3 Ways Quora Can Supercharge Your Business

By Joshua Poh

What can a Q&A site do for my business, you wonder?

Promoting my business on Yahoo! Answers? Maybe that's not what you had in mind.

Source: BuzzFeed

Quora? What's Quora?

Quora is a community-based Q&A platform where anyone can ask and answer questions.

What distinguishes it from Yahoo! Answers, then?

Quora is one of the few communities that have founders of renowned companies like Wikipedia, Pandora and Craigslist as regular contributors. They also have representatives from other companies like HubSpot Singapore and Moz contributing their expertise and knowledge on their subjects for free.

The Quora community also covers a tremendous scope; from the digital marketing industry, entrepreneurship, the latest happenings in Silicon Valley to life advice. People actively ask questions and seek answers to these questions.

What do all these factors mean for you as a marketer trying to promote your business?

#1: Quora is a place to establish thought leadership for you and your company.

People on Quora actively ask questions and look for answers to these questions.

Browse, find and follow relevant topics to follow on Quora that your business is working in or have expertise in. For example, if you are a marketer in a digital marketing agency you can follow and monitor topics related to social media, SEO and marketing analytics.

Following these topics gives you access to the multitude of people looking for answers in your topic of expertise. These are opportunities for you to demonstrate your expertise, provide value to your prospective audience and get your brand name out there.

Two types of answers are especially popular on Quora:

Actionable strategies

Examples include: How to X, What is the best way to do Y.

Specific examples

Examples include: 21 Examples of Amazing Headlines, 3 Examples of Stunning Personal Websites, 5 Examples of Outstanding Resumes.

Providing concrete examples and visuals to answer a question makes your answer easier to understand and provide more value to your audience.

These strategies on Quora can help to establish you and your company as a source of strong, relevant information for your area of expertise.

#2: Quora can drive traffic to your company website or blog.

Use existing content on your blog or website to answer existing questions on Quora. As you answer these questions, include a link back to your website or blog with either a more detailed answer or more relevant examples that viewers can read more about if interested.

As your Quora answers gain in popularity, make sure you include a link to your website or blog post you are quoting to ensure it becomes a source of social referral traffic. The Quora community is made up of dedicated users and its carefully curated content ensures it is well positioned as a source of reliable, high quality information.

Establishing your brand on Quora allows you to build relationships and trust with prospects to organically guide them to discover your brand's products or services. This process takes time, but will drive qualified and warm leads to your website as you nurture these relationships.

#3: Quora is a place to find, listen to and engage with an audience who is relevant to your company.

Quora is a wonderful way to learn specific details about your core audience. Its Q&A format allows your brand to discover the answers to the following marketing related questions.

Who are my customers? What are their wants and needs?

What challenges / problems are they facing? What are they looking for in potential solutions to these problems? What are my competitors offering already and how can I differentiate

myself from them?

Do your research on Quora! By focusing on what your prospects are saying in comments or what questions they are asking, your company can gain insight into your audience's characteristics and more importantly, how to create appropriate content to address these needs.

Quora is one of those Q&A sites done right. Quora admins continuously ensure answers are of high quality and the community remains respectful in comments, questions and answers. Quora may just be that listening and traffic generating platform your business needs.