I think every marketer’s job comes down to one basic task:
Answering people’s questions.
We find the questions that worry our customers. We answer them in a compelling way. We show how our product can help.
Finding those heart-stopping questions is often the hardest part. It’s even harder to do at scale. That’s why, over the past year or so, I’ve been using LLMs to find those questions all over Reddit.
In this post I’ll explain how — and why — I do it. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to do it yourself. If you want some more hands-on guidance, you can always send me a DM.
Reddit is a goldmine for customer research
“Is traditional data modeling dead?” It’s an honest question posted in the subreddit called r/dataengineering. And it sparked a pretty robust debate there. 👇
If I were marketing a product that involves (or challenges) data modeling, this Reddit debate would be gold!
Web-based research like this isn’t new to content marketers. For years now, we’ve been collecting data from Google’s “People Also Asked” questions.
In my opinion, Reddit has been underrated as a source of these questions.
How we search Reddit to understand audience pain points
For years, at ércule, we did it manually: keeping a list of relevant subreddits, or doing site searches via Google.
We’d open a subreddit, then…
- Search key phrases in the search bar
- Click on threads that showed promise
- Scour the discussion for interesting audience insights
And that’s basically how the research is done now… with one very important change. We use LLMs now to conduct that research with greater breadth, depth, and scale.
Overview: the LLM workflow
I built this flow on n8n (I’ve talked about n8n at length in this blog post).
What it does:
- Ingests a list of topics
- Searches for them on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Google
- Identifies relevant discussions in subreddits
- Adapts those discussions into discrete questions
- Exports a list of those questions
That list of questions will inform a variety of the content we create for content across channels.
And here’s a video walkthrough of the process. 👇
The workflow I’m using in that video is scanning Reddit, LinkedIn, and Google. Each search requires a separate node in the workflow design. This involves lots of little steps, which would be mighty tedious to recount here (but you can always reach out if you’d like to talk shop in detail).
The workflow will aggregate all of the topic-oriented data we requested. Next, it will shape that data into discrete questions.
My little Reddit FAQ generator
I call this next step the “FAQ generator.” It’s just another little LLM flow. We’ve designed a prompt here that says, basically: extract a list of human readable questions from this data.
Some of the data that it collected is already in the form of a question, like the title of that Reddit thread: Is traditional data modeling dead? But not all points of inquiry involve a question-mark.
For example, check out this statement in the comments:
This comment is not formulated as a question, but it brings up a very valid concern. If a data engineer is doubting the value of traditional modeling then it’s worth asking: What are the costs of ditching traditional data modeling?
Our LLM workflow will read and identify concerns like this, formulate them as explicit questions, and export them in an FAQ list.
The output: real questions and new answers
The workflow then exports several dozen questions. Here’s one haul for the topic of public relations monitoring:
Now, for the AI caveat: not every question on this list will be a winner. However, there are going to be some really interesting ones.
On the topic of public relations monitoring, it generates questions like…
- How can real-time media intelligence improve decision-making?
- How can you track media coverage for PR campaigns?
- What are your favorite media monitoring tools?
Each one of these is sourced from a specific instance on a specific channel – Reddit, LinkedIn, or Google.
Again: the value of the LLM here is in finding the data, sorting it, and augmenting. You could do that all manually but the LLM is rapidly accelerating every step.
Use those FAQs to generate targeted content
Answering straightforward questions like these is not only smart marketing – it’s a real service for your audience.
Answer them in a variety of formats:
- Add those answers (and questions) to existing content
- Generate FAQ pages
- Post them on community channels
- Respond to the Reddit threads where you first found the question
Again, LLMs are useful here. At ércule, we use another workflow to draft answers for every question. (As with all AI output, the drafts require human editing.)
Once you systematize this kind of research and content generation – whether it's manual or AI-driven – it will only get easier.
Reddit is great for building credibility, too!
Reddit is considered one of the last reliably honest websites for community discussions. There’s a real opportunity there for marketers in terms of user engagement.
Community engagement campaigns
Our friend Hashim Warren has been experimenting with brand content specifically for Reddit communities. The results have been incredibly encouraging, as he detailed in a recent post on LinkedIn…
(Hashim has a newsletter called Hype Burner. You should sign up for it.)
Hashim is using Reddit as a venue for community engagement. Brilliant. It’s also a great testing ground: the content that does well on Reddit can easily be repurposed for other channels, too.
LLM visibility campaigns
Reddit is also really helpful for visibility in LLMs. Josh Blyskal has been tracking LLM visibility data. He published his findings earlier this year.
Basically: GPT is increasingly citing Reddit threads in its queries. Josh’s data showed a 4x increase in a matter of weeks.
No surprise here, considering how we’ve seen Reddit become a mainstay at the top of traditional Google SERP results.
All of this is to reiterate what we all intuitively know: Reddit prioritizes no-nonsense discourse, and that’s a benefit for everyone involved. In this case, we’re trying to do some no-nonsense audience research.
Search your own strategic topics on Reddit
No matter how simple or sophisticated your topic, I bet somebody is discussing it on Reddit.
See for yourself. You don’t need an LLM to get a quick glimpse. Just open up Google and do a site search:
site:reddit.com [insert your topic phrase here]
Here’s what it looks like when you type it in the search bar. 👇
Explore the results. Find an interesting thread that is getting some upvotes and comments. Extract a few questions yourself, by hand. Or, if you’ve got some AI tools handy, instruct them to extract the data for you.
Once you systematize this kind of research and content generation – whether it's manual or AI-driven – it will only get easier.
If possible, automate it. Mechanize it. Make it routine so that you are answering all of your audience’s questions on a weekly basis. Build up that karma. Pipeline follows.
🙂
