Back in October 2018, Quora Ads announced three new betas were going to be added to the platform: CPM bidding, Auction Insights, and Promoted Answers. Promoted Answers caught my eye because I loved the mix of organic and paid marketing. If you or other members of your team have crafted amazing content that could help out a lot of people, you can now promote your awesome content to a wider audience on Quora. Almost think of it as the Quora Ads version of a boosted post. Also, you may be able to rely on people outside your company to write the answers for you. (Teaser alert! I’ll explain this very soon).
In this guide, I’ll show you what Promoted Answers are and how you can use them to increase brand awareness and build authority in your industry.
What are Promoted Answers?
I am not going to say Quora is just a Q&A site, but if I had to give a simple explanation of what Quora is, I’d say that Q&A is the main bulk of the site’s content.
With the Promoted Answers ad type, advertisers now have the opportunity to push a question to the top of the page—which will, of course, also push your answer to the top of the page, too. Users can start reading the answer, then click a “more” link to read your entire answer if they choose.
Image via Quora
When Quora announced this new feature was out of beta and ready for everyone, it recommended the kind of answers that advertisers should boost: “Choose high quality answers that adhere to our content policy guidelines.” With this new format, your answers are more than just answers. They are now treated as a landing page if the quality of the content is high enough, and to get the most out of your Promoted Answers, you want top-notch quality (more on this in a minute).
If you already know you have great answers you would like to promote, let’s now go through the setup, which is going to be a lot easier than you think.
How to set up your Promoted Answers campaign
Advertisers can start creating a campaign and ad set like they normally do. You can still choose to select a campaign to push conversions, traffic, or awareness. (Note: App install objectives are not an option, but that’s an obvious reason why.) Once we get to the ad set level, the targeting options advertisers have for Promoted Answers are the same for any other type of ad set you may want to create. (Here is a list of the targeting options on Quora Ads if you are new to the platform).
The only component of this type of campaign that is truly different is the ad creative, and advertisers don’t have to put in much effort to create a Promoted Answer.
After you select the “Promote an Answer” ad format, and enter your business name, you’ll have to find the URL for your answer. The key part right there is answer URL. Not question URL. So what’s the difference?
To find the answer URL, go to the page where your answer is. Underneath your answer, you’ll see a date of when that question was answered. Well, that date is clickable. Click on it, and a new window tab will open. This new page will only have your answer, and the URL for this new tab is what you’ll need to enter into your ad creation.
Wasn’t there a recent update to Promoted Answers?
Why, yes there was, astute PPC marketer! On March 21, 2019, Quora announced an easier way to promote answers without ever having to go within the ads interface. If you are looking at certain answers you wrote within the Quora interface, and you can now click on the ellipsis icon “…” and select “Promote” to begin setting up a new Promoted Answers campaign.
Now, you may be thinking, “Can I only do this for the answers I write?” Great question! And the answer to that one is no! You can promote any answer on Quora: It doesn’t have to be your own. Why is this an option? If your company sets up the ad account, but your employees (most likely the real knowledge experts in the field) are answering the questions, it’s still beneficial for your brand to make sure the people representing you are getting top exposure. I’m also of the personal belief that an answer is more believable coming from a person instead of a company account. Again, that is just my personal belief, but you can test it for yourself.
How to promote great answers
Like I mentioned earlier, you don’t want to promote just any old answer: You want to promote the best answer possible to promote brand awareness or drive conversions. But how can you promote great answers? In my opinion it all depends on a few key things:
- The quality of the answer
- What are your current customers looking for
- What type of traffic can you get from your questions
- Who has the authority to write the answer.
Don’t worry—this isn’t as complicated as it seems. Let me show you a few scenarios where different types of answers could be worthwhile to promote.
Showcase authority
How awesome is this? The CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo is answering questions about his own product. There is probably no one better to answer questions about DuckDuckGo than the CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo. If your brand name is a topic and you can see several people asking questions about your brand (more common on Quora than you think), then try and get answers posted from high authorities in your company.
Let me flip the scenario around to talk about a different strategy. Maybe you have a competitor that has bigger brand recognition than you. And maybe that brand has a topic on Quora that gets a good amount of questions and traffic. You can create a campaign targeting the Topics or Interests of your competitors, then promote an answer to them to showcase why your brand could be the better choice. Depending on what questions and answers are out there, this could be a good tactic to use for getting in front of the right audience and trying to win over new customers.
Bring in the experts
I’ve had many types of clients in all different types of industries. I consider myself a PPC expert. However, I will never consider myself the expert in every industry my clients work in. So if my client worked in electronic engineering, and I saw a question on Quora asking, “What is this digital spike filter called,” I couldn’t answer that question. Ever. But you know who could? An engineer who actually does the work. These could be great answers to promote if you have a staff on hand who can answer the harder, more in-depth technical questions your audience could be asking.
This example I used is a very specific one, but this strategy can be used for almost any industry out there. There are a variety of ways different levels of employees from your company can help potential customers on the Quora platform. We already saw how having an authority figure like a CEO can be a good influence. Your product developers can help answer specific questions about what you offer that your marketing or content team may not be able to answer as well. What about your sales team? What questions do they typically get from prospects or qualified leads? Even if your sales team doesn’t want to answer questions on Quora, they are still a valuable asset to find the right questions to answer. Remember, you can use the other teams in your company to be the industry experts and build more authority for your company.
Let your fans speak for you
Sometimes people like to hear answers from users like them and not from the brand. The believability can be higher when users see organic answers from other people, and it doesn’t feel like brands aren’t writing answers saying they’re the best. So let your current customers speak for you. If fans are writing great answers touting your products, you can promote these organic answers to help influence new users to purchase your product.
I can’t say there is one sure route to go in choosing the best answer to promote. You’ll have to decide the best strategy for yourself. It will all depend on what industry your company or client is in. But you’ll always want to consider if the goal of your campaign is to build awareness or try and push more conversions. And hopefully these few examples will give you some new ideas to test in your Promoted Answers campaigns.
Start promoting your great content
The answers your company puts on Quora could be written by the PPC team, your organic team, your social team, or maybe a valuable member in the company’s industry. If you have valuable content that can help a lot of your potential customers, start promoting those answers. If you are spending the time to write the content, do whatever you can to make sure it reaches as many of the right users as possible whether the questions get a lot of traffic or not. Test out this new ad format and boost your brand perception on Quora.