How to Use Quora for Marketing

Quora is a social media website based in the United States wherein someone asks a question, and another person, perhaps a professional in the appropriate field answers as the OP (Original Poster). This organization allows for comments to be directed toward the OP’s answer to the question. Quora is not unlike yahoo answers or even reddit was a few years ago. What makes it unique, however, is that it focuses on allowing people to connect with one another through followers and well thought out bios.

Why Should You Market Your Business on Quora?

Quora is an excellent place for professionals to establish authority in their industry, generate leads, and develop a good online reputation. Quora is the second most popular information-oriented website in the world today, with nearly 500 million active monthly users. Its user interface contains categories which allow you to target your answers, and therefore your brand, to potential customers who are asking about your services in real time. 

For example:

If a customer who has been researching website development wants to know which CMS software to choose, they might ask, “There is a shortage of react developers, how can I find a qualified react developer?” As a software development company, we might answer this question by explaining a situation wherein we helped a client find a react developer, or when we have found one ourselves. Then we could casually ask the potential client to message us, or give us a call if they need any more information or if they found our answer helpful and would like additional help finding a qualified react developer for their team or project.

Here Is Why We Like Quora as a Marketing Platform

• You can include links to your website, blog, or services from your Quora answers, and track leads through google analytics.
• Quora sends out emails to people who are following categories in their field of interest. If someone posts a question, that question gets emailed to other people who might have the same question. Those people will then click on the question and, if you have answered the question well, then they will hopefully click on your link within the post.
• As you gain followers, Quora sends suggestions to their followers who may also follow you.
• 90% of top-performing content marketers put their audience’s informational needs first, making Quora an incredibly attractive place for lead-generation.
• You can even use Quora to do market research, or ask questions to better understand the needs of your consumers.
• This platform is also helpful for customer service and reputation management, as a question can be based on your brand. Is anyone talking about your brand on Quora? Find out now.

How Can You Best Market Your Business on Quora?

1. Create a Complete Profile

A complete profile will include your name, your company name, your position and credentials, your location, and an about me section referring to your experience and expertise. This will help your audience establish a reason why they should listen to you. This is also how they will attribute your knowledge of the industry to your brand. Are you Google Certified? Published in Time Magazine? Here’s the place to brag about it.

Optimize your profile with attributes and a tagline related to your niche, avoid being the jack of all trades, for a most targeted audience. Your tagline should include information about your company and your credentials within that company, and can be edited depending on what question you are answering.

Your profile is like your website’s homepage, you want it to capture attention. It should link to your other content, including your company website, other social media pages, and your favorite Quora answers. It may also invite readers to sign up for a free newsletter, or updates to your blog. It may also contain a promo code for a discount or free consultation for Quora followers. Each profile should have such a call to action in a visually appealing form.

2. Follow Your Competition

Who is answering questions to your target audience most successfully? Follow them, see what is working, and try to improve your skills.

3. Add Keywords In Your "Knows About" Section

This will allow you to receive a relevant question bank from which to answer Quora questions. Pro Tip: Pick the “knows about topics” which have the greatest number of followers.

4. Select The Most Appropriate Questions to Answer

1. Consistency is Key

Whether you spend 15 minutes a week just finding five or six questions to answer, or spend an hour and a half finding 30 questions to answer, the important thing is to find and answer questions every week.

2. Create a Quora Ad Account

This is to find suggested questions which are available only through the ad account. This will show you which questions currently have the highest number of weekly views. These are the qeustions you want to have good answers for. This is going one step further than selecting high traffic "knows about" keywords

3. Find Your Target Audience

Keep in mind that your target audience likely writes different questions than other experts in your industry. We don't want to market to our competitors, we want to market to our potential customers. What is the best way to do this? Your time might be best spent answering simple questions.

4. The 7:1 Ratio

There are some questions on Quora that, despite being popular, are not the best to answer fro marketing purposes. This is because your answer can get lost in a mess of everyone else's answers. So, try to answer only when there is a 7:1 ratio of followers to the number of answers provided.

5. Develop a Spreadsheet

I wish I could remember whose suggestion this originally was, as it is not my original idea, but it is a good idea nonetheless.

It may be helpful to develop a spreadsheet with questions to answer, after saving them for later on Quora, their follower ratio, the topic, and a rating of the quality of the other answers from 1-5.

5. Finally, Start Answering Questions

1. There is a lot of content on Quora! Because of this, quality matters more than quantity. It is important to be generally interested in the content of the question.



2. Look at what your competition is saying in their answers, and provide something unique to the conversation.



3. Oftentimes, controversial answers get the greatest amount of attention.

4. Provide links where appropriate. Our goal here is to be helpful. Cushion links with an explanation of what information or resource readers have to gain from clicking the link.

6. Obtain Measurable Results

1. Utilize Google Analytics

Taking advantage of the tools provided by Google Analytics will allow you to measure the success of your Quora campaign. Google Analytics has the natural ability to show Quora as the referral, but you can also use UTM parameters to show which of your campaigns on Quora is driving the most traffic. With this information, you can ascertain what is and is not working in terms of which Quora topics contain your target audience.

2. Narrow Down Your Niche

It’s important to find out what works best for you. This can be done by perhaps doing a two week trial in each of your “interest” areas, seeing which one is generating the most quality traffic to your business, and then sticking to what you do best.

What Makes Some Quora Marketers More Successful Than Others?

• Consistency is key.
• Focusing on a niche topic and being generally interested in posted content.
• Answers which feature photos have a 94% increase in viewership as opposed to those without.

• Focusing on quality informative content. This includes placing links to “resources” at least 2/3rds of the way down their answer, or on the bottom as a footer. It is also better to be conversational and friendly when providing more information by not being too forward. People don’t like cut and paste ads.

• Writing about controversial topics often attracts a lot more attention.

• Making answers personal through humor, good advice, storytelling, dialogue, metaphors, or asking readers to become involved in the content.

• Making answers visually appealing by italicizing questions, bolding titles, and using bullet points for an easily readable response.

• Following up with comments on their most popular answers.