Ross Simmonds on The Power of Reddit

This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I'm John Wall. Today's guest is Ross Simmons. It's been an interesting story. He came to me, Greg Poirier from Ateco. He's my source for a lot of sales force stuff. You know, anything comes up on that front. I'm also talking to him. He had him on the show. He forward me a LinkedIn post from Rand Fishkin of Spark Toro. And it was Ross's original research. And I was reading this paper about Reddit conquering everything and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And as I dug in, I was like, how have Ross and I not even talked? But of course, you know, this space is so huge that there's so much going on. And it's insane. But so all that to say, I'm thrilled that Ross is here to join us Ross, thanks for spending some time here. John, thanks for having me on. Super excited to be here. And it's always great when like so many mutual friends and contacts can put us together. So I had known Rand and Greg for quite some time. So I'm glad that we could finally finally connect. Okay. Now, your research is about, as I had mentioned, Reddit just dominating search results. Yeah. But let's back up a little bit. I mean, so you're obviously deep into analytics. Yeah. And I know you're also into distribution is something that you focus in and are, you know, deep into. But what happened, you know, when you were a kid at school, did you know that, I mean, it's so funny. You know, there was no internet. There was right. There was a number of stuff. Yeah. What subjects did you gravitate to and kind of what got you on your career path? Yeah. So I was always obsessed with writing. Like I always had like an itch to create and write. And when I got into about university, I started a fantasy football blog. But when I was in elementary, I had the early bug and interest in entrepreneurship. So I always wanted to kind of work for myself. And then this internet thing, when I was in university, really started to open my eyes to this idea that if you create stories on the internet, you can reach people all over the globe. I remember one of my first websites that I had run was all about fantasy sports. I had another one about this video game called The Sims. And they both were like building like massive audiences. But my traffic was going up. But my marks were going down and my mom said to me, like, why don't you just start writing about what you're learning in school? So then I started to publish insights about marketing and social media. And I started to do research and started to publish what I was learning and the internet started to pay attention. And I started to get opportunities to consult and help brands and businesses. And it just opened up the world of tech and marketing for me. And I just continued down that path and you fast forward 15, 20 years later. And here I am still still in the space. That's amazing. Okay. I'm dragging a soft topic. But I do have to ask, is there anything still going with The Sims or is that chapter closed? So it's funny. It's the chapter. But my sibling, my sister who I actually started the website with still runs in a successful and managing it and has built up a massive community on The Sims and even met her now husband through this community that we created when we're in university. So it's wild. Yeah. That is amazing because that was a moment in time that was, you know, that game completely dominated for so long it was just a top of everything. All right. So tell us about your work day now. So you said you kind of got dragged into more and more consulting. It's funny. So this happens. It's just kind of if you keep answering questions, eventually people realize that you're the person to go through. So is that the route that you went? Did you start your own firm and run or did you work with another firm at some other point? Kind of what brought you to that point of starting up as your own consultancy? Yeah. So my journey was interesting. I had a few years where I wanted to go into the agency world so I could learn a little bit about agency in general. And then I wanted to use that experience to go out and eventually create my own. So I did that. I spent a few years working in a host at a big agency, spun out as a freelancer. And as a freelancer, I was able to actually start a multiple businesses. So I've run everything from coffee companies to cleaning companies to tech startups, etc. I was a fractional CMO for a bunch of companies. Some of them have become wildly successful. And I continued down that path until I started to have babies and I was like, I can't keep working this crazy. So I started to kind of scale back on a lot of the different endeavors and started to hire and build a team. And you fast forward to now and foundation is a content marketing firm that helps organizations with AI visibility, helping them show up in the LLMs. But it's all rooted in some of the core concepts that we used to do, which was content marketing, content distribution and more. So our team helps B2B SaaS companies show up in the LLMs. But it's rooted in some of the best practices that we've been applying for years. Right. Okay. And since now that's publishing some original research, that's just the exact kind of content that you want out there because the folks reading