One of the many keys to driving retail purchases through advertising campaigns is capturing users that are “in-market.” Often, advertising dollars are wasted on showing our ads to users who may not even be considering buying our product, or any product in our industry. In an ideal marketing world, we could target users who are so close to buying a product that the only thing they need to convince them to purchase is engaging with one of our ads. Enter Quora, a Question and Answer social media platform where users can ask questions, answer questions, and participate in a general discussion below any given Q&A. We use Quora Ads to target users who are in-market to purchase one of our clients’ products. How do we know these users are in-market? If you’re asking questions about a product, you’re considering buying it.
What is Quora, who uses it, and how do I advertise there?
Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and at the heart of that knowledge are questions. Questions that users can ask, users can answer, and marketers and advertisers can target. Over 300 million monthly visitors are asking 3,000 - 5,000 questions every day about what to buy, how to learn a new skill, and if X is better than Y. So who are these users? According to Quora for Business:
With over 400,000 topics on Quora, you can be confident that there will be users in-market for your product that will be asking questions about your industry. Think about some of the questions that potential buyers ask themselves when shopping: how does this compare to competitors, is version A or version B of this product the best for me, or with which business have customers had the best experiences with? We use those questions that our potential customers are asking, and target them directly with our ads to provide an easy answer.
Contextual targeting is the most powerful tool you can use on Quora as it targets users that are actively browsing the answers to a specific question. This contextual targeting is where your ads will be most effective at capturing users that are in-market. There are other targeting options to help you hone in on your in-market potential customers:
The key to ads on Quora is providing answers to users who are seeing your ads, or at least lead them to a site that will answer their questions. Quora lets you run image or text ads with a headline and body text. Image ads are the current preferred ad type from the representatives at Quora, and video ads should be coming soon. There’s also an option to include your ad spot in the Quora Digest, an email newsletter that Quora sends out to all users with an account, at no additional cost to the advertiser.
Putting Quora to Work for our Clients
We’re using Quora in our Fender campaigns driving aspiring guitar players to their Beginner’s Hub. We’ve seen the most success targeting common questions that users are asking when thinking about learning guitar: “What is the best beginner guitar?” “Should I start learning on an acoustic or an electric guitar?” Targeting these questions allows us to tap into a user on Quora that is already midway through our marketing funnel, and close to purchase. We don’t have to convince these users that guitar is a great skill to pick up, that they can easily learn the guitar, or that they should consider buying a guitar - all because we’re capturing them in the research phase already. We’ve started using Contextual Targeting to run ads on questions mentioning our competitors, which we are optimistic will perform just as well.
The last piece of the puzzle for our Quora campaigns is promoted answers, which require organically answering a question and then putting advertising spend behind it to prop your answer up to the top of the fold. We plan to use these for Fender to reply to the top questions surrounding learning and playing guitar. Answering those questions as Fender and putting advertising spend behind the answers will reinforce and educate users on the learning and buying experience that Fender prides itself on.
There are big things coming from Quora in terms of new targeting opportunities, pixel tracking, and impression tracking upgrades through a partnership with Integral Ad Science. We’re looking forward to testing each exciting development that Quora releases to keep our in-market users interested in our products and guide them towards a purchase.