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Are They Right For Your Business?

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Are They Right For Your Business?

When you think of online advertising, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Google? Facebook? YouTube?

If you limit yourself to those digital media giants, you could be missing out on a more targeted market that is reaching 300 million users every month.

What Is Quora? And Who Uses It?

Quora is a social question-and-answer website, founded in 2009. Over the years, Quora has earned a reputation for crowd-sourcing the best responses to questions based on a Q&A engine of curious and highly engaged users.

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In June 2017, Quora launched its advertising services, and businesses are seeing significant ROI from advertising on Quora. Why? Quora users are 20% more likely to have authorized a business purchase. They’re 65% more likely to report a college degree. They’re also 37% more likely to be a manager. And they’re 54% more likely to report an annual household income of more than $100K.

Even more interesting? 63% of Quora users conduct research before major online purchases. In the United States, Quora users are highly educated and primarily live in West and East Coast metropolitan areas.* With demographics like that, Quora Ads might be the perfect way to connect with your target market.

Let’s dig deeper into why Quora makes sense for advertising, explore what advertising options are available, and delve into best practices for running ads on Quora.

Quora Ads

When you’re ready to launch your first Quora Ad campaign, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is, which makes it an ideal platform for beginners. You only need two lines of text and a landing page to get started.

While it’s quick and simple to launch your ads on Quora, don’t underestimate the platform’s power. Being able to pinpoint users who are interested in specific topics and/or questions means that Quora Ads provide a level of niche targeting that most other ad platforms can’t deliver.

There are several objectives to choose from, including conversions, traffic, awareness, app installs, and lead generation. And you can target your ads based on users’ interests, behavior, location, what they’re reading, and more.

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If, for some reason, you get stuck as you set up your first Quora advertising campaign, you can always get help by clicking the ‘Talk to an Expert’ button at the bottom of the Quora for Business page.

How much does it cost to advertise on Quora?

You can start advertising on Quora’s self-serve platform for just $5 a day, which makes it almost risk-free to experiment and discover what advertising tactics work best for your organization.

Quora Ads uses a live auction system. In the way auctions commonly work, buyers — in this case, advertisers — offer a bid for the items being auctioned (i.e., ad placements). Final costs vary depending on the competitive landscape and your targeting selections.

Major debit and credit cards are accepted, and you’re only charged when your spend meets specific billing thresholds. The first threshold is $25 USD, and the threshold rises with each successful charge to $50, $250, $500, and $750. You are charged either when you hit your current billing threshold, or on the first week of the month, whichever comes first.

Types of Quora Ads and Where They Appear

Choose from text ads, image ads, or promoted answers to launch your campaign. Quora ads can appear on a user’s personal feed, topic feeds, and question pages. You can also opt-in for placements in the Quora Digest e-newsletter. (To subscribe to the Digest, go to ‘Settings’ and then select ‘Email and Notifications’. There, adjust your ‘Digest’ settings to your preferences.)

There are 10 targeting types available on Quora Ads, giving you several options to match your targeting to your advertising goals. Businesses are encouraged to utilize two or more targeting methods for a balance of contextual, behavioral, and audience targeting.

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The Quora Pixel is required if you intend to run Conversion campaigns, or if you want to attribute conversions to specific campaigns, ad sets, or ads. Quora’s pixel not only allows you to track multiple conversion events, but also allows you to utilize Website Traffic Targeting, Lookalike Audience Targeting, and Conversion Optimized bidding. To install the pixel, visit the “Pixel & Events” tab in your Ads Manager and click “Setup Pixel.” A prompt with instructions will appear. You have the option of installing the pixel directly to your website, or through Google Tag Manager.

Quora Ads Best Practices

The key to success in advertising on Quora is to focus on answering questions, rather than being overly salesy. People come to the site to get their questions answered. Giving them what they want is the best way to showcase how your business is a good fit for them. This also makes Quora an ideal place to establish brand leadership.

As with any advertising option, there’s no “one size fits all” strategy when using Quora Ads. What works for one business, may not work for yours. The best practice is to test each targeting type or retest them with different groups of topics, interests, or keywords.

Not sure where to start? See what other businesses have done by studying Quora’s Success Stories.

And be sure to review Quora’s Ads Success Checklist before going live with your first campaign. To facilitate your onboarding, they’ve compiled a checklist of key steps to guide your campaigns. While completing each step doesn’t necessarily equate to success on Quora Ads, checking off each action item will help ensure your campaigns are optimized for scalability, measurement, and long-term success.

Is Quora advertising worth it?

While the answer to that question will vary depending on your organization’s priorities, Quora’s team has found key differentiators between successful and unsuccessful ad campaigns. Those differentiators can be found on Quora’s blog.

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Speaking with one of Quora’s Ad Experts is another great way to determine if advertising on Quora is right for you. Their experts work on understanding your brand’s funnel, potential limitations, and even your team’s structure.

Advertising on Quora offers both advantages and disadvantages.

First, Quora features a high-quality audience. Unlike other online environments, Quora’s user base is overwhelmingly positive and informative. An internal team of moderators, along with the Quora community, ensure there’s very little negativity or name-calling. Answers are generally well crafted and carefully thought out. That means your ads are getting in front of a high-quality audience there to solve problems, not make them.

Second, the community on Quora is generally safe and constructive. The Quora community is positive by design. A team of human moderators oversees content, and posts must be attributed to verified real names. Advertiser controls are robust with exclusion capabilities. Only high-quality pages are eligible to run ads.

Finally, Quora’s Advertising dashboard is similar to Facebook’s and Google Ads’, making it very familiar. If you’ve used either of those platforms, you won’t be starting from scratch when creating and analyzing your campaigns.

No platform is perfect, and there are a few disadvantages to advertising on Quora.

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First, Quora does not offer video ads. Video content, as opposed to text-based or image-based content, tends to draw in more viewers, but it’s not an option with Quora Ads.

Second, Quora metrics and customization are not as dynamic as those you may be used to with Facebook or Google.

Facebook Ads and Google Ads are currently the two largest digital advertising platforms in terms of ad spend, and they’re likely to remain so for a long time to come. So, it makes sense to continue to use them as the foundation of your online advertising strategy. But supplementing with Quora Ads might be the perfect way to boost your sales and brand authority.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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