"What if I do this?" or "How can I do that?"
We humans were, are and will always be full of questions. Without asking and learning, we wouldn’t be where we are now. What this means, it's natural for any human being to ask questions.
With the advancing technology and the internet, the world has never been so close.
Information can travel in real time, passing though mountains and oceans to reach even the furthest part of the globe. With the internet and mobile devices, just about all of the world's information is at the palm of the hands.
While religion, history, literature, science and mysticism can answer many of people's doubts, sometimes, people just want to ask others that are more knowledgeable and with more experience on the topic. People want interaction, as they believe talking to real humans can solve problems better (faster) then them seeking elsewhere.
And on the web, one of the places where people can learn from others, is on Quora.
Because everyone seems to have at least one question at any given time, Q&A platforms like Quora thrive because people never run out of questions.
Quora relies on its users asking questions and others answering them. The platform allows anyone to answer anything, with even professionals in their respective fields contributing to the collection and curation of free-access information.
And because of the previously-mentioned humans in preferring other people answering their questions, Quora is multi-directional. This essentially makes experience of asking more dynamic.
But beyond that, Quora can be a great place for prefessionals who want to promote themselves organically, by giving something to the community.
Using Quora, professionals can tap into the audience, increasing the number of their followers, and ultimately market their business/product/service/brand.
To do this, professionals should write responses that showcase their knowledge and experience, in a clear-sighted way.
In short, Quora can be a powerful tool since it surfaces people's interests in learning, by incorporating aspects of social media into a typical Q&A website.
Read: Boosting Your Business Social Media Presence To Benefit Yourself And Your Audience
Defining The Goals
It is vital for professionals that want to market their business/product/service/brand to prioritize their goals, and structure their Quora strategy according to what they need the most.
Knowing the goals would allow them to reverse-engineer the structure of their answers, to get those people who asked, to act just like what the marketers say.
One example, is to choose the most time-effective questions to answer.
Here, the marketer can focus on popular questions, but don't yet have satisfactory answers. And here, the marketer can answer the question based on their knowledge and experience, in an engaging manner, which goal is to promote a call-to-action to their business.
To do this, the marketer is required to have basic understanding of copywriting techniques.
Copywriting To Call-To-Action
There are several ways to do this.
Be smart: One question can have many answers. The strategy is to make your answer stand out by hooking readers right from the start.
Use images: Images can worth a thousand words. For this reason, they can be a great strategy to help you tell the story. Using images can also help kill the boredom of readers reading long text paragraphs.
Answers that are easy to understand: The main goal of answering a question is to solve a problem, not to create more questions that spark even more problems. Therefore, it is wise to avoid unclear languages, jargons, and other local cultures. But if necessary, only use them to back up affirmations with examples and personal stories that readers can easily relate to.
Call-to-action: Put a conclusion, and in this case, marketers can summarize their answers in one short paragraph. Here, they can also include their own social media handle in case readers want to find out more about them, or link(s) that redirects readers to where the marketer wants them to go.
One big difference in Quora is that, results aren't fast. This is quite the opposite of social media posts on Facebook or Twitter than can go viral with relative ease.
Quora's questions and answers don't really give great results overnight. But they are searchable and available for the audience for a much longer period. This is like an investment, as one question or answer can rake an increasing number of readers overtime.
In order to create a great-quality answer, practice makes perfect. And the key here, is consistency.