that are the folks that are going to need your help. But let's talk about this Reddit paper, kind of what was the trigger for it? Even had you seen Reddit providing results for folks or what? Yeah. So back in 2018, I wrote a book called Cracking the Reddit Code because marketers were so afraid of this channel. And I was a Redditer first and foremost. And I believed that you could actually do marketing on Reddit correctly if you understood a few nuances. So for the last few years, I've been working closely with Reddit, working with brands, helping them do marketing on Reddit. But one of the things that has recently changed is how dominant Reddit is in the SERP. And when Google and Reddit announced a partnership right before their IPO, it led to a path in which Reddit started to dominate the SERP. So the search engine results pages in Google. And for the vast majority of bottom of funnel and middle of funnel queries, I was noticing that Reddit was showing up. So I said, I need to do some research here and really dive deeper to understand what the value is of Reddit in comparison to other channels and other platforms. We started to compare Reddit to some of the review sites and Reddit was winning. We have been studying how Reddit was showing up versus Cptera, G2, Traceratius, all of these review sites in software, and time and time again, Reddit had surpassed those sites, but those sites were still getting the vast majority of the dollars from brands. So this research opened up insights into two key things. One, there's an opportunity organically to have a presence on Reddit, which leads to you showing up in the SERP. But two, there's probably an underappreciated, underestimated value that exists on Reddit from an advertising lens because people are landing on Reddit to get real answers to real problems and real questions. Now, things got very interesting after the roll-out of things like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Cloth, because traditionally SEOs just think about Google. But Reddit is being cited in a lot of these different LLMs. In August of last year, Reddit was the number one cited domain across all platforms. There's been some fluctuations over the last few months in the last few years, and most recently, ChatGPT saw a slight dip in Reddit, but it is still a very prominent and dominant player for prompts and questions that are associated with the transaction. So long answer to a short question, but it all started with enjoying Reddit, and then you fast forward a few years months later, and Reddit just truly becoming the front page of the internet, and we wanted to provide the market with some research and data to show it. Okay, we just have to take a second. I had recorded this with Ross about a week ago, and since then, I've gotten sick so you guys are getting a very weight break here. We want to thank Sally for their support of marketing over coffee. If you're somebody who travels for work, this is the dance you go through every time you leave the country. How do I get my phone to work? The last thing you want to do is land and have to figure it out then. 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How about that marking line of the IPO, did things kind of change and become more corporate at that point? Was there a full on culture shift because you touched a killer point and let me, I want to go back to this too, is your book, you know, for so often marketing has thought that like, oh yeah, Reddit's where you go to get beat up and made fun of. Like it's a prank, it's mostly a place for disaster. Yeah. Have things changed around the IPO or are there other things that have kind of made the shift? Yeah, I'd say there's been a massive shift. I'd say two key things that have happened is one, their ad platform itself has gotten way more sophisticated. Advertising on Reddit historically was very difficult and complex and you didn't really know what you were going to get. Today it's a lot more streamlined. You can be a lot more strategic with your targeting against different subreddits. They have machine learning built into the back end that is based off of user behavior. So it's a lot more sophisticated than it once was. And I think that's connected to the IPO and then trying to again just create more shareholder value. Now right before the IPO, they've struck this partnership with Google and that has been a key part of the success of Reddit because the amount of organic traffic going to Reddit.com has never been higher since that partnership rolled out. Now, Google will go on record and say that they have nothing to do with each other and their Reddit just happens to be the right place. But I try to read between the tree leaves and see, is there maybe, I don't know. But all that to be said, Google is driving so much traffic to Reddit in a way that a lot of people have continued to sleep on this platform, but I'm recommending a lot of brands to, at the very least, use Reddit as a channel to get feedback and insight around your brand. Use it to protect your brand by creating a subreddit that is dedicated to your community. And then also having user accounts so you can respond when someone's asking a tough question and actually engage with them one on one. Okay. Now, you also had some interesting stuff that there were a few companies