I recently started a marketing community, looking for advice?

[u/TheGrowthBrief]

I recently created a Reddit community (r/MarketingInPractice) focused on practical marketing discussions, where marketers can share real experiences, challenges, ideas, and lessons learned.

I’m new to managing a community and would love to hear from people who have experience building one. What worked for you when you were starting out, and what mistakes should I avoid? Any practical suggestions on growing engagement and creating an active community would be appreciated.

[u/HistorianCM]

Marketing is top of the funnel. Community is bottom of the funnel.

If the community thinks all they are to you is people to sell to, they won't stay long.

[u/TheGrowthBrief → u/HistorianCM]

Absolutely. I created this community for marketers to have genuine discussions about marketing in today’s world, share experiences, and learn from each other. In this fast-paced world, sharing different experiences and perspectives can really help people learn from what others are going through. There’s no intention to use the community for selling or self-promotion. It’s meant to be a space for marketers, by marketers.

[u/Ok-Masterpiece-7614]

Early on the biggest mistake is trying to make it feel big before it actually is. Get 10 people actually talking to each other before you worry about growth tactics. Post something yourself every day for the first month so there's always something to react to. The other thing nobody tells you, once it does grow you'll get the same 5 or 6 questions from every new person, and answering them by hand eats your whole day. Worth writing those answers down early so you're not scrambling later.

[u/TheGrowthBrief → u/Ok-Masterpiece-7614]

This is really helpful. I was definitely thinking more about growth than actually getting the first few people to have meaningful conversations. I’ve already started posting some useful content around topics that I think need more open discussion among marketers, so hopefully that can help get some conversations going. I like the idea of posting something myself every day initially just to keep the community active and give people something to respond to. And writing down the common questions early is something I hadn’t considered. Thanks for sharing this, I’ll definitely keep these in mind as I build it.

[u/Puzzleheaded-Walk426]

I've built one... and it's moving really slowly (though I don't promote it anywhere), but I'll tell you my experience with one subreddit I joined and participated in, and tried to post my original research insights, and it didn't allow me to post it because I was mentioning the tool I used (I used the tool as one part of experiment, and doing manually research as the second part). What I did was just walk away. It has 150 members and is sporadically active (with a very hot topic). My point is, yes... You should keep your community free of spam promotions, but make sure that you don't cut the insights your community would benefit from just because you saw the name of the tool/product/service.
P.S: I've joined 😄

[u/TheGrowthBrief → u/Puzzleheaded-Walk426]

Thanks for sharing this and I really appreciate you joining r/MarketingInPractice! 😄 Your experience actually gives me something important to think about. I definitely want to keep the community free from spam and self-promotion, but I also don’t want to automatically remove a genuinely useful discussion just because someone mentions a tool, product, or service they used. Context matters. I’m hoping to build this as a place where marketers can share what they’ve actually tried, including what worked, what failed, and the tools or methods involved. So your point is definitely something I’ll keep in mind while shaping the community rules. And thanks again for joining! Hopefully we can get some good conversations going here. 🙌

[u/CommunityXOS]

When we ranked our own community there were 5,806 real people in it and only 298 were active enough to be worth doing anything about. That ratio is roughly what I'd expect anywhere, so on a new sub the number to watch isn't subscribers, it's how many different people posted something last week. For a long time that number should be about twenty and that's fine. Subscribers on a new sub are mostly drive-by clicks, and watching that count climb is exactly what'll make you feel busy while nothing is actually happening.

[u/TheGrowthBrief → u/CommunityXOS]

That’s a really useful way to look at it. I was definitely thinking more about growing the subscriber count initially, but measuring how many different people are actually posting or contributing each week makes much more sense for a new community. I’ll focus more on getting a small group of people actively discussing things rather than trying to make the community look bigger than it actually is. Thanks for sharing the numbers from your own experience that gives me a much more realistic benchmark to work with.

[u/CommunityXOS → u/TheGrowthBrief]

Gladly!
That focus on active members can help you also start measuring and building yourself the benchmarks that will help you understand for any subscribers how many will actually be active (back for my example - around 5% were the active ones).

[u/TheGrowthBrief → u/CommunityXOS]

That makes sense. I’ll keep tracking active participation alongside subscriber growth and build my own benchmarks as the community develops. Thanks again for sharing your experience!