Promoted Answers are Quora’s flagship ad format that lets you boost the distribution of existing Quora answers to reach a larger audience on the platform.
Promoted Answers can be paired with the entire Quora Ads targeting suite, along with our Lead Gen Forms to amplify existing content and capture user intent at the source. Tell your brand’s story at length, as well as embed relevant links to your site. This dynamic ad format allows you to build a following, communicate directly with customers, and drive towards your marketing goals all at once.
Aside from the “Promoted by” label, Promoted Answers function just like other answers on Quora — you can still upvote, downvote, share, and comment on Promoted Answers.
#PABenefits
Benefits of Promoted Answers
Establish thought leadership
Demonstrate your expertise and gain credibility as a thought leader. Have a voice in questions being asked about your organization or products.
Answers are evergreen
Amplify existing content
Ample real-estate for discussions
Build brand recognition
Prime and remind
#PABestPractices
Best Practices for Writing Promoted Answers
1. Quality over quantity
Quora answers do not need to be long. In fact, we distilled insights from hundreds of businesses across verticals and found that short answers (<200 words) had the highest clickthrough rate on links within answers. Medium-length content (200-600 words) came in at a close second.
It is still recommended to test varying answer lengths to determine what’s best for your business and audience. The quality of your content will also be a determining factor in your Promoted Answer’s success.
2. Provide value (don’t be overly promotional)
Quora’s audience responds best to authentic answers. To ensure you’re adding value with your answers, follow these tips:
- Answer thoughtfully and authentically—think about writing it as if you were teaching something to your best friend!
- Don’t try to force your answer into an existing question if it’s not a good fit.
- Demonstrate credibility and make sure you are factually correct.
- Disclose any affiliations that might inform the answer’s interpretation.
- Stick to 2-3 hyperlinks tops—and avoid adding any that are not relevant to the question. Overly self-promotional links could hurt your performance or be flagged as spam.
3. Repurpose content
Sharing previously written content gives it more mileage—all while contributing to your audience and influence on Quora. Plus, you can ride the wave of strong SEO and evergreen nature of Quora’s content distribution.
When repurposing content as Quora answers, keep in mind:
- Do not simply link to an external page. Users should not have to leave Quora to find the answer to their question.
- Use block quotes for verbatim content, or simply cite your blog at the bottom of your answer.
- Add UTMs to any hyperlinks that lead back to your blog or website.
4. Ask and answer your own question
Have something specific you want to write about? You can add content you want to share by asking and answering your own questions.
When you post a question, it’s important to understand a question’s intent as it relates to the buyer’s journey. For most marketers, intent falls under one of three categories:
- Brand awareness, site traffic
- “What is”…questions
- Lead generation, education, and nurture
- “How to”…questions
- Conversions
- Questions that review and compare products
Pro-Tip: When posting your own question, you can choose to make the question “Limited” instead of “Public” so that it won’t appear on your profile.
5. Include images and videos
Promoted Answers appear with the first image or video thumbnail included in your answer. This helps your answer stand out on users’ feeds, in addition to:
- Growing top of funnel awareness.
- Building trust with customers as a credible source or expert.
- Adding supporting evidence or value to your answer.
- Earning video views for cross-channel marketing.
Keep in mind that your images and videos should add value to your answer and be helpful to someone interested in learning the answer to the question.
Note: Videos must be embedded via a Youtube link, rather than uploaded directly to your answer.
6. Experiment with employee and customer voices
We’ve said it before: the key to Promoted Answers is authenticity. Writing from the point of view of an individual, such as a company representative or loyal customer, can help add to the authenticity and credibility of the promoted content. There are also a number of online tools that help connect brands to relevant influencers, if this is something you’re thinking about exploring.
Individuals who are genuine subject matter experts in a topic area already have credibility and trust with the Quora community. By enlisting them to promote an answer from a brand, it signals to readers that the content is high-quality and deserving of their time and attention. Trusted experts can speak genuinely about why they recommend a particular Promoted Answer based on their expertise. This approach helps ensure Promoted Answers feel like a natural and trusted part of the Quora experience, rather than seeming overly commercial or out of place. Leveraging individuals is a smart way for brands to build goodwill and get their content in front of engaged, receptive readers.
7. Get writing help from Poe
Poe is Quora’s platform that lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with AI-powered bots. Users can toggle between multiple bots including GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Poe can be a game-changer for advertisers looking to create impactful Quora Promoted Answers. With its advanced language capabilities, Poe can help advertisers produce well-structured and persuasive answers that not only address users’ questions but also subtly promote their products or services. The result is a powerful combination of valuable information and effective promotion that enhances brand perception and drives more conversions.
Here are some key benefits of this technology:
- Time and cost efficiency: Poe reduces the time and resources required to create high-quality content, allowing advertisers to focus on other aspects of their campaigns.
- Content generation: Poe can quickly produce a variety of creative answer options, allowing advertisers to choose the most suitable one for their promotion.
- Audience targeting: By analyzing the preferences and interests of the target audience, Poe can tailor content to be more appealing and relevant to specific user groups.
- Consistency: Poe can maintain a consistent brand voice and style across multiple answers, helping to establish brand identity and credibility.
Poe is available on the web at poe.com and in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
8. Write from a Business Profile
Business Profiles empower your brand to join conversations around your industry and level up your Promoted Answers by delivering trusted brand content to users. Brands with a Business Profile can unlock additional features such as profile design tools, built-in Lead Gen Forms, and the ability to connect individual users to your Business Profile.