that were able to crack through and do a better job than Reddit. And so what did you learn there? What was the takeaway? Yeah. So what I was able to see there was that the brands in the URLs that were actually surpassing Reddit were those who had what I like to call double elite. So experience expertise, authority, and trust. So the content that is on their site, oozed with experience from those individuals who are pressing publish on the content, expertise. So the author of an asset, the author behind a piece is someone had deep experience in creating these things. Authority, they were known on other domains for being an expert in a subject and trust they had all of the trust signals. So websites where there was a significant amount of reviews where there was positive reviews, positive sentiment, all of those things when done well allowed these brands to surpass Reddit. And that's one of the things that has started to show up for a handful of different queries. Okay. And then you talked about, you know, where you should be targeting your efforts. And you have a sweet spot of keyword density around 21 to 60 words. What's the idea with that? Yeah. So one of the things that was surprising is that the actual approach that a lot of marketers are taking when they're going after keywords is like, let's just focus on one phrase. Let's just focus on CRM, for example. But in reality, in the rise of LLMs, people are asking way more robust prompts. They're not just asking, give me a good CRM. They're asking a question like, I am a Fortune 500 company who have 10 BDRs. I have an account executive who is struggling with this platform. I used to use this tool. They have a much broader prompt. So when they are asking these very in-depth prompts and questions, what you want to do as a brand is to be present on a site like Reddit where your keyword density and the various phrases in which you are using are actually much bigger than just best CRM. So you want to surround your brand with best CRM for Fortune 500 best CRM for 5 BDRs for 10 account executives with a lot of modifications. So you're more likely to actually influence the LLMs when someone is looking for that. Now just really quick because I think this is something that not a lot of folks are picking up on. When we are tracking prompts in these various LLM tracking tools, not a lot of marketers are realizing that this is a whole different method of tracking keywords than it used to be. Before we would care if we ranked number one for best CRM. But in today's world where everyone is using these different LLMs, multiple queries are happening every time someone uses it. If you asked for the best CRM and I asked for the best CRM and we wrote the exact same prompt into our favorite LLM tool, what actually happens behind the scenes is very different. It's going to know my context and it's going to modify that query to a bunch of different phrases. It's going to modify yours as well. If you asked for the best Sauna, it's going to look for a Sauna in your region in your area if I did the same, it's going to modify. So this thing called memory is actually resulting in variations of queries that people are sleeping on, which is why there's more opportunity on channels like Reddit to go after a long tail queries where you're going after so many different variations of phrases and ultimately increase your chances of winning. Yeah, that's interesting. The idea of just casting a broader net. And that was one thing that I was pleasantly surprised at is most of your advice in the paper of the things to do are just still just kind of the block and tackle bright, great content beyond the mark. So what specific stuff those should people be doing to go that route? You know, like what kind of content strategy should they have and how's it different? So it's so difficult with Reddit because it's can't just be your brand. It's important that we as marketers have a presence are there and are engaging, but that we are inspiring and trying to increase the likelihood of our customers to go on Reddit and leave us a positive review. And I know that automatically is going to make some of your listeners break out into Hives. They're like, oh my goodness, you're going to have our customers on Reddit. That's where people go to get yelled at and screamed at. But if you can think about Reddit the same way as you would think of a review set when you would ask for that plus that review on G2 on captera on Yelp or whatever site is relevant to your category, I would encourage people to think of how can you use those moments within your product to say, can you leave us a review on Reddit? And of course it's going to be after they get value from your product. By simply doing that, you increase your surface area and increase the likelihood that they're going to use words that your other customers would use if they were looking for this product and the LLM is going to pick that up. So that's one thing. Inspire more conversations. Another thing that brands should be thinking about is how can you look at and track and monitor how various platforms and sites are starting to be cited in the LLM's. When I look at channels like YouTube, I'm starting to believe truly that YouTube might be one of the most underappreciated channels today in marketing. We are seeing lots