B2B eCommerce marketing isn’t all about webinars, social media, or guest blogging (although I’m a huge fan).
With 300+ million monthly active users, enviable SEO, and content covering every imaginable niche, Quora is often one of the most underutilized channels for eCommerce content marketing. It’s a popular question-and-answer community that can help you discover what your customers care about, learn more about your industry, and answer questions to enhance your reputation and thought leadership.
Here’s how you can get the most out of Quora for your B2B eCommerce business.
What is Quora?
Quora is a Q&A platform founded in 2009 by two former Facebook employees. The business, now worth $2 billion, allows users to post questions and answers on a range of topics. These questions and answer threads cover topics from “how many users does Quora have?” to “what’s the best eCommerce marketing tool?”
Quora users can upvote others’ answers, and the platform displays answers in order of upvote popularity. Fun fact: One of the most upvoted answers on Quora has 265.9k upvotes and counting!
Aside from the core Q&A functionality, the platform also provides feeds for specific topics, ads to reach specific audiences, and a feature where you can request an answer from a specific user.
Why Quora is a great tool for B2B eCommerce
Quora is a fun and helpful platform to explore in your spare time, but it’s also hugely beneficial for marketing managers, content creators, or business owners. The platform has a large user base, lends credibility to your answers, ranks well in search results, and helps extend your content’s lifetime (especially if you pick timeless questions to answer).
1) Large user base
Quora has an unbelievable user base, with more than 300 million monthly users asking between 3,000 – 5,000 questions a day, spanning 400,000+ topics. Whether you’re looking to reach a niche, popular, or obscure audience, Quora delivers.
Registered Quora users are 37% more likely to be in a managerial position, which means you get access to a wide audience with decision-making power.
Finally, let’s not forget Quora’s unregistered users. Anyone can access Quora to read questions and answers, whether or not they’re registered. This expands the reach of your answers even further, with 620+ million visitors to Quora every month.
2) Credibility
Quora helps you establish yourself as an industry expert when you provide insightful and helpful answers to relevant questions. You can show your expertise and willingness to help educate others. Your answers on Quora are also a channel to inject your tone and voice into your content, allowing you to put a face and personality behind your brand.
Your business becomes an even more viable option when someone else on Quora mentions you in their answer, as social proof drives those conversions home.
3) Lead generation
You can include links to your blog, videos, or website in your Quora answers, making it an effective lead generation tool. Companies using Quora ads see up to 4x higher conversions than other platforms. But the platform delivers plenty of organic leads, too.
Marketing tool Wishpond gets around 9,000 monthly leads from Quora. These leads spend an average of six minutes on Wishpond’s website, suggesting Quora is excellent for generating qualified, interested traffic.
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4) Brand awareness
You can increase brand awareness among your audience by answering industry-relevant questions on Quora. The more your audience runs into your brand online, the more familiar they become with you, increasing trust.
Si Quan Ong, marketing lead at Ahrefs, amassed nearly one million views and more than one thousand subscribers on Quora by answering five or more questions per week on digital marketing topics. By doing so, he introduced Ahrefs to more than one million people.
5) Customer insights
Quora is also the ultimate customer research tool. You can use the platform to learn more about your target audience, the problems they face, what they think about your products, and if they’re willing to recommend your brand.
6) High-ranking SEO
Even though the backlinks you create from Quora are nofollow links, which hold less weight than normal backlinks, Google still considers them when analyzing your website for search results. Linking to relevant resources on your own blog can help signal your website is a good candidate for certain topics in search.
Additionally, Quora is a trusted resource that many people click on in search — 63% of Quora’s traffic comes from search engines. That means it ranks well for many search queries, often capturing the featured snippet and “People also ask” box.
In fact, Quora ranks for 65+ million keywords — pop a question into Google, and you can almost guarantee that Quora will be one of the first results. And if you’re one of the Quora answers, you can top the search results even if your website doesn’t.
7) Long-term exposure
Quora gives your answers long-term exposure and helps to extend the lifetime of your content. Unlike social media posts, which quickly disappear on your followers’ feeds, Quora’s answers stick around. In fact, as long as people are still asking the question you answered, you have a good chance of showing up in both Quora and Google search results.
As more users answer questions, Quora keeps growing as a humongous knowledge base that users can search and access whenever they want. Trending questions on Quora can be weeks, months, or even years old.
Fun fact: The oldest live answer on Quora is from October 2009, and asks “How can I find office space for a startup in Downtown Palo Alto?”
How to add Quora to your B2B eCommerce content marketing strategy
If you’re sold on Quora, and ready to start investing some time creating content for this platform, let’s talk about how to make the best use of this powerhouse platform.
