B2B Marketers Are Missing Out on an Opportunity by Not Using Quora
If you haven't considered using Quora as part of your B2B marketing strategy, you might be missing out on an opportunity. Especially if, like over half of all marketers, one of your primary goals is to position your brand as a thought leader.
Compared to LinkedIn, Quora is much more focused on people asking and answering questions. If people are asking questions, then maybe your company’s solution is the answer they’re looking for. You can use Quora to establish your brand and team’s reputation for helpfulness and expertise, and where appropriate you can suggest your products and services as suitable for some people posting on Quora.
Questioners become customers. We have written about adapting your content to the search intent of visitors. In terms of progress through a sales process, asking questions and problem-solving is generally much further along the sales funnel, so often you are more likely to be engaging with high purchase-intent people on Quora than you are on LinkedIn.
Thought leadership is the quintessential way to offer value for your audience and that is the cornerstone of inbound marketing. And Quora can be a helpful platform from which to build your brand’s reputation as a thought leader.
Quora might not be on your radar. Other social media platforms have a much higher user base. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for example, have more active users. However, the interesting thing about Quora is how it can help you to target the right people, rather than a larger audience of generic people.
To understand why Quora excels where other sites may take longer to reach the same type of credibility, let's take an in-depth look at what Quora is and why your audience is far easier to target on that platform.
What Is Quora?
Quora isn't just another social or search channel. It's a hybrid that is best described as a question-and-answer platform and online community. Ask anyone who spends any time on a particular, favoured platform and you’ll find that community is a key motivating factor.
The way people use the site and the reasons they love it is why you should, too.
People come to Quora to ask specific questions, search for answers, conduct research, find help and evaluate products. If inbound marketing is all about offering value-based content (and it is) then Quora built its entire platform around value. Being part of the Quora community can help you to extend your reach and provide potential customers with more information. It can also be a useful research tool to understand your market.
Why do people use Quora?
Quora attracts a wide variety of users, from students to heavily credentialed professionals.
Whether they want to learn new things about hobbies and interests or are researching business ideas and products, what these people have in common is a desire to find relevant, trust-worthy information and answers to their questions.
There are hundreds of thousands of topics represented on Quora and more than 300 million (yes, 300,000,000) users a month use the platform. Quora attracts a large audience, with slightly more male users than female. Many of the users are highly educated and more than half of users report that their annual income is more than $100,000. This puts Quora in a good position as a platform for marketing teams, especially those in the B2B industry.
Quora garners more thought-out, well-researched content from its users. Journalists use content on Quora to develop their articles (which can be an interesting connection if you're trying to attract media attention for your brand). Students use the platform as a jumping-off point for their studies. Parents use the platform to research the best products for their children. There isn't a topic that you can't find covered in some way on the platform.
Like any user-generated website, there are pitfalls. Because every category is on the table, you'll run into discussions that veer into politics, religion, and other subjects that you might want to steer away from when promoting a business. However, you will also find specific topics to follow on areas of interest to your business. The ‘Digital Marketing’ topic, for example, is followed by 2.3 million people.
What are the benefits of Quora for B2B Marketing?
One of the biggest benefits of using Quora for social media marketing are the leads you can generate. Quora opens the door to making value-led connections with a highly targeted and high-intent audience.
For B2B marketing, Quora offers some enticing benefits that you can't duplicate on other platforms. While LinkedIn is also an excellent platform for B2B leads, the thought leadership opportunities can be over-shadowed by the focus on networking and straight sales. Everyone on LinkedIn is there to make a business connection.
Quora has created an environment where knowledge is the highest currency. You have knowledge seekers, experts, journalists, consumers, and decision-makers all converging in the same space. People here are more open to new ideas and that makes them more open to finding thought leaders, such as yourself.
You can use Quora to leverage your own expertise in a way that is valuable to searchers and helps to quickly build your brand and reputation as a thought leader.
Besides finding your audience, you can also use Quora to do your own research. Find what the trends are in your industry, what your competition is doing, and dig into popular questions to generate content marketing ideas. You can also use the platform to ask your target audience for direct input that can help you target and develop new offerings.
Another benefit of Quora as a B2B marketing vehicle is that the knowledge you share will continue giving a return on your investment. Unlike other high-turnover platforms where your content gets lost in the churn, Quora is designed to be evergreen, landing your brand in the search engine results for years rather than just weeks.
How to use Quora
You can use Quora in an organic way, by answering questions and otherwise participating in the community. You can also streamline your use of Quora by developing paid advertising campaigns. Quora makes it easy to find your target audience, develop your campaign objective, and schedule your ads.