of people cut their cable because they have a YouTube subscription and just consume YouTube content. Both from a paid and organic standpoint, I think YouTube presents a massive opportunity, especially when you consider the rollout of AI overviews on Google, the decline in traffic that so many brands are seeing, but the rise of traffic being sent from Google to YouTube, which only makes sense. It's a company that they own. YouTube is another channel that I think presents a massive opportunity. The subreddit, it's just amazing to me how the CRM subreddit is the elephant, the monster, and it's just amazing how much way that thing has. The first question, should brands ever be thinking about creating their own subreddit, or is it just no always go to the existing point? Great question. I think the best strategy for any brand is to create their own subreddit, but to be active in the category specific subreddits that are relevant to their audience. In your own subreddit, you're going to be creating a ecosystem in a community in a world where you're able to build trust, where you're building a dialogue, where you're seeding your own content, you're distributing your blog content, you're making product announcements, you're announcing features, you might even host an internal AMA, which isn't asked me anything, just to build and foster a sense of community. In addition to that, you're going to be looking for opportunities in other subreddits like our CRM, where if you're in B2B, that is the most dominant subreddit that exists in the SERP, and you're going to be looking for ways where you can become a part of those conversations. You're going to answer questions when someone is asking something about your product, but you're not just going to show up in conversations when people are asking about your product. You want to be a natural sounding human. So when someone is asking, how do you onboard a great BDR, or a great SDR, or an account executive, maybe you're going to give them a roadmap and give them some guidance on, hey, one of the things that we've done to onboard our BDR successfully is X, Y, and Z. So you go in with those types of value ad-driven content and people are actually going to say, thank you, they're going to give you upvotes. The worst thing that could happen is that the only thing that you do on Reddit is constantly plug your business, because that is going to lead down a path that I've been down like 18 times in my career, which is getting banned. You do not want to be banned from Reddit. So you want to go in with the intention of adding value in these different communities, not with the idea that you can just plug, plug, plug your business time and time again. Yeah, yeah. And so can you clarify for that? They will actually ban your subreddit. It's not just getting banned as a user, but they'll kill the whole subreddit. Exactly. You can risk both. You can risk having your subreddit and banned simply because all you're doing is feeding tons of content that spamming your product. You're not facilitating conversations and dialogues that can lead to the subreddit being banned. If your user account, the individual who's on Reddit is also doing that, you could be banned. So what you want to do is just use Reddit like a good Reddit or would, which is, in my belief, rooted in three simple concepts that I like to call the three ease. One, educational content, you need to go in with the intention of educating people and providing them with information they didn't have before. Two, engaging content. So ask questions. Open up different subreddits with questions about things that you're interested in or that your brand is interested in and works kind of parallel to. So maybe in a CRM subreddit, you're asking, what's your morning habits for the top salespeople or how do you close your calls at the end of a conversation with a high-value prospect? You ask those types of questions to drive engagement. And then the last one is entertainment. So the last E educate, engage, and entertain. This is where you're going to have a little bit of fun. So as a redditor, you want to be human. I'm not saying you have to crack jokes and make a lot of like jokes all the time, but you should be open to providing some type of casual, normal human dialogue and storytelling within your content that's going to lead to upvotes. And if you do that consistently, you're less likely to be banned. Yeah, that's that's a great point. God, there's so much there to think about that because you're really, you know, you can lose your your brand name. The one that comes to mind for me is Bose, because I've been to their board a number of times. And I was able to get in some discussions with engineers about how the products work. And I was so cool. It was basically hacking, you know, one of the tools. And they pointed me in the right direction. And it worked. And it was great. Thinking about what's at stake and how marketers, you know, have the marketers have the reputation of ruining anything. What do you see as far as for clients and how you counsel people as far as I mean, in a perfect world, you'd have a product manager that's doing this, right? Because they know everything. But of course, everybody who's done marketing even on the agency side knows that that product marketer may or may not want to do