As marketers, there’s a balance we all must find between having a robust inbound marketing strategy and spreading ourselves too thin. As such, it’s imperative that we focus our efforts wisely. You may have heard of Quora, but perhaps you wrote it off as just another platform you’d have to manage in exchange for little return.
Well, I encourage you to reconsider. Quora is a highly underutilized platform that has great potential to support and grow your marketing strategy — making it very worth the time and effort.
What is Quora?
Quora is a social Q&A community. Since being founded in 2010, the platform has seen its user base soar. Today, Quora garners over 1.5 million monthly visitors worldwide.
For marketers, that’s a vast untapped source of referral traffic and potential leads. With the right strategy, marketers can reach new audiences and drive prospects to their products and services, resulting in huge returns for their bottom line. For some marketers, using Quora has proven to triple their referral traffic for a reasonable time investment.
Users on Quora develop profiles, pose questions to the community, and share their expertise by answering others’ questions on subjects ranging from technology to social media to startups and venture capital.
Don’t worry, Quora stands far apart from questionable online forums. User profiles are verified, and the community self-regulates poor content or disruptive users by upvoting and downvoting posts.
10 Huge Benefits of Using Quora as Part of Your Marketing Strategy
1. Quora helps prospects discover your brand
The Quora community is vast and made up of dedicated users who trust it as a source of reliable information, which presents brands with a unique opportunity to truly engage with their audiences. Providing answers to users’ questions and starting conversations on topics related to your industry allows your brand to build its reputation as an authority, and demonstrate your expertise. Once your brand has established a voice, you can begin to build trust with prospects and naturally guide them to discover your products or services.
The community’s distaste of shallow or self-promoting content means that marketers need to avoid overly-promotional tactics, and contribute to conversations in an organic way that doesn’t attempt to sell users. Putting time and effort into real communication with drive the most qualified users to your website who are already sure of your credibility.
2. Quora posts appear in search engine results
Search engines crawl Quora data just like any other content in order to bring up the most relevant results for any given search query. Bing produces Quora results in its social sidebar, where Google shows Quora posts as regular results, meaning it’s possible that your answer to a question could be ranked in the number one result spot for a given term. This is great news for marketers trying to drive organic traffic.
All the more reason to ensure your answers and input are relevant, and dropping the occasional keyword or phrase wouldn’t hurt. If Google’s algorithm deems your responses the best answer to a search, your impact has doubled — with the Quora community and search engine users.
3. Quora lets you learn more about your target audience
Quora does the work of a marketing survey, without the survey. It’s an excellent way to learn specific details about your core audience solely by paying attention to what people are asking about. If they’re expressing a problem, how can your brand be the solution to it? Your passive research can also help define your content marketing strategy. By focusing on what your audience vocalizes, you can create content that adequately addresses their wants and needs.
4. Quora is great for content ideation
Running out of content ideas? Quora offers endless opportunities to discover common questions and create targeted content that provides actionable answers and solutions. By following users and feeds, you’ll easily be able to see what topics and content types are sticky with the community. For example, a user posting the question, “How does social media help SEO?” is an excellent prompt for a quick blog post, or a more robust e-book.
5. Quora helps you discover industry influencers and capture their insight
You can connect with potential influencers and prospects in a few ways on Quora. Start by looking at frequent posters and follow them. Engage them by commenting on their questions or replying to their answers. If someone seems like a good prospect or someone who might be an ambassador for your brand, you can direct message them to reach out personally.
Conducting a search of user profiles may also uncover prospects. Look for users with relevant bios and a high number of followers who ask or answer a lot of questions. You can see stats like their all-time impressions within the community, and access links to their social profiles as well.
6. Quora lets you stay on top of trends
Once you set up a profile, follow topics that matter to your brand to stay in the know. The trending sidebar feature lets you quickly see popular topics up to the minute, and posts with the most comments and upvotes will be apparent when scrolling through top stories in your feeds.
Once you pinpoint leading topics that are relevant to your brand, insert your point of view into the conversations, and carry the topics over to your other social media outlets.
7. Quora can be a customer service and reputation management tool
There may be conversations happening on Quora about your brand or product that you’re not aware of, but should be. Do a quick search for your brand and you might discover potential sales as users often pose questions searching for specific tools and/or advice. Craft authentic, informative responses to nudge them into your sales funnel.
You’ll also be able to address any concerns your users might be posting about your brand, product, or service. If a customer is experiencing a specific issue, take the time to step into the conversation and offer a solution. Any anytime you come across a positive mention of your brand, you can voice your gratitude and strengthen relationships with existing customers.
8. Quora lets you build thought leadership
Many brands throw around the term thought leadership, but aren’t quite sure how to achieve it. Enter Quora. Its unique forum lets brands share knowledge in a genuine way that a whitepaper never can. Rather than trying to force your knowledge on your audience, Quora lets you participate in conversations that are already happening in your space.
9. Quora can be an outlet to amplify your content
While we’ve noted that self-promotion is taboo on Quora, that’s not to say that you absolutely cannot share your excellent blog posts or content in a relevant way. The key is to only promote your content that is directly related to a question posed or that provides insight and real value to the feed. Often the best answers are supported with data and/or reference material.
If your content marketing strategy is smart, you’re creating content users care about anyway, so sharing blog posts, articles, videos or infographics won’t be forced. Promote your content by reframing it as a question. For example, if you wrote a blog post about how to write good email subject lines, pose the question “What are your top tips for writing meaningful email subject lines?”
Or, ask questions as a way to create new roundup posts. Ask users if they’d like to be featured in a blog post on a certain topic, and pose a series of questions to craft into a post for your blog. They might even help you promote the final post afterward!
10. Quora is great for gleaning competitor insights
Just as you can search for your own brand, you can also search for your competitors and see what they’re doing to market themselves, as well as learn how customers are talking about them. Investigate. Listen. Learn.
You may find a common theme or reason customers choose your competitor over you, and utilize that knowledge to improve your product or service. There may also be opportunities to reiterate your unique value propositions when a user is at the critical decision-making stage of the sales funnel, and ultimately convince them to choose you. What’s more, even if you think you know your industry through and through, you may discover emerging industry trends or opportunities before your competition does by listening to your customers.
Do you use Quora for your marketing strategy? Have any questions about the site? Leave me your comments!