MBA1911 Should You Advertise With Quora?

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show business, simplified every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn. Should you advertise with Quora? Quora has been the leading question and answer website for some time now. Many people look for specific answers to their questions through Quora and because of its popularity and its traffic, many of the questions people Google, the top answers will be found on Quora. So is it a good idea to advertise on Quora and get in front of an audience that is specifically looking for answers about your product, about your niche, about your market? Well, that's what we get into. We talk about what Quora advertising exactly is, what are your options, what about cost? And we'll even get into. If Quora is a good fit for your business and your customers, it may be an alternative way of spending ad dollars. If you're trying to reach new markets and you've kind of tapped out on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, we get into all that and more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good. Free milk.

Oh, mate. That expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

Full transparency. I actually did a lot of research on marketing on Quora for our own software company, Webinar Ninja. I wanted to learn a little bit more about why would Quora do better compared to other platforms? What are some of the costs? What's the setup, what are my options, and if it's aligned with what we do in our brand. But most importantly, is it going to attract the right customers? This is something that you have to think about anytime you are advertising on a new platform. The people that frequent this platform, are they your perfect ideal clients or close to it? If so, it's a fantastic opportunity. Now, one of the reasons why I was looking into Core is because, to be quite honest, many of the other paid advertising platforms are quite saturated. And anytime you have a saturation in the market, this means demand is high. That means things get expensive. That means it's not as inexpensive as it used to be to run ads on Facebook or Instagram. YouTube is getting more expensive. Google Ads are getting more expensive. So if you're looking for a platform where they're still not where Google or Facebook is at in terms of popularity as a platform to advertise on, you can get some pretty good rates. Now, let me just walk you through how it works. How do you advertise on Quora? Well, you create an ad account. You create an account with Quora, and you basically have two options when it comes to getting in front of their audience. You have an ad placement, or you can promote an answer to a question. How does this work? Well, the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna write down all the key search terms or quote, unquote questions you want to show up for. So say, for example, we're gonna roll. With my company, Webinar Ninja, I would put keywords like best webinar software, best webinar software for teaching what's a good webinar solution all in one webinar software, automated webinars, hybrid webinars series webinars. I would put all these keywords because I want to attract people that are looking for the things I offer or asking questions around that topic. I can then go even Broader and ask questions like, how do I sell my online course? And the answer would be run webinars. And I would recommend webinar Ninja. So you have all these search terms that you put into your account. And basically Quora will feed an ad or promote an answer based on the keywords that you have selected. So an ad is basically just what it sounds like. It's just an ad placement, like a banner ad or a advertising block, where your ad will just show in the middle of all the answers to any particular question. A promoted answer is basically what it sounds like. You can promote an answer, one of the answers that are already there, that exist below the question, answers to that question. So these can be answers that somebody else has answered, or it could be you answering that question, and then you promote your own answer. So basically, Quora will bump up your promoted answer to the top or close to the top. So it's seen more prevalently when people are looking for answers to particular questions. And of course, like I mentioned, those questions will have keywords that you're targeting, things that your audience would look for. Now, if I were going to advertise on Quora, I would go with the promoted answers because this is really what they're looking for, an answer, not really an ad. The only kind of thing that you have to keep in mind is that it will say promoted. And that's great because it's transparent and people are letting you know that, hey, this is an ad. Really, this is an answer that got promoted based on who bid to be on top, right? Who bid, who paid money or more money to be a promoted answer. Now, right now, Quora is not that competitive where you're going to be bidding against so many competitors, but in the future, that will probably be the case. This is very similar to the ads you see at the top of the list when you do a Google search. You know, the on the top of the list are all ads. And then you have to scroll down maybe four or five ads, and then you see the first result in the Google search. But for some reason, when I kind of discovered this, it just didn't feel the same as a Google Ad result. And to be honest, for us, this is a little bit off brand, like kind of forcing ourselves to the top of the answer, even though it's not organically there. So if I were going to run ads, I'd probably go with the banner ads. I know that it sounds more appealing to go with this, the actual promoted answer ads, because it's actually what they're looking for. But I don't want to say it's deceptive, but I want to say it's also not a hundred percent transparent or clear. An ad is clear. They know what an ad looks like. And I think the ad will still serve its purpose in terms of brand awareness, brand affinity. You could do retargeting, meaning if they visited your site, you target people that have seen your site so they can see your brand again and again. So for us, that is something that we're probably going to look into. But for you, you might want to go with the promoted answers. Now, why would you even want to entertain the idea of spending money on Quora? Well, the first thing is it's not as competitive as the other big players like Facebook and Google, so you're going to be able to advertise and get leads and traffic for far less. Based on my research, we're talking about 50 to 60, even up to 80% less. It's also not as saturated, so your competitors are most likely not all there like the other platforms. But most of all, I think that Quora is actually a great place to advertise if you have a niche product. I really think that this is where niche businesses can really get the most bang for their buck for advertising. Why? Because it's allowing people to find you through specific searches, specific questions, something very niche. If you have a general product or something that's not very unique, let's say, for example, you have a barber shop or you sell life insurance, it's quite general. Versus you have a very niche product, like you teach yoga for rock climbers. You're going to be able to find people asking questions about yoga for rock climbers very easily with Quora. And you're going to be able to advertise and get in front of them very easily, because people are looking for specific things, specific answers in Quora. So niche products and businesses really do well.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

