Finding Your Marketing Channel

When launching RestauRent I was coming in with over 12 years of marketing experience across Google, Meta, and more but I knew if we were going to make this company successful we needed to truly redefine what it meant to “Market” because there was a reason many platforms before us had failed at a similar mission; we are working with two of the hardest target markets: Hospitality Owners & Independent individuals planning casual events.

These are two markets that you can very easily blow millions of dollars on Meta & Google ads and see little to no return because the audience sizes are MASSIVE but you need find people that are ready to convert today.

So rather then taking a traditional marketing approach we took our industry experience of product development to apply the same discovery frameworks commonly used by product teams in order to discovery where our core marketing channels would lie.

How Reddit Became Our Most Engaged Audience For a Total of $1,000

About 1 year into RestauRent we had gotten the basics down; we had built a strong paid advertising funnel for B2C private events through Google PPC but we needed a Growth Lever to really “Hockey stick” our growth and thats when google changed everything; they changed their algorithm.

See an article emerged that mentioned a Google executive said, “While SEOs hate to see Reddit and other forum threads show up so often in the Google Search results, searchers like seeing them. In fact, he said that searchers seek content out from these forums, and this is why Google shows them so often in the search results.”

So like all traditional “product people” I started doing some initial discovery testing and what I found was astonishing; people are FLOCKING to reddit to find recommendations in different areas for private event spaces and unlike advertisements they trust these recommendations far more but how would we get in front of them.

Test 1: Advertisements

Starting with the lowest hanging fruit for the easiest way to get data fast we launched a couple different advertising campaigns through the native reddit ads manager. After giving the campaign a 6 week test with multiple different creatives it generated a decent amount of clicks but comparative to our CAC on other ads networks, like google search, it was not going to be a strong enough leader to reallocate funds from our existing high performing network to a different one; because CAC is everything in an early stage start up.

But the frustrating part here is we KNEW our target audience was here but we could not figure out how to reach them.

Test 2: Getting Scrappy

Every startup has a scrappy growth lever marketing story; for example, Airbnb started by cross listing every Airbnb on craigslist because it was easier to market to people where they were already searching.

Using the same methodology how do reach our target market on reddit, where we know they already are searching, without using paid advertisements? That’s where “Product frameworks” and “Marketing frameworks” deviate and where product frameworks are able to drive true growth.

I went to my good ol’friend, upwork, and found a python developer who could build me a system that analyzed Reddit on a daily basis looking for people that were making posts with keywords indicating they might be looking for event/venue recommendations. From there we logged the post in an external database where we then used our own GPT agent spun up through openAI in order to analyze the post and see if this person was actually looking for a private event venue recommendation. If they were it would send me an email that there was a new reddit post that needed my attention.

From there I would then go into reddit, look at the post, go to RestauRent.com, find a couple of venue recommendations that fit what they were looking for, and I would respond directly to the post with links to every venue that would fit their event.

Now let’s be honest this did not drive immediate results but as I mentioned at the start of this section, google had begun giving reddit rankings preferential treatment on google search.

So it wasn’t just about investing in getting a booking today but it was about investing in the longterm success of RestauRent by making sure every single person looking for a private event through Reddit saw that RestauRent was a highly recommended tool for finding the perfect space.

We built a repeatable process for this and overtime became extremely active on reddit; responding to comments, recommending venues, and even creating our own groups!

Building a Community

For example, we identified that the NYC market was by far the most active when it came to utilizing reddit for private event venue recommendations so we tested the waters with building our own Reddit community called r/NYCEventPlanning this group quickly became a hub for one thing & one thing only; finding the perfect place for your next event and we were in control of the entire community.

Now don’t get me wrong, these things don’t “Blow up” overnight but the best part about this entire strategy is it has cost us less then $1,000 in total with the ONLY cost being the initial post identification system that we hired a developer to build for us. Everything else we were able to piece together with no code tools and our own time (yes time is money but in a startup you have limited time, but money is even more limited so this became my early morning and late night task.)

The community started slow but we spent the time to research the best tips and tricks from other communities. We crossposted posts about private events from other communities into ours, commented on them, and then let the original poster know we posted it in this group JUST for event planning.

We took the time to “dive all in” and do it the right way and now about 7 months later this group in NYC is growing completely organically and users are flocking to it to post their own recommendations & look through previous recommendations.

Continue to Build on Our Strategy

As mentioned in the subtitle of this post; finding the right channel is like dating.

• We took reddit on a first date (initial research) and it showed promise so we asked for another date

• Our second date wasn’t the perfect place (strategy) but it was the right person (platform)

• We pivoted for the third date (new strategy) and confirmed it was the right person when we did the right things together (platform)

• Then we continued to date as we got more serious (built our own tools, processes, communities, etc)

• Then we got married (we now invest continued time and effort on a weekly basis to the success of this strategy)

So now that we are “Married” what did we do next? Well that’s where we really started to test new stuff. From launching a native AI recommendation bot directly in reddit through their reddit api to create an entire site called Redditvenues.com that analyzed every single post on reddit to find which where the MOST recommended venues for different occasions according to reddit.

How to apply this to your own startup?

Now lets be clear here; I’m not saying you should go flock to reddit to solve all your marketing issues but what I’m saying is that to build a successful marketing strategy that drives true, affordable, sustainable, “hockey stick” growth, you need to think outside of the box. Google Ads and FB ads may work but there is a network / a strategy out there that is your startups “soul mate” and it is your job to go on a bunch of different dates to see which strategy you need to get married to in order to find the strongest success for your company.