something that’s getting harder to find via search engines or social platforms.

Differentiate your brand personality & voice

Substack gives brands a rare opportunity to speak without the constraints of traditional social algorithms or character limits. Long-form content allows teams to adopt a more human tone, whether that’s analytical, witty, educational, editorial or deeply narrative. By publishing in a space where readers opt-in, brands can experiment with a more nuanced voice and build a distinctive personality.

Foster community & brand loyalty

Because Substack centers around subscription models, readers choose to be part of your brand’s world. That active choice leads to deeper engagement, stronger relationships and recurring interaction. Subscriber-only discussion threads and direct messaging features help cultivate a sense of belonging, making followers feel more like members of a community rather than passive content consumers. Over time, this dynamic builds durable loyalty and advocates who stay connected.

Create a new channel for thought leadership & creativity

Substack shouldn’t be a 1:1 replacement for your regular newsletter. The platform serves a completely different purpose, giving brands permission to slow down and offer richer, more substantive ideas. It’s an ideal channel for sharing founder-led POVs, behind-the-scenes perspectives, original research, creative explorations or exclusive guest editorials that don’t fit neatly into other platforms. By publishing thoughtful, high quality content, brands can position themselves as category leaders while also fueling creativity within their teams. The result is a channel that strengthens reputation, expands reach and showcases the brand’s most compelling ideas.

How brands are using Substack

To see these benefits in action, take a closer look at some notable brands already finding their home on Substack.

Hinge: No Ordinary Love

Hinge, the dating app designed to be deleted, hasn’t posted from their brand’s traditional network social accounts since 2020. In the five years since, they’ve instead invested in growing their creator program and experimenting on emerging platforms.

On their Substack, No Ordinary Love, Hinge shared five posts featuring love stories of couples who met using their app, written by real authors. The brand includes short chapters in each of their posts, comparing key milestones in a couple’s relationship to a storybook romance. The limited series also included a foreword written by Roxanne Gay.

Given Substack’s origins as a platform made for writers, the series felt authentic and highly intentional. The branding also made it distinct from Hinge’s typical look and feel, juxtaposing the fairytale aesthetic with relaxed photography.

As the Hinge team told Forbes, the entire No Ordinary Love universe was created with Gen Z as a muse: the photography style, the writers, the relatable love stories.

Restack this strategy: Substack is a playground for creative, long-form content, and Hinge’s strategy was truly out-of-the-box. What’s equally admirable is how they built their presence with members of their target audience, making their brand more human and in sync with their user’s needs.

Blackbird: The Supersonic

Blackbird is a loyalty company that rewards people who love restaurants. On their “secret Substack,” the Supersonic, Blackbird creates a space that feels like reading the food and culture section of your favorite newspaper.

In their posts, they feature their favorite food takes (“There is no such thing as a bad Caesar salad”), and editorial interviews with legendary chefs and leaders in the food industry. They also publish personal essays where writers share their favorite childhood food memories, and a newsletter full of top-of-mind news stories readers can take to inspire small talk during meals.

On their Substack site, the brand organizes their content with tabs for every series.

The Supersonic has grown their subscriber base to 11,000 subscribers, and frequently gets comments on their posts like, “Easily my favorite read of the week.”

Restack this strategy: For brands considering Substack, you have to be sure you have the resources to fuel consistent content production. The Supersonic is a great example of what that looks like in reality, with content published weekly (or more often). The brand has also mastered writing people-driven content (v. brand-driven), with distinct author voices and personality-driven editorials.

Loftie: Little Book of Sleep

Loftie is a wellness company helping people create tech-life balance through beautifully designed, deceptively simple products for the home. On their Substack, Little Book of Sleep, the brand tackles a topic everyone can relate to: getting a good night of sleep.

Their posts cover everything from how to create a sustainable sleep routine, to the history of mattresses and pillows, to how caffeine, naps and screentime impact our sleep habits. They also comment on emerging sleep trends—including eating kiwis before bed and the science behind the “morning shed” trend.

Restack this strategy: Substack newsletters are organized by categories (e.g., Technology, Health & Wellness), and many top authors find their niches within them. While it can be tempting to talk about everything that matters to your audience, take a cue from Loftie and narrow your focus. It can help you emerge as an expert and stand out as the platform continues to grow.

Sprout Social: Social Futures

Our team was elated to launch our Substack, Social Futures, earlier this year (more on how we built it in the next section). We love experimenting with timely and editorial content on the platform, like which brand won the celebrity denim showdown or holiday marketing trends (and horoscopes) for social marketers.

In our posts, we also share our proprietary data and My Social Media Diet interviews with our favorite social media subject matter experts. We recently invited a guest author, creator Coco Mocoe, to share her perspective on the future of the creator economy.

After just three months, we hit 7,300 views and an average newsletter open rate of 61%. While we still have room to grow, we’re immensely proud of how much we’ve achieved in a short time, and will continue sharing our biggest lessons with our subscribers.

Restack this strategy: Distribution is essential to driving views and subscribers. Using our other social channels and Employee Advocacy platform helped get the word out about our presence. Partnering with creators (through interviews and guest essays), who in turn amplify links with their networks, is another reliable way to fuel growth.

