Choosing a marketing strategy for early stage products can be tricky. Most of the times, you have very less data to begin with. So the usual answer to any Return on Investment (ROI) based question is  — ”lets run an experiment, lets write a blog or two and see what happens”.

That’s how a lot of content marketing strategies get started. But then slowly every one loses interest because nothing much happens beyond few clicks and views.

Is there a way to evaluate a content marketing strategy even before we spend time on it?

If you are a growth marketer or an early stage entrepreneur, this scenario is way too common. You come across a new channel to reach your target audience. You search about the channel on Google. And there are plenty of articles about the subject . There are “ultimate guides. There are “10 ways to become successful” with the channel. There are “hacks” to grow users and signups from the channel.

But all you want to know is — whether this channel will help you grow you user base or revenue  for your product? You want to know if putting effort on this channel will give you any ROI? And if it does, what can kind of numbers can you expect?

Content Marketing can be pretty vague for founders and decision makers who are data-driven. The usual answer to any ROI based question around content marketing is “it depends”. The main reason for this is that for a Content Marketing strategy to become successful, you need to  — 

1. Choose topics that are not greatly competed upon but have a good search volume,
2. Focus on the nuances of the topic not talked much about,
3. Optimise the content properly for specific keywords you want to rank for,
4. Make sure that your website has all the technical requirements for SEO ranking,
5. Distribute your content enough(back linking, social media etc.), especially if your website does not have organic traffic already… and above all…
6. Write good quality content that provides value to your audience.

Phew!!!

In this context, Quora is a valuable channel for content marketing. Why? Because, Quora — the Q&A social media website, takes care of many of the above aspects of content marketing, making it really easy for you to get started.

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Quora makes it easy to choose a topic to write content on, brings in organic traffic to your content and helps you backlink your website pages. So generating traffic at the earliest stages is easy on Quora than any other channel out there. With Quora you still need to produce quality content, though it’s far easy to write for Quora than for your own blog.

So the only true question that remains is this — does it really make sense to do Quora marketing for your business?

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Will Quora work for my product?

To understand if Quora will work for your product marketing, you need to understand how content on Quora is organised.

Quora has questions organised around topics (categories). You have people who follow these topics as well as specific questions under these topics. For example, the topic “Marketing” has 13.1 Million followers. Each question under the topic talks about a specific aspects of Marketing. So if you are building a Marketing technology product, for example, finding questions that are relevant to your product is fairly simple.

So to reach your “audience”, you need to know what topics will be of interest to your target market. What questions on those topics are highly relevant to the problem you are solving for. In a way, Quora can also be a great way to understand all the relevant issues around the problem you are trying to solve for.

Quora is really extensive in a way that it covers topics from pets to space exploration. So finding your target audience through relevant topics should not be a problem.

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Building Traffic on Quora

Now that you found your audience through specific topics, let’s ask some basic questions that can help you understand if Quora is the right marketing channel for you.

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Is your target audience community on Quora big enough?

Number of followers for Quora topics and Quora spaces can give you an idea of how big your target audience community on the platform can be. But then beyond the audience on Quora, your answers also have a good chance of showing up in Google search as top results.

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What will be the Quality of leads from Quora?

The essence of Quora as a platform is to help users find answers to specific questions they might have around the topic. So the kind of people who use Quora are those who have specific interest in an area and are looking for ways to improve their understanding of the subject. Or they are doing research to find the right solution to their problems. If your answers are relevant and specific to the question, then you have a very good chance of attracting high quality leads to your website.

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How much you need to spend to get a decent ROI?

Like I mentioned before, writing on Quora does not demand the same quality of writing you would expect for a case study or a blog. That being said, it is important to understand what kind of writing receives more views and up-votes on the platform (see the section below).

Your ability to write high quality answers on questions relevant to your product determines how easily you can get traffic through Quora.

Views on your answers can rapidly increase if you are identified as a Top writer in the categories you are writing for. The more categories you are ranking as top writer, the more views your individual answers get. Continuing to be the Top writer in a category does require constant effort in terms of answering relevant questions on the topic.

Now, being identified as top writer depends both on the number of original answers you are writing as well as the number of up-votes on your individual answers, which all comes to the quality of the answers you are writing.

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What I need to do maximise my returns on Quora?

Writing high quality and relevant answers to the questions your audience is interested in.

1. Your answers need to be specific to the question
2. Your answers need to be original and unique — copy pasting the same answer to different questions does not help
3. Good quality relevant images to the subject can greatly help in getting audience attention
4. Writing in a conversational tone, like the way you would talk to your friends works greatly on Quora
5. Sharing personal experiences about the problem and solution can greatly help as such answers are seen as genuine
6. Going deeper into the topic but explaining it in a way that everyone can understand

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Is Quora marketing worth my resources?

Each platform has a psychology. On Quora, you will find people who are curious and ready to develop their knowledge. The intent to learn and understand is high among Quora’s users. So if you are trying to sell a product that needs awareness, then Quora as a growth channel makes perfect sense.

Quora is one of the very few channels out there today where you could build purely organic traffic — irrespective of how small or big you are as a brand. And because your answers stay there for ever, you have a greater chance of building regular traffic from Quora, especially at the early stages of your product.