When host Erin Sparks spoke with special guest Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy for Clix Marketing in episode 326 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast, they talked about how Quora is the up-and-coming platform digital marketers should be using.
Advertising Options in Quora
For those who are ready to discover the benefits of branching out beyond Google and Facebook for PPC results, Quora is a great option. Trying it out to get a feel for it easy, too. One of the best ways to do this is to engage in a simple remarketing campaign. Take the people who have engaged with your brand on your website, find them on Quora and see what kind of reaction you get from them. Then do the same thing with your customer list.
The next way to test the Quora platform is through specific topic targeting. When you create a campaign in Quora, you have the option to target certain topics or certain interests, and those are two different things in Quora. A topic in Quora means a “bucket” of questions. A bucket might be a brand. If there are at least a thousand questions about that brand, then they will be grouped into a topic for that brand, and you show people your ad as they’re engaging with that topic in the present moment. An interest, on the other hand, is something in which people have shown an interest in the past, meaning they had some previous engagement with a question, whether liking it or downloading it and so on. There are different levels of intent happening with topics and interests, so you should always segment those out into separate campaigns.
You can also target specific questions. Using keywords, you can find various questions with those keywords and select the questions you might want to target and get estimates for the number of impressions for each of those questions per week. You can also get stats on each question, such as how many times people have viewed the question. Question targeting has the highest intent because you know exactly where your ad will appear – with that question. And even time-dated questions (such as “best digital advertising options for 2017”) still get a ton of traffic and views, which can be another way to get your ad in front of those people.
One of the newest features on Quora, although it’s not a campaign per se, is the “promoted answers” feature. It’s a style of ad that is based on an answer you wrote. You can do all the same kinds of targeting with it as well. Doing this well requires your organic team to talk to the paid media team, which can be a challenge. But if your organic team is writing great answers to questions about your brand, you can promote an answer to vault it to the top of the page.
And the answer doesn’t have to have been written from the advertising account. If you have an engineer who is writing great answers, you can choose to promote one of those. Or even someone totally outside of your company whose answer is just right for you. If a consumer explains why they like brand X versus brand Y and it’s an awesome answer and you’re brand X, you can promote that question – and it’s not content coming from your company. It’s brilliant. What other platform offers that kind of innovative triangulation? And it’s very easy to do.
What do Quora Ads Look Like?
You do have the option to run text ads, but because the platform itself is largely text-based, you want to go with image ads because they really stand out. In fact, people routinely get double click-through rates with image ads on Quora. And Quora is beefing up the visibility of the ads on the site now, too, and especially on mobile.
And Quora has solid guidelines that keep the advertisers from abusing the system. The platform won’t allow excessive capitalization (which makes people feel like they’re being yelled at). Their guidelines sometimes get in the way, though. A company whose brand title has punctuation in the name is going to have trouble getting ads through because the platform thinks you’re trying to include multiple sentences in the headline of the ad, which would be a no-no. If you want to get creative, you can create an image ad that has a question that you then answer within the body of the ad. This makes sense because it’s a question-and-answer website, right? You could also promote an answer for the same purpose, but those image ads really stand out.
Stay Tuned for New Features
Without a doubt, Quora is a platform on the move when it comes to digital marketing and PPC. There are several features coming down the pike that Joe couldn’t talk about in detail but wanted to at least mention. One is going to be a remarketing option based on a current targeting option. Another is a new demographic targeting option that will be very specific. Quora has been a little slow on some targeting options because they’re very concerned about the privacy of their users and want to be sure they do these things right, which is a good thing for everyone.
Another feature coming out soon will be lead gen inquiry form ads. A user asks a question and gets not only an answer but also an inquiry form right there so they can contact the company. And of course, business accounts and profiles are now possible, which just makes a lot of sense so people can separate their personal accounts from brand accounts. Quora has now surpassed Pinterest in terms of monthly active users. It’s growing. The first thing is to just sign up for a business account and start exploring and building audiences, for free.
Connect with Joe Martinez, Clix Marketing, and Paid Media Pros
Twitter: @MilwaukeePPC (https://twitter.com/MilwaukeePPC)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemartinezppc/
Instagram: @milwaukeeppc (https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeppc/)
Clix website: http://www.clixmarketing.com
Clix Facebook: @ClixMarketing (https://www.facebook.com/ClixMarketing/)
PMP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/PaidMediaPros
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