If you‘re a B2B business owner or marketer, and you haven’t considered Quora as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing out. Quora is a platform where users seek answers to pressing questions, and as such it’s possibly the best site, besides LinkedIn, to establish yourself as an expert in your field. It also allows laser-sharp targeting to boot.
Read on to find out how you can leverage Quora to generate high-quality leads and maximize your growth.
What is Quora?
So what exactly is Quora? Essentially, it’s a Q&A site. You can ask a question on any topic, niche, or subject, and within a few minutes to a few days, you can expect answers from knowledgeable users. Thanks to the site’s massive user base, it’s one of the best places to find user-generated, informative content online. Users can also “upvote” the answers they found the most useful and accurate, providing social proof for the writers.
Currently, the Q&A platform boasts 300 million active users. According to Quora Analytics, 60% are male, 40% female and 60% of advertisers on Quora are B2B businesses.
Why Quora works so well as a B2B marketing platform
Because of its question-focused nature, Quora is perfect for establishing brand awareness and building a reputation for helpfulness and expertise in your niche. If people are asking questions, then your company’s solution is likely the answer some of them are looking for.
Quora is particularly suited for B2B advertising because B2B is almost always a long, deliberative process that relies heavily on research. Buyers are increasingly turning to social media and user-generated content to research before making large purchases. In an industry rife with advertisements, it has become difficult to distinguish a genuine review from an advertorial. As a result, user-generated platforms like Quora grew popular as resources for information on software and other B2B products.
The bottom line is, questioners can become customers. The question-asking stage is quite far down the sales funnel, so you are actually more likely to engage with high purchase-intent leads on Quora than you are on LinkedIn.
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Advertising on Quora
Quora Ads was launched in 2016. It enabled businesses, which were already leveraging the platform, to target users more accurately and put relevant content in front of buyers looking for information to guide their B2B purchases.
Another great benefit of advertising on Quora is that your audience isn’t limited solely to the site’s users. Quora pages often rank highly in Google search results and are visible to unregistered users as well. This can greatly expand your reach and ROI since people can end up on Quora pages and see your content simply by Googling information. A good example for a company that took full advantage of Quora’s marketing potential was vCalc, an online calculator and dataset utility. According to founder and CEO Kurt Heckman “We simply signed up for topics where we knew we had good content and waited for the public to ask questions where we could use our calculators for answers.”
For instance, someone asked what is the surface area of a cube with 8-centimeters edges, and there were Heckman and his team with the answer. They answered over a thousand questions this way, with links leading back to vCalc’s website. The team was also able to figure out what users were most interested in based on the calculators they used (plumbing, astronomy, construction, etc.). The company now has over 30,000 calculators embedded in over 13,000 web pages and continues to grow steadily.
How to Advertise on Quora?
1. Optimize your profile for business
The first step for marketing on Quora is optimizing your profile to showcase your credibility. Start with the short description under your name. Think of it as your LinkedIn headline – it’s the first thing people check when they come across your profile. Most importantly, it’s one of the few elements that will be visible in the search results, besides your name. Make it short and to the point – Social Media Expert for B2B SaaS at XXX Company (X Years of experience). In just a few words you need to explain to people who you are and why they should take your answers seriously.
You can also include a short blurb of information about your background and knowledge, but make sure you don’t overdo it and turn it into a long-form post (this is comparable to an Instagram bio).
The key elements to add are:
- Information about your company and your role in the company.
- Any credentials or awards you’ve achieved.
- Popular publications you have been mentioned in or written for.
- The topics you are knowledgeable in.
Quora allows users to add links in their profile bio, so it’s easy to direct followers to your website or landing page.
2. Start answering questions on your niche
Once you have optimized your profile, it’s time to get down to business. The first step is to start following topics you are experienced in. Then, spot the questions you are equipped to answer and go for it. Make sure your answers are detailed, enthusiastic, and aligned with your brand’s distinctive voice.
Say you sell video editing software. You might look for questions related to video editing. For example, “how to add music to a video”, “what is the best software for creating and editing videos”, or “what are your top video editing tips and tricks”. It doesn’t matter how simple or complex the question is, your major focus should be on helping the person with the best answer possible.
The key is to maintain the right balance between promoting your business and sharing valuable answers. How can you do it? By applying the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule states that roughly 80% of your content should be purely educational, while the remaining 20% should be about promoting your business. For instance, if a user has asked how to add captions to a YouTube video, you can list all the possible ways and finally mention how it’s done in your software, including some hacks and shortcuts. Alternatively, if you have a blog post on your website that provides more in-depth information on the subject you can provide a link in your answer.
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3. Run paid campaigns
As we already mentioned, you can achieve some fine-grained targeting on Quora. You can drill down to extremely specific subcategories and keywords, which makes it pretty much perfect for paid ad campaigns.
There are three types of ads you can run on Quora: image and text-based ads, similar to what you might see on Google or Facebook, and the “promoted answer” option, which is unique to the platform. Using promoted responses will increase exposure and reach for answers you’ve provided and already received positive feedback.
This is probably the most effective way to drive quality traffic to your website and generate leads. One reason for that is that people mainly look for text content and not images or videos on Quora. The second reason is targeting.
Targeting options on Quora
Let’s dig a little deeper into some practical advice on how to find your target audience on Quora. You might begin by looking for keywords that are related to your industry and field of expertise. This will help you assess the size of the audience and the topics they ask about.
Quora offers a range of options for targeting your ads:
- Audience: You can choose the audience segment your ads will be shown to. For example, previous website visitors, looklalike audiences or, individuals with specific characteristics matching a provided list.
- Broad: Quora will automatically select ad targets for you based on machine learning.
- Interests: Your ads will be shown to users who have previously interacted with pages related to a specific topic.
- Keyword: Your ads will appear on question pages containing the specified keywords.
- Keyword History: Ads will be shown to users who have previously searched for certain keywords.
- Question: Ads will appear on pages for certain specified questions, or for users who have viewed those questions.
- Question History: Ads shown to users who have visited certain spedicifed question pages within the last 30 days.
- Topic: ads appear on category pages for certain Quora topics.
You can specify additional criteria based on location, device, browser, and demographic attributes. The option that has shown the highest results for B2B marketing is question targeting, combined with other targeting criteria.
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Final Thoughts
Quora is an extremely useful marketing channel for SaaS and other B2B businesses. As a question and answer platform, it lends itself perfectly to raising brand awareness and lead generation.
By providing practical and educational answers to questions related to your field of expertise you can establish yourself as an authority in your field.
B2B buyers who are in the research stage are likely to browse Quora for reliable information. This means that your message is more likely to reach a high-intent quality audience than on other channels.
Don’t overlook this incredibly beneficial platform – optimize your profile, start answering questions and start running Quora campaigns. The key to success lies in leveraging on the platform’s initial goal of serving as an information resource.
