Content Marketing For Quora: Will It Actually Do Anything For My Brand?

Quora - is it marketing's next big thing or another passing trend?

First, let's consider the facts. There are over 100 million monthly unique users. The platform has publishing partnerships with Forbes and Newsweek, and contributors like Neil Patel, Barack Obama, and Sheryl Sandberg that answer questions and hold Q&A sessions.

But does that mean it's worthwhile?

Although Quora has a significant following, brands can struggle to make use of the platform. Because Quora posts themselves are a drop in the bucket. If you only post something occasionally, the channel won't do much for you. And there isn't going to be a massive surge of high-quality traffic back to your site all at once, at least when you're first starting out.

So is Quora worth spending time on or not?

In my opinion? Yes.

Why You Should Use Content Marketing For Quora

Here's the challenge with Quora. You can't go into it with the wrong expectations.

You can't expect a massive return on Quora right away.

You can't force the people on Quora to become your customers.

You can't bank on "going viral" and getting a flood of traffic from one post.

Basically, you can't expect a massive return on Quora right away. But if you use the platform effectively, it can definitely improve your current marketing ROI. In time, it can even drive some pretty good traffic back to your site. That's why there are a lot of reasons that Quora is a great place to invest your time.

1. There's An Opportunity To Improve Your Content

Personally, I like going to Quora when I'm brainstorming blog content. Because like any other social channel, Quora has a lot of people looking to make contributions and be heard. You can browse through any topic and find a slew of answers to common questions.

Unfortunately, the majority of these responses aren't very good.

Often, in my areas of expertise, I find a lot of Quora contributors push themselves or their product instead of providing thought leadership. Sometimes, the answers are outdated or unclear.

However, when I research my blog topics on Quora and read through a few responses, I can typically get an idea of the mediocre, or frankly, lousy advice my customers and audience are getting.

Then, I can write a post that challenges that advice or knocks them out of the park with much more compelling, creative content. Later, I can reply to that same question and link my own blog post to the response.

2. It's A Great Exercise For Your Team

In a perfect world, everyone on your team makes regular contributions across various social channels. But it's not always easy for team members to share their thought-leadership and expertise.

It can be intimidating to write a blog post positioning yourself as an expert or shooting a video on the subject.

That's why Quora is a great place to start. It's relatively easy to find topics and questions that relate to your expertise. You can do everything from sharing feedback about marketing technology to talking about your favorite podcasts.

The idea is, once you employees posting and regularly engaging on Quora, you can get them thinking about two things:

1) Their area of expertise and what they can share with your audience and community.

2) Your audience and how they ask questions, such as the language and phrasing they use and their basic knowledge of your industry.

From this, they can learn more about your audience, their own industry, and build up their confidence to post and share expertise on other platforms.

3. It Can Inspire Better Keyword Research

Sometimes, you assume you know everything about your audience. But your ideal customer is more complicated than you can describe on a buyer persona template. And they don't know as much about your product or service as you do. It's easy to forget that your customer often needs more context on topics that you deal with every day.

As a result, they may phrase terms differently, and ask unexpected questions to search for answers. They often confuse or don't understand certain aspects of their problem, making it less likely they'll search for it.

If you use Quora, you can see how they converse, ask questions, talk to their peers, and talk about their problems.

Often, you can use this to conduct better keyword research, with a tool such as SEMrush, which we use. You can also write more compelling blog titles and material, and address any areas of confusion or differences in your content and website content.

4. It Can Improve Your Personas

Unfortunately, a lot of companies let their buyer personas go untouched for a year or more. They never make any updates or throw rocks at their own assumptions. The personas sit in Dropbox or Google Drive untouched. And while our one-page buyer persona is pretty fantastic, it wouldn't do us much use if the information was inaccurate. 

However, buyer personas that are frequently updated, challenged, and refreshed are an excellent resource. They can inform blog articles, page messaging, social posts, and additional digital marketing efforts.

Quora is great to help inform buyer personas, because the channel is full of people talking about what they know and what they don't know. You can sort by topic and subject. It's an excellent way to understand their mindset, challenges, and problems, in their words.

Using Quora To Fuel Your Content Marketing Efforts

If you're a savvy marketer, you tie the performance of every channel and initiative to a goal. It's critical to understand which of your efforts are paying off, and which ones are not. And when it comes to Quora, the key to measuring success is regularly incorporating it into a content distribution system, along with a few other platforms.

To learn more about our preferred social media channels, and how you can use them to get more from your marketing efforts, check out our guide, The Inbound Marketer's Guide To Social Media Apps and Tools.