From an audience reach standpoint, some might say that B2B marketing is becoming more difficult by the day. The attention span of the audience is lower than ever, and the search for instant gratification is at its peak.
As marketers, we tap more into content marketing to cater to the immediate need for information than other channels. And that makes sense because, when we flip roles and become customers, we are super clear that we don’t want someone to breathe behind our neck or nudge us to take action. We want to self-educate.
So if you want to earn the trust of your target audience, you need to offer thought leadership and value. But, the term ‘value’ is over-abused already.
Let’s keep it simple. In terms of content, value refers to offering answers to what your target audience is seeking, in the space and time they’re looking for it. From my experience, I can say that Quora is a great place to do that. And let me delve deeper into it, through this post.
What to expect from the platform?
You can think of Quora as one of the contributors to the marketing flywheel. For context, Jim Collins described ‘flywheel’ in his book Good to Great as the momentum gained because of multiple factors working together.
Quora currently has more than 300 million people as their user base. They typically allow users to either pose questions or write up answers. I began using Quora for a business in 2019, and over the next 12 months, I went from 0 to 2 million views and managed to get business opportunities worth $100,000 as part of the process. But it didn’t happen without a lot of trial and error.
I started writing on Quora during my time with Ontraport, where I kicked things off. I initially used it just as a forum to answer questions. Quora for anyone who’s not familiar is a Q&A website. People can ask a question, like say – how do I generate more leads on LinkedIn? Or how do I convert more of my trials?
And then people can respond to those. And depending on the merits of those answers and how much people upvote specific answers, they get different amounts of attention. And so what happened was I started to write answers and people liked my insights.
So, from there, I started getting more and more involved, and Quora became something that was not only just a platform for me to get out content, but I could distribute it to a large audience. And it became a place where I also networked quite a bit.
Understanding the mechanism of Quora
When you start on Quora, you typically find a question you know a lot about and write on it. But when you dig a little bit deeper, you’ll find that there are a lot of additional opportunities for distribution. For instance, they have a concept called ‘Spaces’. They are basically like tons of mini-communities that are curating content on a specific topic. So you have different spaces for entrepreneurship, marketing, startup growth, SaaS etc. And so I joined up into dozens, and dozens of these communities started to share my answers into those.
As I became more of an authority, they started promoting me as a contributor, which means my answers would automatically be approved. And so, suddenly I had this opportunity where every time I wrote content, it was distributed into dozens of these different outlets. And it got tens of thousands of views. Also, from a networking standpoint, it helped me build relationships with the people that were curating a lot of these marketing SaaS sales style communities.
And then another concept that Quora has is something called the Quora Digest. Here’s how it works. They have a very robust email list, probably millions of people on their email lists. And they do targeted blasts based on answers. And so, as I gained popularity on Quora, I would get notifications that say your answer went out to a 100K people or say 10K people if it was a smaller niche.
People tend to rely solely on their inbound marketing efforts and their internal email list. And it makes it substantially more challenging. If you can tap into a platform like Quora, you can scale quickly.
What works well on Quora?
First up, Quora is a storytelling platform. When I first started on Quora, the way that our team had been using it was to repurpose the blog content merely. And it didn’t perform very well because that’s not how it works on Quora. The platform encourages answers that are personal experiences.
Keep it super personal and honest.
So the first big takeaway is – take a step back from the blog style long-form content that expands on an issue from a didactic or instructive standpoint. You can still absolutely layer that in, but I think it’s essential to nesting it within personal experience.
It’s better to start with an educational approach. Don’t start with the intention to promote. You can include links, but you want to be smart with it. You want to be discretionary. If you have too many links, they’ll start to shut down your answers.
Here’s an approach we took:
In our growth department at Bonjoro, we do a lot of podcasting. We have done about 175 podcasts so far in 2020, and that’s been a robust growth lever for us. So when I write an answer to a question on podcasting, it comes from our experience. I would talk about the platforms that I use, the way we use a tool like ListenNotes to build relationships, etc.
A part of it is also about sharing things that didn’t work. Because everyone in the marketing world knows you don’t bat on a hundred or fifty all the time. So, it is more authentic to mention things like – ‘we tried this, it didn’t work, and that led us to this, etc.’
Niche down, get specific.
The next significant learning is – don’t try to answer every topic you can get your hands on. Get super specific to the ones that you know like the back of your hand. Remember the original example I started with – ‘How do you generate leads on LinkedIn?’
If you are an expert on that topic, you can type in that question, and you’ll see all variants of that question asked by people. You can also see how many people are following that specific question, which gives you a sense of the potential engagement for your answer. And if you see that there is a strong following around that question, then that opens up an opportunity for you to share your narrative there and get involved.
I’ve been in the SaaS world in different capacities for a long time, so that was my wheelhouse. Therefore, I would typically focus on answering questions such as – how do you increase MRR or how do you reduce churn? How to build a healthy onboarding process, etc. When I focused on SaaS topics, I could quickly become one of the top 10 writers in that domain within about six months.
What if you don’t have time to get on the platform daily?
Every time I talk to people about Quora, one of the things I mentioned is you have the thought leadership angle, which is something that I did write, which is I wrote a lot, and I put a lot of content out there, but some people say, well, what if I don’t have time?
It seems like I’m an athlete writing all the time. It’s this massive investment for maybe an unclear ROI. But I think there are more straightforward and efficient ways to handle this.
When you don’t want to put a budget on it
For instance, networking, commenting on people’s answers and building relationships in reaching out to people that run podcasts or webinars, or that you want to do a content collaboration with, can go a long way.
You can start by writing three answers a day, something I did, and that is an excellent way for you to produce a lot of content and build name recognition. And over time, it will be an ideal pathway to get millions of relevant views. It’s like the compound interest that you get with time.
When you have a small budget and are focused on monetization
But if you’re trying to focus on monetizing Quora, you can tap into the relationship side for a much lower investment. To give you a little background, I ran Facebook and Google ads, as well as on Twitter and Reddit in the past, but nothing gave me the ROI as much as Quora. The ads were getting a 7% click-through rate, which wasn’t something I was getting on Facebook, so it was kind of remarkable.
Targeting is much better in Quora compared to Facebook, which is broader. You have interest targeting (people interested in a specific topic) as well as keyword targeting (targeting people searching for particular terms). But in my experience, when I compare the groups based on interest on Facebook versus Quora, I have many more options on Quora. So that’s more valuable.
And I also think it’s because the Quora ad ecosystem is still a little bit nascent, with not many players. But, now I see more and more companies joining in. The window of opportunity might be increasingly slipping, but definitely worth a try if you want to put your foot on the gas and step things up.
Closing thoughts
Like most things in life, you will get out of Quora what you invest in to it. It certainly has its advantages. There is a massive opportunity for you to become a topic expert on Quora genuinely, and it is relatively easier to establish yourself compared to the efforts you might need to put on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Remember, to keep it personal. Some of the top Quora writers still write on casual topics because the platform encourages informal, personal narratives. Stay away from being excessively promotional.
Keep growing!
P.S. If you found this blog post useful, you may also be interested in checking out my course: How to monetize Quora