1. Create a profile that speaks for you
Making a hard sell on Quora is generally frowned upon, and mentioning your business without disclosing your affiliate could even get you banned. However, there’s one place in Quora where you’re free to be as promotional as you want: Your profile page.
Your profile page gives viewers and followers some background, so they can judge how credible your answers are. It’s also a great place to introduce your business and generate some leads.
Some tips for your Quora profile page:
- Fill out your Quora profile with your background and expertise.
- Link to your website, special offer, or any other CTA on your profile.
- Pin your most popular or useful answer to the top of your profile.
2. Use Quora to guide content planning
Quora is an excellent place to uncover customer insights, which makes it a valuable resource to guide your content planning. Use it to see what questions your audience is asking, what topics they’re discussing, and what content they link to. You can take this information to identify content gaps and create a list of topics to cover across various mediums, like blogs or infographics.
For example, if you see a question relevant to your industry that has plenty of followers, you can write a blog answering it, then summarize your blog and link to it in your Quora answer.
Since you already know there’s interest in the topic based on the number of people following the question in Quora, your blog will:
- Help you rank in organic search for a popular topic
- Cover a content gap you didn’t even know you had
- Be a useful resource your customer-facing teams can share
You can then observe how your blog performs in terms of search volume and conversions. If it’s a high-converting piece, repurpose the topic into a whitepaper, video, webinar, and more.
3. Provide helpful answers
Here’s where the meat of your Quora strategy comes in. You have to go in and answer questions. Answering questions increases visibility, showcases your expertise, and helps you become a trusted resource, both on and off the platform.
When answering questions on Quora, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Focus on your expertise. You should answer questions you’ll be seen as a credible expert in. You should be a subject matter expert and have relevant experience with whatever topic you choose.
- Format your answers so they’re easy to read and skim (ex. use headers, bullet points, images).
- Cite your sources. Attribute any claims and make sure to use relevant, reliable, and credible sources.
- Make your answers engaging, useful, memorable, and error-free.
- Disclose your affiliations, such as when you mention your own business, or any connection to a business you mention.
- Let your personality shine through, which will help you seem more personable.
- Avoid sales pitches. Quora isn’t a platform to sell your products or services on. You can reference your business only when relevant.
- Improve on the best answer of the thread. Look at the most upvoted answer and try to provide even more information and value to top it.
- Answer questions regularly, and don’t be afraid to ask a few, too.
- Turn on notifications so you get an alert when relevant questions pop up.
4. Answer the right questions
You could spend all day answering questions on Quora, so it’s important to tailor your approach. Identify relevant questions that generate high organic search traffic, and target those first.
Here are a few ways to prioritize what questions you answer on Quora:
- Look at how many followers a question has. The more followers, the more people are alerted when you publish your answer.
- Use a keyword research tool to find the top-performing Quora pages for the last month, and then filter by your industry.
- Find questions with highly upvoted answers, but not many answers overall. This signals interest and visibility, so even if you get the second spot you’re likely to be seen.
Remember, this is your opportunity to showcase your knowledge and brand, so pick questions where you can weave in experience and link back to relevant content on your website. Once you get a feel for the questions that perform well in search, you’ll naturally start spotting the best questions to answer. Quora also has an intelligent question suggestion tool — the more you answer, the more relevant questions Quora sends your way.
Tip: Quora has a stats section under your profile. This gives you a dashboard of useful information about your upvotes, views, and shares so you can analyze your activity and results.
5. Make Quora part of a unified content approach
Even though Quora is a valuable channel, it shouldn’t be the only one you rely on — and it shouldn’t exist in a silo.
Once you gain traction on Quora, you can share high-performing answers to your social media channels directly from Quora. This generates more traffic to your answers and, if you include a backlink, your website. You can also share webinar recordings on Quora, share Quora answers in your blog, and link to free resources in your Quora answers.
There are plenty of ways you can cross-promote your different content channels, as long as you make sure you add value, provide relevant information, and follow channel guidelines.
6. Consider Quora Ads
Like many communities with a large user base, Quora offers advertising to help businesses reach their niche.
Quora Ads are native ads that appear among answers on the platform. You can create different campaign objects (such as conversions, traffic, and lead generation), target specific audience demographics, and set daily budgets and bidding strategies.
Analyze Quora’s top-performing pages according to website traffic and relevance to your product or service, and target your ads appropriately.
7. Measure impact
Finally, don’t forget to measure your results. You can look at Google Analytics to see how much traffic your Quora answers send to your website, and how much of that traffic converts. These metrics should guide how much time you invest writing content for Quora.
Asking and answering questions on Quora can be lots of fun, and I’ve often lost track of time on their website. To get the most out of your Quora content, approach it with an eagerness to learn, explore, and provide value.