Interview: Adriana Gadala-Maria, reddit Ad Sales Marketing Manager

Welcome to the third interview in the “InterviewFX” series! These interviews offer business owners and marketers important insight, advice, and ideas that will help grow their online presence and become more successful at what they do. If you missed the first two posts, here’s our first interview with Jim Armstrong from Google, and last week’s interview with social media expert Alison Zarrella can be found right here.

Today, we’re asking Adriana Gadala-Maria, the Ad Sales Marketing Manager for reddit, five question about sustainable client relationships, advertising strategies on reddit, and how digital marketing can help businesses get ahead. Keep reading to see the full interview!

1. What’s the culture of your company?

It’s very fun and casual.

We tend to have a lot of visitors, both human and canine, coming in and out while everyone else browses reddit. It’s exactly what you’d imagine reddit’s environment to be like.

2. What makes for a sustainable client relationship?

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my sales and marketing career is the importance of being 100% transparent in your business relationships.

The best client relationships I’ve had stem out of being completely honest about campaign details, risks, and expectations with your clients. By not doing so you risk your client’s money, time, and trust. The best way for your client to succeed is for them to have all the information at hand, and if they succeed you’ve done your job.

3. How does digital marketing and advertising help small-medium sized businesses?

I specialize in helping small businesses market their brand on reddit through paid advertising. I’ve seen hundreds of small businesses benefit from marketing their brand through advertising, and the most common benefit I’ve seen is brands increasing site traffic, quality of traffic, and amount of new users to their sites. Knowing who your brand audience is, and then identifying that audience in other sites, is the key ingredient in digital advertising and marketing.

Once you can identify and strategically target your online audience, you can successfully leverage online advertising to drive traffic and new users to your site.

4. Describe an effective digital marketing/advertising strategy you worked on.

TopShelf Clothes, a NYC startup company that makes personalized fashion recommendations for women, recently incorporated reddit advertising into their digital marketing strategy with the goal of increasing site traffic and membership signups. The fashion brand had used other social media native advertising platforms prior to reddit advertising, and was looking to test out reddit ads to expand their audience reach even further and connect with our fashion communities.

Prior to setting up their ad campaign, TopShelf Clothes searched for the largest fashion and female subreddits on reddit (“subreddits” are reddit communities dedicated to a specific interest), and then the brand launched reddit ads targeting those subreddits to promote their service. By researching and then targeting subreddits that are actively interested in female fashion, TopShelf Clothes was able to successfully reach their audience: the fashion brand’s reddit campaign resulted in their new member sign-up cost lowering by 4x and also saw a 47% lower bounce rate from incoming reddit traffic (more than any other social media site).

5. What’s a digital resource or opportunity that you wish more small-to-medium sized businesses knew about?

This is a biased answer: reddit advertising.

I have done several workshops at start-up incubators and coworking spaces, and few people are taking advantage of reddit advertising, which is a great way to expand your site audience at a very low cost ($.75 CPM). reddit is made up of thousands of passionate interest groups, and if your product matches one of those groups it’s a no-brainer that you as a brand should be promoting your product in that community. You’re hitting the sweet spot: people who are passionate about what you, as a brand, are offering.

To give you an example, there is a huge reddit community that is solely dedicated to sharing the most delicious pictures of food on reddit: /r/FoodPorn. This subreddit alone has over 1.6 MM monthly impressions, and over 275k monthly unique users. If you’re a food blogger, are selling a food-related product, or have a cooking YouTube channel, this is your opportunity to connect with a highly passionate community of reddit users who are already enthusiastic about your content.

Adriana Gadala-Maria is the Ad Sales Marketing Manager at reddit, Inc. Adriana joined the reddit team in 2011, where she managed and planned multifaceted ad campaigns for over 2 years prior to shifting her focus to reddit’s self-service ad platform. You can find Adriana on Twitter at @AdrianaTGM.