r/marketing: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

The sidebar says the place is for marketing professionals, and most posters give their title and years of experience. Job terms are used without explanation. The rules ban broad teach me marketing requests and questions already answered many times, so a beginner question tends to be removed, not answered. Students and new graduates do get replies when they ask something specific about getting hired.

• Mid-career marketers in house or at agencies, often coordinators, managers and directors, asking about pay, layoffs and next moves.
• Senior people in their forties and fifties comparing notes on leadership roles, burnout and leaving the field.
• Agency owners and freelancers with a client or pricing problem.
• Recent graduates trying to find a first full-time role.
• Founders and vendors trying to get a product mention through, mostly without success.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/marketing.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up36%
• Removed by Reddit's filters8%
• Held by AutoModerator43%
• Removed by moderators11%
• Deleted by the author2%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   Advertising & Self-Promotion

   If you want to advertise to this community have a look here reddit.com/advertising

2. 2

   Spam

   We get it, you wrote about something. If it can't be shared here in it's entirety then make a good claim on why we need to go somewhere else to read it. Keep in mind this is a place for marketing discussion and questions not growth hacking your blog.

3. 3

   Interviews & Resume Feedback

   We're here to help, not to help you land a job for which you're not qualified.

4. 4

   Homework Help & Surveys

   Don't post them. This includes asking the community for ideas for your next web development or app project.

5. 5

   URL Shorteners

   Any post or comment using a URL shortener will be removed.

6. 6

   Website/Product Reviews

   Please don't ask us to review or give feedback for your website or product. If you have a specific question regarding it, ask that instead.

7. 7

   Low quality

   We're trying to build something great here, help us do that. A post or comment in a poor attempt to shill or sell a product or service, is someone's homework, is asking a question which has already been answered many times, is looking for free marketing instead of paying for a professional, or is a few sentences with a link to their blog. Let's not forget, memes, rants without a source, screenshots, etc. will all be removed.

8. 8

   Non-specific resource request

   E.G. "I'm thinking about marketing, teach me." Be respectful of the community by searching the posts and asking specific questions.

9. 9

   AI generated content

   This is a subreddit for humans, not bots, so please don't copy and paste AI generated content.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/marketing has close to 2 million members but only about ten posts a day make it into the feed, because most are stopped on the way in. The ones that get through draw a crowd: the typical post gets 28 or 29 comments. About 85% of posts are text, more than half of titles are questions, and the median post is around 140 words. Video and polls are switched off.

The subject is less marketing technique than the marketing job. Top posts are about burnout, six-round interview processes, being consumed by work, being underpaid, and what people over 45 do next. Layoffs come up constantly. Replies come from people who state their age, title and industry, then say what happened to them.

The mood is weary and a bit self-critical. A post from a marketer calling the profession a joke got a long argument going, and AI sits behind much of the anxiety: its effect on jobs, on search, and on clients who run everything past a chatbot. Comments carry no links at all in our sample. People talk, they do not cite.

What lands

• A short, honest career post: burnout, a strange hiring process, a pay question with real figures.
• A question aimed at experienced people, such as what marketers past a certain age are doing now.
• A specific practical problem with the context given, like improving a trade show booth that has to travel by plane.
• A pointed observation about the trade or its tools that people can argue with.
• Industry news with a clear angle on jobs or platforms, under the News flair.

What gets removed or ignored

• Posts from accounts under 30 days old or under 300 karma. This is the single biggest cause, and AutoModerator held about 43% of posts in our sample.
• Thought-leadership posts with a headline like a blog article: breakdowns, frameworks, a statistic from your own data. Discussion is the flair moderators remove most.
• Questions that set up a product category, especially when the same question is posted more than once under different flairs.
• Basic or how do I market my small business questions, which the rules class as already answered or as looking for free marketing.
• Blog links, surveys, homework, memes, screenshots and unsourced rants, all listed under the low quality rule.

The unwritten rules

• Say who you are: role, years in, industry. Nearly every post that does well opens that way.
• Write it yourself and keep it plain. A tidy listicle with bold headings reads as AI or as content marketing, and both get removed.
• Do not put links in comments. None of the comments in our sample had one.
• The submit page tells people with a plain marketing question to use r/askmarketing. In practice Question is still the most used flair, but the question has to be specific.
• Naming your own company in a post is a gamble even when the post is useful. A few get through. Most do not.

Self-promotion

The advertising rule is one sentence telling you to buy Reddit ads. The spam rule adds that this is a place for discussion and not for growth hacking your blog, and the submit page warns that shameless self-promotion will usually be deleted. Practice matches the wording. Moderators removed about 11% of posts in our sample, and most of those were content-style posts or leading questions that pointed toward a product or service. A founder occasionally gets a post through by disclosing who they are and teaching something concrete, and requests for work sometimes stay up, but neither is a pattern to rely on.

How people write here

Typical post length

142 words

Typical title length

9 words

Titles phrased as a question

53%

Typical comment length

28 words

Comments that include a link

0%

Posts that carry a flair

99%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/marketing.

• marketing 110 posts
• agency 34 posts
• ads 26 posts
• brand 29 posts
• role 29 posts
• career 26 posts
• media 24 posts
• advertising 14 posts
• marketers 13 posts
• content 29 posts
• social 24 posts
• director 13 posts
• video hosts 5 posts
• sales wall 5 posts
• pricing behind 5 posts
• hide pricing 5 posts
• contact sales 5 posts
• social media 17 posts
• company 34 posts
• marketer 10 posts
• google ads 10 posts
• job 34 posts
• marketing team 8 posts
• campaign 15 posts
• business 35 posts
• digital 16 posts
• strategy 17 posts
• experience 36 posts
• hired 12 posts
• b2b 15 posts
• sales 22 posts
• communications 8 posts
• digital marketing 9 posts
• companies 20 posts
• designer 9 posts
• marketing manager 6 posts
• roles 15 posts
• marketing role 5 posts
• client 18 posts
• website 21 posts

Recurring topics: marketing, ad, ai, agency, ads, video, business, job, content, LinkedIn.

Posts that did well

• Anyone burned out?173 upvotes · 77 comments · Discussion
• Are 6 rounds of interviews too much?97 upvotes · 112 comments · Question
• Why is no one learning Adobe or Figma anymore?62 upvotes · 112 comments · Discussion
• How Do I Not Get Consumed by My Work?42 upvotes · 45 comments · Support
• A hard truth I’m discovering40 upvotes · 33 comments · Discussion
• Marketing is a joke (from a marketer)31 upvotes · 32 comments · Discussion
• Marketing books25 upvotes · 23 comments · Discussion
• How to make my booth more interesting?20 upvotes · 60 comments · Question

Growth

1. 20128.6k
2. 201318k
3. 201432k
4. 201547k
5. 201662k
6. 201794k
7. 2018151k
8. 2019226k
9. 2020313k
10. 2021387k
11. 2023706k
12. 20241.6M
13. 20251.9M
14. 20262M

Related subreddits

• r/smallbusiness
• r/smallbusinessowner
• r/DigitalMarketing
• r/SocialMediaMarketing
• r/copywriting
• r/SaaS
• r/b2bmarketing
• r/SaaSMarketing
• r/Teachers
• r/newjersey

Common questions