any writing at all. Never mind. Right. Be good at it. You know, yeah. Do you do a partnership, you know, between sales and marketing and somebody that has product knowledge? And then the other one is that gets missed is the customer service side. Do you just leave it over to customer service? That seems to work better. Right. Yeah. So we've been doing a few parallel opportunities where we create like a shared Slack community with the client where customer successes in their sales is in their end marketing. And when there's an opportunity for one of those parties to be involved, we will tag them in and let them contribute and share and give guidance on what that communication should be. So in the ideal scenario, you're looking at all three parties kind of being a part of it. Typically on the sales side, you're going to see that happen in the DMs. So in the DMs is where the sale happens where someone sends a message to someone who's running the account and they're like, hey, I'm interested in learning a little bit more about your service. I'm interested in learning more about your product. Who should I chat with? That's when we can pass it over. Customer service always happens in public. And this is the beauty and the curse of Reddit. Because when customer service questions are coming up, you're not just working one to one. It's one to many. Like, yes, there is one individual who has a problem, but there's thousands of people who are watching how you resolve this problem. So it's important that you lean heavily into this idea of just killing them with kindness, bringing as much kindness as possible, do not get into a flame battle on Reddit with anyone because it will not go well for most brands. You want to potentially, if they are very hostile, result in that message and that conversation going into an email or into the DMs. Before a lot of times, we like to deal with those things publicly. So other people can see, oh, this is how great this brand is in terms of managing conflict and challenges. And thus, we're going to carry that reputation to make a decision to potentially buy from them. In some instances, clients are looking at Reddit and brands are looking at Reddit. And they already know that there is an old thread from two years ago, three years ago, maybe five years ago, that sit at the top of Google for their brand query. And it says that they're a horrible company. And it's making their CEO lose sleep. It's making everyone lose sleep. Everyone stressed out about it. The best thing that a marketing team can do to remove that from the internet service is to actually become active and to try to get new content because Google wants recency. Reddit wants recency. So you want to inspire new conversations to let that old stuff get away. Sure. I hope that you have fixed the problem that may have led to that negative post that is on Reddit. But you also want to be active and inspire new conversations to dilute that one post that might be causing problems today. And that's great. You kind of just, my head exploded with this idea. We're finally at the stage where things have tipped enough that that idea of having everybody in Slack talk about, okay, here's what the answer should be and where we go. You've got somebody on your side who's queuing, you know, triaging them so that the other, you know, these subject matter experts don't have to watch everything. They just get called in. But then on top of that, now that you've got it there, you can actually have AI scan it. And you can, you know, the most, the 50 most popular answers, you can already have them queued up and ready to go with no input because you've got, you've got a repository of those answers and how stuff works and where it goes. So that makes a ton of sense. Exactly. And that's the beauty. It's like over time, you just get better because you are learning how to respond and manage different problems and scenarios. And then it just becomes muscle memory. Right. Yeah. It's easy. And you can just rip out the copies. Okay. Based on what you've done, I do have to ask. So now, how about Wikipedia and LinkedIn? Like, if you were to rank these three, obviously, it seems like Reddit is just king of the hill, but similar approaches for the others or what's your opinion on those other two network? So the other two are just as important. However, one of them is close to impossible to influence, which is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the most difficult things to kind of, I would say, influence as a marketer. So the only way that I have seen success with influencing Wikipedia is by actually just doing good business, doing massive initiatives that will shift your presence on Wikipedia, launching things to even get listed on Wikipedia for some brands is very difficult. If you already have a brand that is well established and exists, you need to be thinking in terms of campaigns and initiatives that are worthy of resulting in an update to Wikipedia. Think about it like an encyclopedia, only the most important information goes there. So you need to be thinking about how can you get to a point where the actual stories and the efforts that you're taking are update worthy on Wikipedia. However, LinkedIn is a whole new bargain. LinkedIn is as Malibu is Reddit in many ways, where if you can inspire your