Consider writing from a Business Profile if one or more of the following apply to you:
- Your goal is to build brand awareness
- You want to build your brand’s authority as an industry thought leader
- You want to engage with Quora users under your brand name
It’s always worth experimenting with whether writing content from your brand or an individual will resonate with your audience. It all depends on the brand, product, audience and what works best for you.
To get started with a Business Profile, click “Business Profile” at quora.com/business/create, or contact your Quora Ads representative.
Success Stories: Promoted Answers in Action
US
DuckDuckGo
17.5M+
Impressions
9.34%
CTR
#PAUS
About DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. With our roots as the search engine that doesn’t track you, we’ve expanded what we do to protect you no matter where the Internet takes you.
“We’ve been really excited about the CTR. I think it just goes to show how engaged the Quora community is. When users are looking for answers already, they’re obviously going to be a bit more engaged. We’re investing in Quora because our Promoted Answers really seem to resonate with Quora’s audience.”
Lily Rouff
Social Media Strategist, DuckDuckGo
Their Goal: Awareness for their search engine
As Internet privacy continues to be an ongoing issue, DuckDuckGo offers tools to help you control your personal information online. DuckDuckGo Search allows you to search the web without being tracked. With more Quora users researching Internet privacy, DuckDuckGo predicted their message and search engine would resonate most with Quora’s 400+ million unique monthly visitors.
Their Strategy: Join the conversation
DuckDuckGo realized there were already conversations happening about their service on Quora. As a result, they accelerated the buzz by promoting answers they predicted would resonate most with Quora’s audience, written by their CEO & Founder, Gabriel Weinberg, so that they could augment their presence on the platform in an authentic way. The team found that their answers on Quora conveyed their message with a genuine tone that can be difficult for businesses to achieve on their own website.
Their Results: Views in the millions
Gabriel’s answer about DuckDuckGo versus Google garnered almost 6 million views. On average, DuckDuckGo’s promoted content was viewed over 200 times more than their non-promoted content, earning 17.5M+ impressions overall. DuckDuckGo also continued driving traffic acquired on other paid social channels to their answers on Quora because the format was so successful. The authenticity and authority of their answers contributed to a 9.34% CTR.
Read the full DuckDuckGo case study.
APAC
Amazon Global Selling
29.4M+
Content views
2x Higher CTR
than average for the B2B category on Quora in India
#PAAPAC
About Amazon Global Selling
Amazon Global Selling is an e-commerce exports program that helps Indian sellers and MSMEs—from local stores and multi-city brands to D2C startups and seasoned exporters —take their businesses global by giving them access to 18 global markets across 200+ countries and territories.
“The two biggest takeaways have been: it is important to be consistent in publishing answers and it helps to create new questions in line with topics being searched to keep answers relevant and accurate.”
Team Amazon Global Selling
Their Goal: Reach sellers across India to increase awareness
Amazon Global Selling joined Quora with the intent of reaching the niche seller/exporter category to educate them through Promoted Answers on how to grow their businesses globally with the help of expert tools, resources, best practices, and other solutions.
Their Strategy: Address queries of target audience to make exporting easy for sellers
By publishing on Quora, the Amazon Global Selling team was able to provide relevant and appropriate information that users in the segment they were seeking. Promoted Answers proved to be a valuable tool, with the authenticity and authority of their answers resulting in a high click-through rate and upvote count. Constant engagement from the brand through their Promoted Answers led to an increase in content views and a steady rise in follower count, which added to their brand awareness and credibility on Quora.
Their Results: A spike in views and engagement at a low CPC
Amazon Global Selling’s campaign generated a CTR that was two times higher than the average for the B2B category on Quora in India. They saw a 48% improvement in their CTR over the duration of the campaign. With the help of Promoted Answers, their profile gained over 29.4 million content views, and a follower base of over 4,159, leading to a cumulative upvote count of 3,200+ across their answers.
Read the full Amazon Global Selling case study.
Europe
Nerdish
16.5M
Content views
44%
CPC reduction
#PAEurope
About Nerdish
Nerdish is a self-education app for adults who aim to know more about the world. Read brief and inspiring topics on everything to be more knowledgeable. Learn something new every week. Nerdish is a new way of life-long learning and self-development.
“Promoted Answers is an absolute killer feature. It’s a great ad format not available on other channels, which is why it’s important to develop it carefully, test different types of questions, and customize answers.”
Yulia Kurkina
CEO & Founder, Nerdish.io
Their Goal: Encourage a new way of learning
Nerdish sought to increase brand awareness and position itself as an easy and enjoyable way for people to grow their knowledge. The team also aimed to drive consideration from potential app users who are keen on self-development.
Their Strategy: Build authority through Promoted Answers
Nerdish wrote multiple Promoted Answers from its Business Profile throughout the campaign, with content ranging from how to grow your general knowledge on a regular basis to fun/random facts that people would find interesting to learn. The brand’s content aroused the curiosity of knowledge-hungry Quora users while demonstrating the ease of learning new things on a regular basis, successfully driving users into the consideration stage.
Their Results: 57% Improvement in content engagement
With help from their Quora Ads team, Nerdish was able to achieve a 195% increase in CTRs with a decrease of 44% in CPCs. The company also saw a 57% improvement in engagements on its content during the same time period. Overall, Nerdish has accumulated 16 million content views since creating its Business Profile.
Read the full Nerdish case study.
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