How to build a brand Substack strategy (with tips from Sprout’s own experience)

We’ve outlined an actionable, step-by-step process brands across industries can follow to launch their own Substack, based on what we learned launching Social Futures.

Step 1: Define your content strategy and focus

The first step is to reflect on what you want to create and the distinct purpose it serves. Ask yourself:

• How will your Substack content be different from what you publish on social or your blog?
• How will it stand out from other creators and brands publishing in the same category?

At Sprout, we saw gaps in our current editorial content that Substack would be the ideal home for. Casual, personality-driven interviews, deep dives into our data as it relates to timely trends, quick how-tos and frameworks, and an advice column.

Step 2: Determine who will write for your newsletter

As you develop your Substack beats, you also need to build your roster of Substack writers. Will you rely on an in-house team? Or outsource to creators, like when American Eagle tapped Casey Lewis for Off the Cuff?

For many brands, it might make sense to take a hybrid approach. That could include working with guest authors and producing editorial interviews, which is the approach we’ve taken at Sprout. Doing so required securing budget for creator partnerships upfront, and assessing how our content team would balance writing for Substack with production for our other channels.

You might also ask whether you plan to publish primarily text-based content or experiment with video. If on-camera talent and video editing skills are required, that could inform how you staff your Substack.

Step 3: Set (realistic) goals and metrics

Substack isn’t a traditional social channel, and you can’t use a network like Instagram or LinkedIn as a benchmark when setting Substack goals. Instead, look to other brands on the platform (preferably in your industry) to set goals for subscribers, views and open rate.

Though you shouldn’t expect massive subscriber numbers like you might be accustomed to on other channels, you should aim for your subscribers to be highly engaged—particularly with your newsletters.

Once you set goals, assign the role of “Substack analyst” to a member of your team. They should run the numbers on a monthly basis to inform your content and distribution strategies.

Step 4: Outline your distribution and subscriber acquisition plans for launch and beyond

As mentioned, distribution on other networks played an essential role in growing our Substack. Make a plan for sharing the news about your launch across platforms and internally. We highly recommend reaching out to your leaders, internal communications team and social team to build an all-encompassing plan.

Our launch plan included posting on Sprout’s LinkedIn and Instagram pages, adding our Substack site link to our Employee Advocacy platform, and posting in our marketing team’s Slack channel.

In this planning phase, you should also take stock of all of the creative assets you’ll need for launch and ongoing distribution (think Instagram carousel templates).

Step 5: Develop creative assets

When setting up our Substack, we were surprised how many new creative assets were needed to build our site. Here’s a comprehensive list of everything you’ll need to have designed or written just to set up your Substack presence:

• Logo: At least 256 x 256 px (or 1:1 aspect ratio) with a transparent background
• Email banners: Recommended 1100 x 220 px with a transparent background, but could be taller
• Cover image: At least 600 x 600 px
• Social preview images (will need one for each post): At least 1456 x 1048 px, but 420 x 300 px is the minimum
• About tab copy: From a few sentences to a few paragraphs explaining the purpose of your Substack newsletter.
• Welcome page copy: A sentence or two of text that will populate on the page that asks readers to subscribe.
• Newsletter header copy: A line of text that summarizes your Substack presence, and will appear in the header of every newsletter you send.
• Newsletter footer copy: A line of text that encourages readers to share your newsletter with their network that will appear at the footer of every newsletter you send.
• Welcome email copy: From a few sentences to a few paragraphs thanking someone for subscribing to your newsletter. These emails will be sent to all of your new subscribers.

To help us craft a cohesive and distinct brand for Social Futures, we worked with our Brand Creative team. They created our wordmark, color palette and imagery, and set the tone for our visual identity based on direction from our creative brief.

Step 6: Plan your community engagement strategy

Instead of posting and ghosting on Substack, the platform offers brands the opportunity to engage via Subscriber chats, Notes and comment section engagement. Build out a plan for how you will weave these audience touchpoints into your workflow.

A tip we’re experimenting with: While Substack posts should be original, you can try repurposing short-form content, including videos, images and text posts, from other networks into your Notes strategy.

Step 7: Leave room for experimentation

As we’ve experienced first-hand, you don’t have to have everything figured out from the start. Remain flexible when it comes to setting a cadence, assigning content themes and even building distribution strategies. There might be images you forgot to create or copy you forgot to draft (we’re guilty of this) when you set up your site. That’s okay. What’s most important is that you show up, ready to pivot and shift as you go.

Why Substack belongs in your brand’s playbook

Substack has evolved from a writer-first platform into a destination where brands can build deeper, more intentional relationships with their audiences. Its long-form, personality-first format gives teams a rare opportunity to slow down, share meaningful ideas and cultivate an engaged, opt-in community.

As more brands experiment (and succeed) on the platform, Substack is proving to be a powerful channel for creative expression and owned audience growth. By approaching it with clarity, focus and a willingness to iterate, your brand can carve out its own distinctive corner of this rapidly growing ecosystem.

For more on everything Sprout’s content team is trying, learning and publishing on Substack, be sure to subscribe to Social Futures.

The post More brands are emerging on Substack: See how Sprout is building on the platform appeared first on Sprout Social.