Sex Toy Marketing: Sell Better with Social Media

Social media has become an essential marketing tool for all industries, but the landscape is particularly complex for adult toy brands. While the potential to connect and engage with a vast audience is enticing, navigating the strict content restrictions and platform policies can feel like a minefield. 

We’ll dive into the unique challenges and opportunities of social media marketing for adult toy brands, exploring platform-specific limitations, demographics, and strategies for success. Learn all about social media restrictions for adult toy brands and discover how to thrive online, from navigating Instagram’s nudity policies to maximizing engagement in Reddit’s niche communities.

Sex Toy Marketing: Understanding The Landscape

Creating one and publishing the same post to multiple platforms rarely yields meaningful results in today’s social media landscape, especially for adult product marketing. 64% of all adult toys are sold online, and a tailored approach can help your brand capture that market.

Let’s briefly examine these platforms and how they might impact your marketing strategies.

• Instagram: Instagram is visually driven, making it ideal for showcasing product aesthetics and lifestyle imagery. It’s a robust platform for building brand awareness and can even help your SEO if used well.
  
  • Opportunities: There’s a large audience on Instagram for sex toy marketing. Businesses can engage a younger, visually-driven market that is already more open to exploring new products and brands.
    
    Paid ad opportunities are restricted here due to Instagram’s guidelines, but the platform is still a fantastic tool for interacting with a massive audience organically. The goodwill generated from informing and helping community members can easily translate to higher sales if used well (more on this later).
    
  • Restrictions: Instagram’s potential as a tool for sex toy marketing on social media is certainly impressive, but there are a sizable number of restrictions you need to be aware of. Adult toy brands using social media for marketing need to account for Instagram’s complete prohibition on nudity (even if it’s related to health/fitness.) Sexually suggestive content focused on sexual activity is similarly restricted. 

• Facebook: This platform offers an even stronger set of community-building tools like Facebook Groups. You can create and shape your Facebook group as both a safe space for discussion around wellness and a tool that indirectly helps your sex toy marketing campaigns. Features like community awards are great for promoting an active community, and a well-managed group will only reinforce your reputation as a reliable brand.
  
  • Opportunities: Facebook’s audience strikes a healthy demographic balance. Brands have the potential to reach their intended audiences who might not frequent TikTok or Instagram.
    
    Note that products that do not focus on sexual pleasure or enhancement, such as lubricants or condoms, can be listed on Meta Shops.
    
  • Restrictions: Facebook’s nudity limitations largely mirror Instagram’s. Explicit nudity and sexual content is prohibited.  

• Reddit: Reddit’s focus on organic content as a community-driven platform has quickly become a priority for brands. The social media restrictions for adult toy brands mentioned above are also present here. Still, Reddit’s focus on niche communities makes it a great place to engage with a targeted audience.
  
  • Opportunities: Sex toy marketing on Reddit is a grassroots endeavor. Reaching a broad audience across multiple subreddits with organic content is challenging, but you can and should participate in adult toy-related subreddits to build brand awareness. The demographic skews toward the 18-29 bracket, but the platform has recently been seeing a surge of older users.
    
  • Restrictions: Website-wide restrictions against explicit sexual content in ads are in place. Individual subreddits also have their own rules that may impact social media marketing for adult toy brands. Naturally, subreddits focused on adult themes will be more lax with their limitations.
    
    While ads aren’t allowed, you absolutely should be interacting and engaging in organic social marketing with the communities on here. The goal is to establish your brand as a reliable voice through community-building. More and more people are adding ‘Reddit’ at the end of their search strings to look for authentic recommendations, and your brand could be the first thing they see if it gets mentioned organically.
    
• TikTok: TikTok is a market leader if we’re measuring engagement in terms of minutes watched, with the average user spending 54 minutes on the app daily.
  
  • Opportunities: Over two in five Americans use TikTok as a search engine. Since sex toy marketing campaigns must be carefully curated to adhere to platform regulations, we recommend approaching your strategy from a place of sexual wellness and education.
    
  • Restrictions: The platform has some of the strictest restrictions against nudity and suggestive content, and penalties can be severe if your content gets flagged. We’ll discuss these restrictions (and how to manage them) in more detail later in this guide.
    
• X/Twitter: X (formerly known as Twitter) is one of the least restrictive major social media platforms for adult toy brands. The platform allows explicit content and nudity to an extent, and sex toy marketing is permitted with certain restrictions.
  
  • Opportunities: X’s relatively lax stance on social media marketing for adult toy brands is only part of the story. The platform’s newer community-driven features, like Spaces and Communities, are excellent for building brand awareness and engaging audiences.
    
    For example, you could host a conversation on Spaces to announce the launch of a new product, followed by a live Q&A session with your followers. Your X Community can serve as a place for ongoing discussion, much like a subreddit. Customers can share their experiences and interact with brand reps in a more casual, lightly-moderated environment.
    
  • Restrictions: X permits sex toy marketing in certain countries as long as ads comply with country-specific restrictions and local age requirements. This gives marketers more leeway for their campaigns, allowing them to include the actual products in their ads and be more direct with their messaging. 