Start with your Quora profile. Be very careful when you create your bio and profile. Use up to date, professional photos, and make sure you highlight the expertise you want people to know you for. Users will verify your credentials when judging whether to trust your content or not, including how active you are on the platform and the sort of topics you provide answers on.
Once your profile is set up, start searching for topics that interest you professionally and that intersect with the pillars of your content marketing strategy. You can also search for other industry leaders in your niche and ‘Most Viewed Writers’ for each topic.
In order to engage, start participating in thoughtful ways and adding your own answers to questions.
It's extremely important that your answers are well thought out, researched, and showcases your individual knowledge. While you might sometimes have the answer at your fingertips, you don't want to rush to be the first to answer a question. It's much better to take the time to do your research and give a good response.
When answering, offer quality information and put effort into your answers. As we’ve seen, content on Quora is evergreen and people come to recognise and trust experts within the community over time, so quality is key.
It's also important that your answer be unique. It won't help you to submit the same answer as dozens of other users. If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, apply upvotes to participate and move on to another question that you have a good grasp of and can help with.
You should make sure that you contribute on a regular basis. Just like any other platform, you need to commit to the work it takes to build your following. This means interacting with other users, providing upvotes or downvotes, and otherwise using the features on the platform to maintain involvement.
To become one of the top writers on the platform, you should link to your sources whenever possible. People want to see that your opinion is backed up by reputable information. You can include links to statistics, studies, and other articles.
However, a small note. You shouldn’t use links in your answers unless they are relevant and in context of an answer. It reads as spam if you just link your website. Instead, if you have a blog post on your website that provides more in-depth information about a topic you're discussing, you should answer the question on Quora and then provide a link or anyone wanting further information.
Finding your audience
Let's dive deeper, for actionable tips to help you find your audience on Quora. The platform is user-friendly and intuitive but, like any new platform, it helps to have some direction.
You can start by searching keywords that are relevant to your industry and expertise. Looking through the questions and responses, you can quickly get a good estimate of the size of the audience. You can also get a good feel for thought leaders in your industry and high intent leads.
Another great aspect of Quora is the ability to research your competition. Search by both brand and employee’s names. Find out if they have thought leaders represented on the platform and study how they're using Quora. No competition? That's great. It means that you might be the first in your industry to leverage the platform, which makes it easier for you to build yourself as a thought leader for your brand.
If you create a business/ads account, you can also match with your email contacts and see who is using Quora. You can also install the Quora Pixel on your website to see which of your website visitors use Quora.
Targeted ads and promoted answers
Quora offers business users several ways to amplify their presence by running paid campaigns, including targeted ads and promoted answers.
There are four categories you can use to target advertising on the platform:
Broad targeting: The ad will show across Quora to a wide audience.
Behavioural targeting: the ad shows based on user behaviours and matches according to their interests and history.
Audience targeting: you can use several criteria to narrow down your audience. This might include visitors to your website, people from your email list, or specific types of users.
Contextual targeting: lets you target ads to keywords and topics.
You can also add several secondary targeting criteria to your Quora ads, such as location, email, gender, and device/browser.
Promoted answers are exactly what they sound like. When you've contributed an answer that reflects your expertise or otherwise benefits your brand, you can choose to promote it so that it will get greater views. When an answer is promoted, Quora labels it with a "Promoted by" tag so that users know the content was promoted. It also gets distributed to more pages on Quora.
Setting campaign goals
Quora lets you set campaign objectives that match your goals. There are several objectives to choose from.
Conversion: If you want to see how your Quora campaigns are performing in terms of visitors to your site, set your objective as conversion and install Quora Pixel to your site. This will automatically measure the clickthrough and follow-through that can be attributed to your campaign.
Awareness: This option helps you to promote an answer.
Lead Generation: This option lets you use Quora's native lead forms to find new leads.
Traffic: This objective helps you to generate traffic to your website.
There's also a mobile app objective for businesses that are Quora mobile measurement partners.
Once you've chosen your campaign objective, you need to set your budget. This can be a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Once your budget is set, you determine when the ads will run.
Find Out More
If Quora sounds interesting but you need to know more before jumping in, here are a few resources to help you decide if it is a good fit for your marketing strategy:
Quora for Business guides:
Case Studies:
How 1827 Marketing Can Help
Properly executed, thought leadership can cement your reputation as a trusted advisor and authority in your field. By underlining your expertise, it can build recognition and trust with your target audience – ultimately resulting in more leads and closed sales. Quora could be part of the mix that helps you achieve that status.
1827 Marketing can help with thought leadership content creation and campaign planning across multiple marketing channels. We’ll bring our best people together with yours to create innovative and effective thought leadership content that drives results.
Contact us today to learn more!
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