When I was Doing my research about core advertising, I got on a call with their team over at the advertising department. They walked me through the whole thing. But they also showed me how you can actually capture leads right on the site and drive traffic to your site and track some conversions with a pixel. So if you want to get started, I highly recommend you put aside a small budget first. 3 to $500 should be enough for you to see if this is going to be a good option for your business. You have to define what a win will be for you. So if you're looking for new customers, for example, how much do you want to pay to get a new customer? What's your cost per acquisition? Your desired cost per acquisition? If you're new to advertising or paid advertising and you don't really have a benchmark for cost per acquisition, just find out how much is the average customer spending with your business, business in their life, which is called lifetime value. So say, for example, the average customer spends $500 at your business. How much money do you want to spend to secure $500 worth of spending per customer? Are you willing to spend $100 to get a $500 customer? I sure am. So that means that if you spend $500 on Quora ads and you get five customers, it's worth it, right? It's worth you running ads. If not, if it results in one customer, then you're really just breaking even. So that's kind of how you can experiment in the beginning. Now you also have to define how much time you're going to allow for that conversion to happen. You can't get upset if in three days you don't get your five customers. It may take 30, 60 days, maybe even 90 days to see a conversion eventually happen after they've been nurtured on your list and you have had the chance to educate them about your products or services. So define how much time you're willing to wait to see that conversion with your budget and your defined cost per acquisition, how much it costs you to secure a customer, and you're ready to rock and roll if it works out. Let's say, for example, you do get a customer per $100 spent. Guess what? You just made five new customers times 500. That's $2,500. You can reinvest now into advertising. Up your budget from 500 to 2000. Or maybe you want to just be a little bit more conservative. Go to 1000. Give yourself another 10 customers. You get the point. Paid advertising works best when you reinvest and you have a snowball effect. Well, there you have it. I hope that this has been informative. I know that for me, Quora is a little bit of a black hole of information when it comes to how do you advertise on Quora. I'm glad I did the research and I was able to share it with you today. Thanks so much for listening. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss another episode. Some apps it's called Follow. Some apps it's called subscribe. Just hit the button that makes sure you get the next episode. That way you have access to all our archived episodes, over 1900 business lessons in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Once you figure out how much it costs you to secure a customer and it's at a good rate, meaning that you are going to make 2x3x profit on acquiring that customer versus your LTV, your lifetime value of that customer. This is the holy grail of business. This is amazing. This means that you can just continue to run that play and get new customers and new customers and new customers and reinvest into marketing and this becomes a flywheel of growth. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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