Get close and personal with your target market by directly addressing their queries through this site!

Friday: Everson’s High-P Fridays FROM THE DESK OF MILES EVERSON: As an independent business owner or contractor, you have to know how to get close and personal with your clients and target market. Doing so enables you to build your network, raise awareness about your brand, establish your brand’s reputation, and many more. And what’s one of the ways to interact with your target audience? Responding to their queries and comments regarding a specific subject in your niche, your brand’s offerings, etc. Keep reading to know how this question and answer (Q&A) site can help you establish your brand identity for a high-performing business. CEO, MBO Partners Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

Get close and personal with your target market by directly addressing their queries through this site! As an independent business owner or marketer, there are a lot of ways to engage with your target market to improve your brand’s online presence. ―engaging through social media, joining in on conversations about your brand, hosting online contests, creating interactive ads, etc. Did you know that even simple questions and answers (Q&As) can help raise awareness for your brand online? No? Well, now you do! Speaking of Q&As, this site uses this method of interaction to connect business owners, industry experts, and marketers with their target market. Quora is an American Q&A website where questions are asked, answered, and followed by Internet users around the world. It was founded in June 2009 by two former Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. Quora operates on an upvoting system where online users click on a certain icon to signify their approval or support for a posted answer. That means the more people upvote your answer to a particular question, the more exposure it will get. How can you use Quora to your brand’s benefit? You can: Publish content in a similar way with LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Target your questions to specific users and collaborate with industry experts. Search for topics and keywords related to your business. Pay the site to get your question in front of more online users. Here are some benefits of using Quora’s Q&A platform as part of your marketing strategy: Increasing Brand Awareness As of 2020, Quora has around 300 million active users per month. That means when you use it as a channel to build awareness about your brand, you are increasing the likelihood of getting your brand exposed to these users. Whether you’re the owner, marketer, or sales manager, you can get your brand in front of your target market by answering questions related to your industry and creating online communities to initiate relevant conversations. You can also ask questions related to your niche! One thing to take note of is Quora operates with personal accounts and not brand accounts, which means your profile and other activities using your profile will represent your brand. Keep your profile updated and don’t forget to mention your brand. It helps build your credibility every time you answer questions.   Boosting Off-Page SEO Off-page SEO refers to all the activities that you do outside of your website to raise your web page’s search engine ranking. One way to do this through Quora is by providing links to your website (or specific content you published on your website). However, you shouldn’t do it very often as it can be marked as spam by Quora. A better way is to provide insightful and useful information to others without being too promotional or heavy-handed in your approach. As you continue to use Quora, online users will start to notice you and the brand you’re associated with. Once you establish your credibility, users will look to you for answers when they have questions related to your field of expertise.   Establishing Connections with Your Target Market and Other Industry Experts By using Quora, you get insights as to what questions your target market has about your industry or your brand. It gives you a clearer understanding about what their needs and demands are, as well as ideas on how you should engage with them. You can address their concerns by providing them with helpful answers to their questions and directing them to relevant sources (not just your own). Aside from that, you also get to observe how other industry experts are answering similar questions and how they build connections with online users.   Search Visibility Questions asked on Quora are searchable through Google. If content on your Quora account remains “evergreen” or relevant, it will be placed on top of all the other answers so users can immediately see it. In order to properly maximize the benefits of venturing into Quora as part of your marketing strategy, here are a few practices you should take note of: Create a professional bio/profile. A great profile is always essential no matter what social media platform you’re using. This will help online users identify what brand or organization you’re affiliated with and build your credibility and reliability in answering specific queries. Quora also allows you to include links in your bio, so it’s better to attach links to help drive traffic back to your brand’s website.   Track relevant topics. One of the ways you can use Quora for your marketing strategy is to conduct research and gather information about your target market. By searching for keywords related to your industry, you’ll learn what your target market is talking about. Aside from that, once you follow certain topics related to your field of expertise, Quora will send you notifications about questions that you can answer.   Find the right questions to answer. According to social media management solutions SproutSocial, there are about 400,000 topics available on Quora, with 3,000 to 5,000 questions asked per day. As a business owner or marketer, you only have to answer questions that will deliver value for your brand.   Own it! Answer questions with passion and authority. Insightful responses to questions, with links to relevant blogs, case studies, statistics, and even your brand’s website, will help demonstrate your thought leadership on specific topics. One of the ways to construct an informative answer is by pulling a snippet from relevant content that you’ve published on your brand’s website. Expand it with a few sentences then include a link back to your official source. That way, your answer will serve as a “teaser” to the information your target market needs. Quora is not just a simple Q&A platform; it is also an online community that connects users with industry professionals who are willing to help others through useful information. By regularly engaging with Quora users, you’ll not just increase their awareness about your brand, but also gain key insights from other industry experts and repurpose your content in a way that appeals to your target market. Participating in online Q&As also has its perks! Venture into Quora now and let your brand be known by establishing your voice (through your answers) as an expert in your field. Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for next Friday’s Everson’s High-P Fridays! In MBO Partners’ State of the Independence in America studies, we’ve always mentioned that there are major disruptions that promise to change the very nature of work. Learn more about the top 5 trends in the future of work on next week’s Everson’s High-P Fridays!