2 Channels for Targeting Tech Personas, Part 2/2
Winfield Salyards
By Win Salyards, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
B2B marketers targeting tech personas know well at this point that they make attribution frustratingly tricky. We know where to reach them, but they’re notoriously skeptical and private. So, how do we make attributions or capture leads when a potential tech contact is moving through your content like a ghost? I find it near impossible. That’s why you need to employ other strategies and channels. Two channels I see as being particularly promising are Stack Overflow and Reddit. To me, these two channels hold the potential for approaching complex tech personas, building trust, and potentially having them self-identify. This is the second of a two-part blog post. Read the first part on Stack Overflow here.
A lot has been written about advertising on Reddit over the last few years, most of it negative. And, I will admit that there are things about Reddit to be cautious about, such as brand safety. However, I believe that Reddit has potential as a channel with the right use case–targeting technical personas.
Reddit’s published best practices encourage broad ad campaigns targeted based on interest categories. However, this isn’t the right approach for targeting tech personas in this case. The better way is to target your Reddit campaign based on specific communities–subreddits–and to retarget. By targeting based on community, you’ll have a smaller but more relevant audience than you would by establishing your campaign on interest areas.
Choosing communities
When choosing communities to target, keep these three things in mind:
- Relevant topic
- Professional slant
- Good moderation
Your targeted communities should be relevant to your targeted persona and product, have aspects of a professional community, and have good moderation policies that keep it brand-safe and on topic. If these apply to your target communities, they’re good to go.
Other considerations
Reddit Ads is still a work in progress for the company. They are still adding to the platform and refining their systems. This makes it very dynamic in what you can do as an advertiser, but it also means you must stay up to date with the platform if you’re using it. Reddit also has a naturally ad-skeptical audience, much like Stack Overflow. Your ads should focus on providing value, solving problems, and avoiding overtly “marketing” speak.
If you take the time to get to know Reddit as a platform, it can be a solid channel to test out when targeting technical personas and can have a broader range of topics covered compared to Stack Overflow, such as mechanical engineering or architecture.
