Does Quora work for marketing?
By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)
SEO is dead, long live SEO!
That’s how it feels, at least, as both AI-powered search and user-generated content take hold in our digital lives. Today’s master in marketing knows a thing or two about user-generated content and how brands can make it work for them.
(And read to the end to find out whether she thinks SEO is actually dying.)
Meet the Master
Shelagh Dolan
Content marketing lead, Quora for Business
Lesson 1: Find conversations that are already happening.
Whatever your marketing channels are, don’t reinvent the wheel.
One of the benefits that businesses can find in communities like Quora, Dolan says, is that there are a lot of conversations already happening. Instead of building a campaign anew, businesses can start where the users are, regardless of where that is in the funnel.
Even if it doesn’t make sense for your marketing strategy to target users at every point in the funnel, use existing conversations (on Quora or elsewhere) to meet your users where they’re at.
Think about somebody who wants to learn a language, she says. Maybe it starts with, “I want to go to Italy.” Somebody else has been dreaming of a trip to Italy for months now, and they’re starting their research with an idea of the specific tours they want to go on. And a third person has everything planned and is ready to start learning some Italian.
Dolan says that her most successful clients are the ones that can target all of those people — ”an awareness campaign paired with a retargeting campaign” combined with genuinely helpful content (we’ll get to that in a moment).
Lesson 2: Build authority by being helpful.
Now, about that genuinely helpful content.
Dolan says that brands can build authority and trust on public forums by genuinely answering people’s questions — when they use a trusted individual, not a corporate entity, to do so.
She gives the example of a healthcare company running a marketing campaign on Quora. To answer user questions, they could use a licensed provider — not their CMO — whose expertise will build trust. The goal is to jump into those existing conversations with something that will solve problems, not promote a product.
(But keep it brand relevant. Please don’t answer medical questions if your job is hocking used Crocs. —ed.)
Honestly, it’s a little bit how we think about the Masters in Marketing newsletter — we want to provide genuinely helpful, good advice on marketing. Self-promotion comes second.
Lesson 3: Embrace multichannel, multi-format distribution.
Last year, Dolan started publishing the Quora Ads newsletter natively on LinkedIn.
Existing subscribers to the newsletter already knew about Quora’s ads platform, so Dolan went off in search of an unsaturated audience. She asked herself, “How can we draw in net new people who maybe don’t know that Quora even has ads?”
Let’s bring this full circle.
Part of this strategy stemmed from Dolan’s own advice …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
