How can SaaS businesses use Quora for their marketing?
22nd February 2017
Quora gets hundreds of millions of monthly visitors worldwide and is increasing its advertising options so it’s important to see what Quora is all about and see how it can benefit your SaaS business.
What is Quora?
Quora was founded in 2009 by two former Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, who left to form the now fast growing social network where questions are asked, answered, edited and organised by its community of users. In Quora’s own words “Quora delivers you answers and content from people who know the answer – like real doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans”. To give an example of the questions and answers you can find on the site, here are three questions from my own Quora feed today:
- If each brand had an honest slogan, what would it be?
- How do I get my first 10 customers for my SaaS product?
- What are the biggest mistakes B2B SaaS startups make with content marketing?
So simply put, Quora is a social platform where you can ask questions of all kinds for others in the community to respond to and answer or you can in turn answer the burning questions of others.
How can SaaS businesses get started on Quora?
The first point of action is the simple question of how can you use Quora? It is very simple to grasp; here is a basic outline in three easy steps:
- Use your feed when setting up your account to tell Quora what you are interested in. The range of topics provided is so broad that you are sure to find multiple points of interest. You can follow topics and people that interest you.
- Get reading some current questions and answers so that you get a feel for what Quora has to offer.
- If you find an answer that you find helpful ‘Upvote’ it or even better, answer it! This will help other users to find good answers to the question in hand and simply improve what Quora has to offer.
How can SaaS businesses benefit from Quora?
So now you know the basics, let’s ask what can Quora do for my business?
First things first, presently Quora does not allow companies to set up corporate profiles, although this is a definite watch this space, there are still many ways that using Quora can benefit your company. So, you or subject matter experts in your business need to sign up to the social network individually.
Monitoring is always an important tool to see what your prospective clients are looking for and Quora provides a great platform for this. Look out for questions that are relevant to your business or product posted on the site. You will find a wealth of knowledge about your target customer and be able to respond to queries, which will increase your presence on the site and build a trustworthy reputation and demonstrate your expertise on a topic. It’s also a great way to open customer interaction and to build relationships with prospective clients.
Research and feedback are two other benefits that Quora has to offer, you can gain customer insight into your product, honest first hand reviews, and have an opportunity to respond and improve your product. Quora is also an invaluable tool for research purposes, whether you are a startup in the very early stages of setting up a business, looking to improve customer retention or getting ideas for a new product feature.
You can use Quora as a tool to research your competitors, because every SaaS business needs to complete some competitive analysis to learn what others are doing and why. You need to know the landscape that your company sits in to make sure it can succeed against similar offerings out there.
We all know that for many SaaS businesses customer support is key to keep subscription numbers healthy and Quora helps you to stay on top of any issues which might arise and give you the opportunity to respond quickly and efficiently. In effect it is like an external FAQ page, which of course is going to appeal to your clients.
Quora is a great platform for building brand awareness, and is great for small to medium businesses, enabling easy communication. The more you share, question and answer, the better brand awareness you build. Networking is also another benefit, Quora easily integrates with Twitter and Facebook to build your web presence across the major social platforms.
Quora is the ideal platform to position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Simply, you are a brand ambassador for your company. The platform provides an opportunity to show your expertise and become a source of useful information to open relationships with prospective clients, which we all know is one of the hardest elements of starting a SaaS business. Your company can use Quora to increase the visibility of your brand as well as build a well respected and trusted reputation so that you become a natural first stop for clients looking for the services you have to offer.
One of the most important points to take from this blog is not to use Quora simply for self promotion, it will not work. Both D’Angelo and Cheever have voiced that this is not what the platform is for, you have to look at the bigger picture. Instead use it as a chance to show your deep knowledge of a topic, the way to build your business using Quora is to help the online community while becoming noticed, listened to and respected and then people will start to search for and use your services also.
It’s also important to not just focus on answering questions, ask them too! In essence this is what Quora is all about, a good question is bound to get people responding and provide valuable feedback relevant to your brand. For a business leader it is a great advantage to know what questions are driving your business.
Finally, Quora offers a free analytics tool for you to analyse the content you add, the tool will help you discover your most popular content so that you can see what appeals most to the Quora community. This means that you can see what effect your presence on the social platform is having, and you can evaluate and importantly change your approach to make sure you get the best response from your company’s content on the site.
Summary
In the words of Adam D’Angelo “The more questions and answers we get, the more useful Quora is.” and Quora is proving itself to be very useful in the world of marketing SaaS.
Quora has proved itself to be a very powerful ally to help market your SaaS business; it builds credibility, relevant content and helps you to deliver better customer service.
Are you thinking of starting to use Quora in your business? If so we would love to hear how it goes, or if you have any other strategies or benefits to discuss, they would be great to hear.
Go beyond Quora with Xander Marketing
Xander Marketing is the outsourced marketing partner of choice for SaaS businesses that need more customers, leads, website traffic and to build their brands. If you lack the time, resource or know how to undertake marketing then get in touch and book your free consultation today.
