Content Marketing

Nine Ways To Reach Important Readers Using Quora

By Lexi Lewtan

Quora is an amazing tool for crowd-sourcing the answers to high quality questions – it’s like Wikipedia meets Yahoo Answers. The site is great for personal and industry related questions, but is still relatively unexplored as a marketing tool. Here are nine ways to dip your toes into this up-and-coming network.

Stay on Top of Industry Trends

Research (and Get New Ideas): MG Siegler uses questions to find story topics and confirm details for TechCrunch. Give it a try – you could end up with an amazing idea for a blog post you never would have thought of alone.

Offer Insights into Individual Questions: If you can offer unique and not already Google-able insights, you will not only pull that user to your brand, but attract the attention of anyone who needs this kind of knowledge in the future. And if that knowledge is the kind of thing your brand provides, the question will probably attract relevant potential readers.

Keep Track of Your Competition: – The questions your competitors are following and the answers they give will provide further insight into how they work. You’ll find that questions they ask might offer the answers you need in your own future questions.

Extend Your Brand

Be Smart: Good writing on Quora makes you a useful resource, which means people will view your content as a useful resource too. Plus, it is another way to improve your chances of getting noticed.

Be Personable: Everything on Quora is tied back to a person, not a brand. So a representative from the company should be the one interacting – preferably one with a title that makes them sound like someone who is worth taking advice from. Spotify is great at doing this – tons of employees, from the CEO to UX designers, answer relevant questions regarding the music streaming site’s multifaceted operation process.

Be Quotable: Give concise, credible quote nuggets – this is a much better method of stating your ideology and message than trying to give a cheesy sales pitch. Plus, it can give anyone who is writing and/or talking about your brand relevant things to mention to others.

Understand Consumer Needs

Ask the Important Questions: By revealing, and clarifying common misconceptions and key assets of your brand, you provide transparency for your brand. This will help your existing community to understand what you do and how you work, and will intrigue new potential fans.

Follow Your Customers: Integrate with your brands’ Twitter and Facebook to keep track of your communities questions and updates. That way, you can keep a pulse on what your users want answers to, rather than just what they are thinking about (like on other social networks).

Answer Their Questions: Not all of the time, but if you see a question and you feel like helping, answer it. They’ll think you and your brand are a bunch of straight-up superheroes if you do a good job!