“Quora is a great marketing channel.”
“Quora will bring you conversions.”
“Quora is the perfect place to build your brand.” These are the beautiful illusions you are presented with when entering the Quora world.
But reality hits harder than expected. Quickly you become overwhelmed in a sea of hundreds of answers already written for each question.
After posting answers to several questions, you discover that each gets little to no exposure. Traffic from Quora is only a trickle. These truly are not the results you were hoping for.
From such results, you can only drive to one conclusion: Quora is a slow way to build links and drive traffic.
To waste hours for just a few links is simply not worth your time. After all, you have other worthy social media channels to work with. Right?
Well hang on. Neil Patel attracted 9K+ visitors from Quora in one month. And the conversion rate from Quora has been found to be higher than organic search or social media.
If Neil and others can, you can too. You just need to play it the right way.
Trust me. I’ve seen a lot of people leave Quora after their answers were marked as “spam.” But if used correctly, Quora can be an effective channel to build brand awareness, generate traffic, and turn visitors into customers.
I’m going to show you how to do all three of those things, using examples from successful brands.
So let’s get started.
4 Steps to Raise Brand Awareness on Quora
Brand awareness is another way of describing how well-known your brand is. Do consumers know about you, know your products, and know how to find you?
While it’s not always easy to measure brand awareness, more is always better. Following these 4 steps will help you to raise your brand’s awareness on Quora.
1. Find your target audience
Thankfully, this can be relatively simply on Quora. Let’s say some of your target keywords are “social media marketing” and “content marketing.”
Begin by searching for these at the top of the platform:
Chances are, the users who’ve both asked and answered these questions fall within your target audience.
Begin with a big list of keywords you want to target. Search for them in Quora and look at the kinds of users who interact with these topics.
This is the best way to find your target audience.
2. Understand your customers and their needs
You’ve found the users and their queries. Now it’s time to learn more about them.
Read all of the questions relevant to your products or services. Try to understand what users are asking.
Users’ queries are their problems. Hopefully, your brand is the solution.
But you can’t just put your product on display. You can’t put your product up as an answer to various questions. That’s a quick way to be labeled spam.
We’re going to look at the right ways to post in a moment.
For now, just get your answer for the below given queries:
- What users are asking?
- Where they are facing problems?
- What they ultimately want?
It’s worth it just to gather this information and prepare for the next step.
3. Highlight your best resources
Here comes the moment you’ve been waiting for. Once you understand your users’ needs, it’s time to start posting and building your brand.
You must have valuable assets like content, infographics, videos, and much more. Quora is the perfect place to showcase them. But you do need to be a little careful.
Let’s take a look at our“social media marketing” example. If a user asks “what is social media marketing for?” I can’t just tell them to “use my product and find out.” But I can do answer their query and provide further resources.
Giving a full and perfect definition for “what is social media marketing” is not possible because it’s a too wide of a concept. But if I have a blog or ebook that gives a full answer, I can put easily share that along with a brief description of how this particular resource has the answer they’re looking for.
You can also give a brief answer to the question and insert a “read more” link, taking users to the real source.
That’s how you have to promote your resources. Put them where they are asked for or needed.
4. Establish connections with influencers on Quora
Want to connect with your marketing hero or someone you admire the most? You can on Quora.
Tyler James, Co-founder of Conversated Media, says she connected with the co-founder of The Huffington Post through Quora.
To develop connections like Tyler James, start answering questions your favorite influencers are following. Their one “like” or comment on your answer will open doors to many more opportunities.
After that, ind a natural way to send a thoughtful and humble message to them.
3 Ways to Generate Traffic from Quora
After raising brand awareness, it’s time to learn how to drive traffic. And we’re not just talking about higher volume. We’re looking for high quality traffic.
1. Answer the right questions at the right time
Not all Quora questions are equal. Some are old, outdated, and nobody even looks at them anymore.
You don’t want to answer questions that have been asked years ago. You need to learn to answer the right questions at right time.
A few simple rules to follow:
- Choose a relevant topic
- Go for recently-posted questions
- Also look for queries with a high number of up-votes
- Keep hunting for new + relevant questions
To keep track of recent topics, you can choose to receive notifications in your email box. That way, you save time looking for trending topics.
2. Write content that make you stand out from others
Quora is already filled with hundreds of answers to each question. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your answer will be forgotten.
Consider it like a blogging competition. Google is full of great blogs solving users’ problems. So you must create something different to catch users’ and search engines’ attention.
Follow the same rule on Quora as well.
Make yourself stand out with content rich with below given ingredients:
- Detailed text
- Eye-catching images
- Useful facts & data
- Stories & real-life examples
- Your personal experience
- Inspirational quotes
- Influencers’ achievements
- Influencers’ facts
You don’t need to be an expert blogger. Plenty of questions are available; you just need to answer them.
But make sure you offer valuable answers, or you’re likely to go unnoticed. And if nobody reads your answers, nobody will click on your links. And then, no traffic.
