In a world with millions of brands, and thousands of small businesses, what are you doing differently?
Marketing is a key factor that decides the success of a business, as much as the product does. You might have an amazing product and first-class customer service. However, your marketing strategy is going to decide how many leads you have and the qualities of those leads. To simply put it: without some form of marketing, you will have very few leads. And without a marketing strategy, you will have leads that get nowhere.
You will decide your marketing platforms depending on what your product is and who your target audience is. However, there is one platform that you can use no matter what your product is or what you sell: Quora.
Quora is one of the best platforms for generating leads and building a community. It is easy to use and works in a question-answer format, where anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer it. Many brands use Quora to answer customer inquiries and connect with their customer base.
Why Is Quora Good For Your Small Business?
Over 190 million users use Quora (as of April 2017), with the USA having the biggest user-based, followed by India. This means that you might reach a big portion of your target audience simply by having a presence on Quora.
Including Quora in your marketing strategy has many benefits, especially if you are a small business or a startup, like:
Establish your brand as an authority in your industry
Expand brand awareness
Build a community
Generate leads
How to Leverage Quora for Marketing Your Business?
1. Your first step should be to make a killer profile
Your profile is going to be the point of introduction to your company. Since Quora is going to be one of your marketing media platforms, it is essential to keep everything on-brand. You can assign answering Quora questions to a person since you can not create a profile for your band. You will have to carefully select this person since their name and a bit of their bio (their credentials) will be visible above the answer. Make sure that your brand is visible in the bio that is displayed on the answer to improving brand awareness. You can even add your website link in the profile or links to other social media platforms you are on. This is a great way to drive traffic to other platforms.Â
2. Focus on generating value, not leads
Look at Quora as more of a community than a marketplace. Customers are looking to connect with brands on social media platforms on a more personal level. This allows you to foster trust and brand loyalty, which is important for customer retention. You are providing a personal touch to your communication with your audiences on social media platforms. Therefore you should focus on the value that you bring to your customers and not on sales. The more you can increase brand loyalty, the better your sales numbers will perform.
Your Quora account will be a place you can connect with your customers and interact with them by answering questions and commenting on other profiles. You are creating a community with your brand at the center. So be careful when you decide to interact with profiles or in community spaces.Â
3. Follow relevant topics and profiles
It is important to know what is trending in your industry and what similar businesses are doing. A great way to do this is to follow topics and profiles that relate to your business. Following other profiles will allow your feed to be filled with questions from the topics you choose.
You need to think of the right keywords. What could a potential customer search for to find your product or something similar? You can enter these keywords in the search bar and the website will provide you with an autocomplete list to help you. This will allow you to find relevant questions without having to specifically look for them. It also allows you to conduct market research into what your customer base is asking, answering, and upvoting.
It also becomes easy to find ideas to create content around the topics that apply to your industry from pre-existing user-generated content. Make sure that you turn on your notifications for profiles you want to follow to stay in the loop.
4. Answer questions that will set you up as an authority.
You don't want to answer all the questions that are related to your industry. It will take up a lot of time and effort, and it is ‌a very unrealistic goal. Instead, you want to pick carefully the questions that will bring the highest value to your brand and your customer base. This is something you will get the hang of over time.Â
There are three things to look out for when answering questions:
Timeframe: don’t answer questions that are 2-3 years old. Cut the time frame off to 1 month‌. The more recent a question is, the better.
Upvotes: if a question has a lot of upvotes, it means that it is a popular question. Answer those.
Keywords: answer questions that have similar keywords that your brand uses.Â
5. Answer with more than just words
This stands true, especially for long-form answers. Customers can get bored when they are reading long paragraphs. Be sure to add images now and then to break the monotony of a long text post. You can also use other forms of graphics like GIFs to seem more in touch with pop culture and state statistics to give you an edge.Â
Supporting your data and claims with infographics, statistics, and external data will set you up as an authority and an expert in your domain. This will show customers ‌that you are fact-driven and can support your answers with strong numbers.
You can also use links, to either support your answer or to increase traffic to your website. But be cautious when using links in your answers. You don’t want to use too many links for one answer or use the same link for all your answers, since it will make your profile look like a spam account.