How I Find Customer Insights from Reddit Marketing Research Using AI

Introduction

Reddit is a great place for marketing research and learning about your target audience. Real people use Reddit all the time when they have a problem. They use it to look for solutions, explore their options, and sometimes just to let off steam about things that are bothering them. So, for anyone who wants to find out what issues are affecting a particular cohort of people, it can provide an invaluable and free source of real world research data.

This is my guide on how to conduct marketing research using Reddit and AI LLMs, such as Claude by Anthropic, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT by OpenAI, to gather and analyse customer market research data, so you can write marketing content that addresses the real world concerns and struggles of your target audience.

I prefer Claude myself, I find it to be a bit more concise and too the point when answering questions, but any LLM will do just fine, so use the one that you like the best.

I also use SubRedditStats (a free Reddit analytics tool) to get useful keyword info and usage statistics for subreddits.

I created a tool called Reddit Scraper to get the relevant data quickly. It’s a free Chromium browser tool that makes grabbing research data from Reddit super easy, saving you hours of manual data collection. You can read how I created the tool here and grab the tool for free to use yourself from the Chrome store.

How I Conduct Marketing Research Using Reddit Posts & AI LLMs (5 Simple Steps)

What you’ll learn:

  • How to prepare an AI chatbot with research context (the right way)
  • How to identify relevant subreddits using SubRedditStats keyword data
  • How to analyze Reddit post titles and comments for recurring themes
  • How to extract pain points and customer language from real conversations
  • How to create a content brief that drives higher conversion rates

Plus, I’ll share a free Chromium browser extension that saves hours of manual data collection.

Step 1: Prepare Your AI LLM with Research Context

First up, we need to train the AI on what your research is about, which is necessary to guide the whole process.I provide information about the business I am researching for, the target audience I’m writing content for, and what I want to achieve from the research process.

The main goal of my Reddit research process is to identify common problems that my target audience experiences, how they talk these issues, so that I can focus my messaging on addressing their core concerns and using the same language and terminology that my target market uses.

Now, you might be tempted to just bypass all of this and ask your AI what the biggest issues your audience faces are. Don’t do this. It’s a mistake. You don’t really know where the data that informs your answer is coming from and what is being ignored. AI doesn’t understand nuance, and although some issues might come up more frequently than others, and will attract more weight in what the AI deems to be important, you will be a far better judge of what is and what isn’t actually important than an AI chatbot.

Don’t outsource your thinking to a machine, but do use them to streamline your workflow, which is what we are going to do.

Once the AI has all the relevant information, I ask it to suggest 5 relevant subreddits.

Step 2: Gather Reddit Keywords Using SubRedditStats

The LLM will suggest 5 subreddits to research from. Visit SubRedditStats and input the subreddit name and get the stats. The info I’m looking for is the top keywords. Copy all of keywords for each of the subreddits and then add them to the chat to get your LLM to analyse based on the information you provided in step 1 about the main themes regarding the pain points that users are experiencing.

Ask your chatbot to anlayse whihc of these keywords are relevant and then you’ll use them for the next stage of the data gathering process. Also have a look at the related subreddits by keyword outputs to see if there are any other useful subreddits you could get keyword data from.

Step 3: Analyse Reddit Post Titles to Identify Themes

Now we are going to to Reddit and open a tab for each of the subreddits idenified in step 1. Then I search the keywords and capture all the post titles that appear. I created this chromium browser extension which will download all the post title in a text file so you can easily dump the data into the chatbot for more analysis. I like to grab all the title data that is available, which sometime goes back several years, so I scroll to the bottom of the search results as only the post titles that are visible will be downloaded using the browser extension. You might prefer to stick to more recent conversations, but I’d suggest that you grab at least 200 post titles for a meaningful analysis.

Then I ask the chatbot to look for recurring themes or patterns in the titles and flag specific posts for deeper analysis.

Step 4: Analyse Reddit Comments for Customer Pain Points

Now we are going to search for the posts that your AI has highlighted for further analysis and open up a tab for each one. With the posts open, scroll to the bottom of the page to reveal all comments. I use the same browser extension to download all the comments.

You might be tempted to skip this step, but this is where we get the detailed information about the real pain points so we can address the emotional impact of these difficulties and the voice of customer info so we can use the same terminology that our audience uses.

You’ll understand more about the nuances surrounding the issues your audience faces which will enable you to write compelling marketing copy that connects more effectively with your intended audience leading to a higher conversion rate.

Step 5: Use AI to Create a Content Brief from Your Data

Now we have a rich data set of user experience, so we can ask the AI to identify the key themes from the keywords, post titles, and comments, as they relate to our initial research question and audience. These are the points we will focus on in our messaging.

You can also ask the AI to identify any key phrases that appear frequently, and we can any terminology that comes up so that we use the same sort of language that out intended audience uses.

So, finally, ask the AI to summarise all of this and create a content brief with the key points we should address, how important each one is, and key terms or phrases we should use.

Why This Research Process Saves Time & Improves Conversions

If you follow these steps then you’ll save many hours of research time and end up with a much better set of insights to work with than you would otherwise by doing it all manually or by asking the AI from the outset. It will probably take you about 30 minutes to go through all the steps. So, it doesn’t take long and your results will be much better for doing it.

Download your free Reddit Scraper Chromium Browser Extension from the Google Chrome Store here and test it out for yourself.