3. Beat your competitors through Quora
Leveraging your competitors’ brand names is a great way to generate targeted traffic to your site. If a consumer is interested in one of these other brands, chances are they’ll be interested in you too.
I have two great strategies for this.
The first is to search questions where users’ have asked for alternatives to your competitors.
Let’s take an example of my company, SocialPilot, a social media marketing tool. We’re a competitor of Buffer.
With keywords like “Buffer alternative” in Quora Search, I will very likely get a pretty good list of questions to answer for:
Users who have asked these questions are clearly looking for options similar to Buffer. If I write a great answer to these questions, hopefully SocialPilot will become top of the list.
To do this, simply try out a few keyword combinations in Quora’s search tab:
- Competitor name + alternative
- Like + competitor name
- Alike + competitor name
- Better than + competitor name
- Free alternative to + competitor name
Find answers with plenty of views, spend some time getting your answer right, and the traffic should follow.
Another method is to keep a track record of competitors’ mentions on Quora.
Tools like Mention or Google Alerts let you track mentions of your competitor’s name anywhere online. Obviously, this includes Quora.
Let’s say eBay is a competitor of Amazon. To keep track of EBay, Amazon can create alerts with keywords like “eBay Quora”. This way, Amazon will receive notifications of questions where eBay has been mentioned.
Find questions related to consumers’ complaints, pain points, or problems they are having with their brand. By answering such questions, you give them a chance to give a try to your brand.
Plus, this is an opportunity to improve your own offering based on what people say about your competition.
4 Ways to Turn Your Quora Visitors Into Customers
By now, you have a nice list of visitors received from Quora. Now it’s time to turn them into customers.
1. Promote your products on Quora strategically
As your brand awareness grows on Quora, so does awareness of your products. Eventually, users begin searching for you on Quora.
Your consistent presence, willingness to help users, and the quantity of answers will make users curious about the brand and what it offers.
You have to prepare yourself for such moments.
I like to think of this process in three steps:
Step #1: Optimize your Quora profile to promote your brand.
Bob Ruffolo’s Quora profile is a great example:
Bob’s profile is an ideal blend of products, services, their purpose for user benefit, and the topics he’s an expert about.
Step #2: Offer products only when asked.
There are two ways users will ask for your products. The first is when they ask for it directly.
Let’s take the example of Mention, a social media and web monitoring tool. When users ask directly for the best monitoring tools, it’s quite appropriate for the Mention team to talk their own tool:
Tip: Don’t be afraid of revealing that you belong to your company. There is no harm in talking about it, as long as you’re up front. But promoting your products or services without revealing your true identity is a quick way to be labeled spam.
The second way a user will ask for your product is more indirect. That is, they are asking when they are looking for competitor alternatives.
Continuing with the example of Mention.com, one can offer this tool where competitor alternatives have been asked for. Check out the example below. I’m sure you’ve even seen article titles that start off like this.
Tip: While offering your product as a better alternative to competitor, don’t forget to tell users why you built the tool. Prove that you’re there to solve their biggest problems, and you build trust.
2. Offer customer support on Quora
On Quora, some users are with you while some are against you. Those who are against you might be former customers or users who have tested your product.
If they’re looking for alternatives to your offering, that’s the exact moment you need to know what issue they faced in the past, and how you can fix it for them.
Buzzsumo do this replying to the question where a user asked for a Buzzsumo alternative:
Three reasons why I liked this answer and you will too:
- Buzzsumo defends its product
- It shows off the key features of Buzzsumo
- Also, it offers alternatives to sort out users’ queries
This is a great way to offer support and provide information without coming across as overly promotional or pushy.
3. Turn your brand into a topic of conversation
HubSpot does this expertly. If you look for HubSpot on Quora, you will find that most of its questions are like the following:
- How to do this on Hubspot?
- How to solve this problem with Hubspot?
- What are the benefits of using Hubspot? etc.
Replace Hubspot with your brand name.
If users are already asking such questions, then these are good opportunities to let them know about your products. If not, it’s time to post such threads on your own profile and answer them in an honest way.
As inspiration, listen to your customers who ask questions directly to your customer support team. Post those questions on Quora and answer them like the way you answer your customers. This is a great way to kick-start new conversation threads.
Tell users how they can use your products in different ways, and turn your brand into a topic of conversation.
4. Become a thought leader
A thought leader answers users’ question, offers advice, and posts content based on their own experience. And you don’t even need to wait for users to ask for advice. Take initiative, and lead.
James Clear, master of behavior science, is too good at this stuff.
He has 6 answers, 236 Posts and 1 Blog on Quora with 4K+ followers.
To make yourself appear again and again on Quora, you have to be available whenever users need you. And try to help them in some way even without them asking.
It’s not easy, but the best starting point is simply to make yourself a resource. The more you build your own authority, the more people will look to you when they need a product to solve their problems.
And when these people are directed to your site, they’re perfectly placed to buy from you.
It’s time to jump in
Now, you have a whole plan with a set of activities you must perform on Quora.
It’s time to jump in and start answering questions. Follow the tips, start building your brand and let me know what advice from this article helped you the most.
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