team to create LinkedIn content, talking about your brand, if you can publish articles, talking about your category and your niche, listicles are ranking extremely well from LinkedIn across multiple platforms. There is the carousel features on LinkedIn, which is now just called documents. There are so many things that you can do on LinkedIn that will ultimately influence your brand's expertise, experience, authority and trust factors on offsite that allows you to show up in the yellow lens and influence buyers. So I would say, if I was to rank them, Reddit is still very high on the top of the list. LinkedIn comes number two. I think Wikipedia is great, but it is so difficult to influence, but it's also very powerful. That sounds good. Okay, so now what's on your radar going forward? What kind of things are you looking at as far as the next six months a year? What are you excited about? So one of the things that has me super excited in the next six months is the rise of video. I think that people are craving human connection. And because of that crave and that desire, we're seeing in almost every Google search, YouTube videos starting to have a more prominent and prominent space. There's also this new tab for short videos. So I'm starting to see a lot of opportunity with short form video content and clips just as well. So from my perspective, if I was to make a bet on where more brands need to be investing, moving forward, it would definitely be video content. I think that we are going to see a surge in not only the human demand for video, but also the robot demand for video because of the way in which people are wanting to consume that content. But also because Google owns this thing called YouTube and YouTube is filled with valuable insights. That sounds good. And then how about anything you've read watched, you know, in media, you've consumed over the past few months that you can recommend to our audience, something that made you think or you really enjoyed. So most recently, I read a book that has absolutely nothing to do with business, but it turns out it has everything to do with business. And it's called the inner game of tennis. So I don't play tennis. My kids play tennis, my wife plays tennis, but I wanted to read this book to understand it. And when I read the book, it blew my mind because what it was really about is the inner work and how to prepare after failure, how to prepare after losing how to prepare for a game and how to manage the stress of the highs and lows of everything. And it's a book that I wish I would have read way earlier in my career. It encourages the idea of kind of spending a little bit more time internal versus always looking for that like validation of whether or not you had the perfect swing and stuff like that. So the inner game of tennis, it's a book that I was strongly recommend folks check out. That's cool. So there's a classic study of talking about, you know, top 100 players, where one of the big takeaways, it's kind of like when you hit that top 10, everybody's the same, except there's usually two or three people in there that love the game, right? That they, they're able to let go of failures because they're just happy to be out there. And that, at first, you think, oh, that's just like a morale yee hot thing. But the reality was that it's less physical stress on their mind. So they're less fatigued after three or five hours. Was that one of the points that was in there? Did they touch that? Yeah, exactly. It's very much along the lines of like, more of the game is associated with what's going on between your ears than what's actually happening on the court. That's fantastic. All right. Well, I'm a huge tennis fan. I have played and we just finished watching the US open. We're all in on that. So I'll have a link to that and push that in the show notes. Ross, how about if somebody wants to learn more about what you've got going on or questions about what we've talked about, what's the best way to get in touch? Yeah. I'm easily able to be found on most channels. They can add me to LinkedIn, Ross Simmons, or you can go to foundationink.co for more research and insights that we're publishing on data all around Reddit and AI visibility all the time. And of course, my personal website, Ross Simmons.com. And I have a podcast, the Ross Simmons show. So folks can check out that as well. That sounds good. We'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes. And of course, you can check out the marketing of a coffee newsletter. If you want to get text links to all that stuff, the marketing over coffee, text line at 617 8125494. We are not going to jump into talking about sauna because we are both sauna fans. We will save that for offline. Let's do it. That may have to be its own podcast at someday or something. I like it. Thanks so much for having me on, John. Really appreciated the conversation. It was great to have a coffee. Thanks for appreciate it. That'll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. You've been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blocks at Christopher S Penn dot com. Read more from John J. Wall at J W 51 50 dot com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called Mellow G by Funk Masters. And you can find it at Music Alley for a mevio or follow the link in our show notes.