Niche Platforms

You don’t have to restrict yourself to the major platforms when creating a marketing strategy. More niche networks like FetLife provide a valuable space focused on sexual exploration and are very open to discussions around BDSM adult toys. Thousands of users actively use this platform and others to share reviews and recommendations, and they should absolutely be a part of your sex toy marketing strategy.

Whether you’re on Reddit or a niche forum, the golden rule is to be authentic. Stop trying to sell and just be a helpful community member who happens to represent a brand. Building this reputation takes time and effort, but once you have it, you’ll establish your brand as a respected voice in the community. This can pay dividends in the long run with zero investment on your part.  

This freedom doesn’t mean the platforms give adult toy brands free rein for social media marketing. You’ll still have to adhere to the community guidelines to avoid getting suspended or banned. 

Building a Campaign

Defining A Goal

The swarm of social media restrictions for adult toy brands means you’ll have to be creative when building a campaign. The bright side? This can actually be an advantage if you know what you’re doing.

Every sex toy marketing campaign doesn’t have to drive sales directly–nor should it. When it comes to social media, in addition to driving website traffic and sales, two of the primary goals are increasing brand awareness and boosting engagement. 

• Brand Awareness: 73% of Americans still believe that sex toys are taboo, according to a 2022 survey. Informative blogs can dispel taboos around adult toys for older audiences, and they can help your brand stand out as a reliable voice in the space.
  
  For instance, you could create a Valentine’s Day email marketing campaign targeting older readers. The campaign would include informative messaging encouraging readers to experiment, perhaps with a coupon code at the end.
  
  • You should also consider working with influencers and subject experts to build awareness. For example, you could ask a well-known sexual health expert to guest-write a blog post and post some of your content to their socials as a collaboration.
    
  • Giveaways are another great way to reel in new audiences. Host a giveaway and require users to enter their email to sign up. This will help you grow your follower count, email list, and your engagement. 

• Boosting Engagement: Your sex toy marketing campaign can guide inexperienced buyers by showing them how they can use your products. A huge part of understanding how to promote adult products on social media is understanding your audience and developing a clear content strategy. Your sex toy marketing campaign should be curated with the 80/20 content rule in mind and you should engage regularly with your audience for maximum engagement.
  
  • You can use short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram to get the message across without being explicit. For example, adult toy brands using social media for marketing could turn to Instagram reels to highlight their private delivery process. 
  • Join Reddit communities and answer questions from your expert perspective. Be authentic and avoid an overly promotional tone.
  • Your account doesn’t have to be educational all the time. It’s okay to space out your content with relatable memes that’ll entertain your audience and give them a memorable reason to come back.
    

Managing Restrictions

Adult product marketing doesn’t have to be hamstrung by restrictions. When working on your content strategy, you can:

• Use colorful infographics for sex toy marketing, showing off a product’s USPs. 
• Share user-generated content (UGC) like unboxings or testimonials. Reviews can do more to convince customers than ads. Shoppers need to know they’re buying from a brand that respects their privacy and is committed to quality control.
• Collaborate with influencers to build brand awareness. This is particularly useful for Instagram and TikTok campaigns where you’re targeting the 18+ (or even 40+) group. For instance, you could host a live stream Q&A session with a sexual wellness coach to discuss the benefits of adult toys for older buyers.

Adult toy brands can turn social media restrictions into a tool for growth. The idea is to be personable, engaging, and open with your content. Not respecting sex toy marketing guidelines can cause your page to be age-restricted or even banned. 

Using Paid Ads

Sex toy marketing on social media using paid ads is a challenge due to the restrictions mentioned above (with the exception of Twitter). These platforms also review your landing pages and website content, not just the creatives in your ads. This means although you might make very safe and compliant ad content, you may still get an account suspension if your landing page or overall domain violates the platform’s guidelines.

You should generally err on the side of caution and avoid explicit imagery in your ads and landing pages if you feel you have a shot at your brand being compliant enough to run a paid campaign. Here are a few examples of social media marketing for adult toy brands to help you get started:

• Create a wellness and intimacy campaign featuring scenic and suggestive imagery linked to fulfillment and satisfaction.
• Launch a sex toy marketing campaign dedicated to educating users about the benefits of adult toys. This could be an Instagram carousel featuring a set of satisfied reviews.
• Launch a brand awareness campaign where you do not link to your website in the ads, and instead drive users to follow your social page itself. From there, they can organically find the link to your website.
  

You’ll want to study the analytics to optimize every new campaign. Which demographics are responding well to the ads? Are you A/B testing to find the best possible CTA for your ads? Are you getting the right return on investment (ROI) for your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns?

Work With An Expert

Learning how to promote adult products on social media requires balance. Brands have to carefully plan every campaign while sidestepping a minefield of social media restrictions on sex toy marketing, and even then you run the risk of getting your profile flagged.

But social media marketing for adult toy brands doesn’t have to be that risky. Working with an expert adult toy marketing agency gives you access to a global team of social media experts who are well-versed in what works and what doesn’t. 

Here at Coalition Technologies, we’ve helped hundreds of businesses drive millions in revenue with tailored social media strategies, and we’d love to help you out too! Contact us today for a free consultation.