r/marketing
In-house marketers and agency staff
- Size
- Very large
- Buying intent
- Medium
- Promotion
- Conditional
High volume and correspondingly noisy. A large share of posts are career questions, portfolio reviews and discussion of whether marketing is a good field to enter, none of which is useful to a vendor.
Genuine tool questions do get asked and answered, but you are competing for the reply with every other marketing tool in existence, which is the most crowded software category there is. Expect to work harder for less here than in a smaller community.
What we have measured
Lidar reads this community every day. These figures come from the 36 posts we collected here over the last 30 days, read a median of 56 hours after they were posted.
- Posts asking a question
- 50%
- Median replies when we read them
- 22
- Median upvotes when we read them
- 16
The question share is the one to weigh. A community where half the posts ask something is a community that wants answers, and a community where almost none do is one where people are broadcasting rather than asking. The engagement figures are deliberately measured at the moment we collect a post rather than at its final score, because that is the state a thread is in when replying to it is still worth doing.
What people actually post
The stack question
What to use for a specific channel or workflow. Useful when it carries a budget or a team size.
The attribution problem
Nobody can prove what is working. Recurring, genuinely painful, and monetisable if you solve it credibly.
The career post
Salaries, titles, breaking in. The dominant post type by volume.
What people get wrong about it
The size suggests reach. In practice the career content dominates and a useful thread is buried within an hour.
Can you promote in r/marketing?
Self-promotion rules are enforced and the community is unusually alert to marketers marketing to marketers. Any hint of growth-hack framing is fatal.
What gets you removed
Growth-hack framing of any kind. Marketers recognise marketing instantly and treat it as evidence you have nothing substantive.
A good first contribution
Answer a measurement or attribution question properly. It is the most common real problem in the community and most replies to it are guesses.
Products that fit here
- Analytics and attribution
- Content and SEO tooling
- Email and lifecycle platforms
- Anything proving channel performance
What does not work
Broad all-in-one platforms. The category is saturated and the community is exhausted by it.
Timing
Budget season in Q4 produces the most tooling discussion.
How it compares to the neighbours
The communities closest to r/marketing, and how they differ on the three things that decide whether one is worth your time.
| Community | Size | Intent | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/marketing | Very large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/PPC | Mid-size | High | Conditional |
| r/digital_marketing | Large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/sales | Large | High | Conditional |
Where this fits in a wider plan
r/marketing appears in our list of the best subreddits for B2B SaaS, which sets it against the other communities worth watching in that market. If you are starting from nothing, the six-week plan in finding your first 100 users covers how to build standing before you mention a product at all.
Watch r/marketing without reading it.
Lidar reads it every day, scores each post against what your product does, and sends you the ones worth answering. Along with the rest of business and operations.