Quora Marketing Mix (4Ps) & Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy of Quora through marketing mix framework which covers the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion).
Quora Product Strategy:
Quora is a leading interactive platform website where people can have discussions using questions and answers. Quora is a collaborative online platform where people share information. It basically provides the service of connecting people from around the world to ask each other questions and answer them. It is a service mostly availed by inquisitive people, students, professionals, businesses or just normal people who want to know about things from each other. Some of the service products in its marketing mix offered by Quora are listed below:
• Ask a question
• Answer a question
• Blogs on Quora
• Ask to Answer service
• Ads on Quora
• Knowledge Prizes
The company recently launched advertising service for businesses. With its beta version that came out in May 2017, the Quora ads are now available to all businesses. Quora also offers Knowledge prizes for best answers. The prize is monetary and is sponsored by anonymous sponsors, which are usually businesses who benefit from the answers. This serves as both, a motivation for writers to do best and a platform for companies to spread good word. Quora is also available in German and Italian language as a beta version, while has a Spanish website operational since last year.
Image: company website
This concludes the product strategy in Quora marketing mix & strategy.
Quora Price/Pricing Strategy:
Below is the pricing strategy in Quora marketing mix strategy:
Quora charges absolutely nothing from its public users. Anybody can ask a question for free and anybody can answer a question for free, provided they have signed up on Quora, which again is free of cost.
People can also start their own blogs on Quora without any fee. There used to be a system of credits, where each user got 500 credits upon signing up and could use those credits to ask questions to specific Quora writers. They could also earn credits when somebody else asked them a question or when their answers got an upvote, but this feature was discontinued later. Although the users of Quora use its services for free of cost, it charges businesses to place advertisements on it. Businesses can register themselves on Quora Ads Manager and get started. The ads are charged based on a bidding mechanism where the highest bidder get highest screen time for their ads, since space inventory on a website is limited. This gives an insight in the pricing strategy in its marketing mix.
Quora Place & Distribution Strategy:
Following is the distribution strategy in the Quora marketing mix:
Quora is available online and does not need any physical presence since the service it provides comes under mental stimulus which can be imparted through internet in this case. Apart from website, Quora is also available in the form of mobile application for iPhone users on Apple’s AppStore and for Android users on Google play. Quora users can use the app or visit the website from anywhere in the world and use its services. The maximum number of Quora users belong to India with around 40% visitors from the country while USA with 20% visitors is the second largest userbase followed by UK, Canada and China.
The headquarters of Quora is situated at Mountain View, California, United States.
Quora Promotion & Advertising Strategy:
The promotional and advertising strategy in the Quora marketing mix is as follows:
Quora mostly relies on digital marketing using the search engines. For example, whenever a question is typed in Google, its answer on Quora is the usually the first one to pop. Such activities help the website gain product retention in user’s mind. Another most effective strategy of promotion for Quora is word of mouth promotions by their existing users and blog writers. The website is already quite famous among internet users and has become a fad. Such phenomenon are very effective promotional tools and help in acquiring a lot of users. Quora also has a strategy of showing limited content to unregistered users and asking for them to sign up first to retrieve answers to more similar questions. This strategy helps in bringing new users on board and increases the count of unique users. As of April 2017, Quora claimed to have 190 million monthly unique users on its website.
Since this is a service marketing brand, here are the other three Ps to make it the 7Ps marketing mix of Quora.
People:
Quora employs highly motivated people with a great appetite for high-impact problem solving. They require their employees to be creative and experimental in different new avenues. Quora culture focusses on learning and helps the new employees learn by making them work alongside experienced mentors. Being a start-up, it does not have a hierarchal corporate organisational structure. Quora has around 130 employees and everyone is able to make impactful contribution to the company. All employees have the authority to be heard and be a part of all the important decisions taken. Quora also makes sure that its employees get an amazing work experience and nurturing environment to be creative by having a highly modern and fun work place at its Mountain View office in California. The company has a policy of celebrating collective achievements of its employees more than personal individual achievements. Their work processes follow agile methodology and are flexible to adapt to changing scenarios. Quora foster an open culture with candid communication in the organisation.
Physical Evidence:
Quora service is openly available for free and all its products are publicly accessible anytime, anywhere. It has a huge customer base which is increasing every hour. It was recently valued at $1.8 billion in its recent fundraising. Quora raised around $85 million in April 2017 in the series round D from investors Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. Its last fund raise was in 2014, when it raised $80 million in Series C funding by Tiger Global Management. It had a valuation of $900 million at that time. Other investors include company CEO Adam D’Angelo, Matrix Partners, SV Angel and North Bridge Venture Partners & Growth Equity. The company recently acquired Parlio, a social networking platform where people discuss current issues, for an undisclosed amount. Quora also has a host of published authors and famous personalities like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Fry, Gloria Steinem, Sheryl Sandberg, Glenn Beck, Vinod Khosla, and Gillian Anderson on its platform who write answers for questions on important issues. Such users increase the credibility of Quora as a platform.
Process:
To avail the services, one simply needs to sign up or register on the Quora website using his/her email id or Facebook account. The users are required to use their original names and not internet aliases so as to track the information posted by them and estimate the authenticity and quality of the answers. Fake names are identified by the company using a sophisticated algorithm and such users are asked to change their names. The content on Quora is both self-monitored and company monitored with the help of moderators. The users can upvote or downvote to rank the answers based on their relevance. The answer getting highest upvote is shown first. This encourages users to post quality answers. In case of explicit, or offensive content, plagiarism, factually wrong answers, users can report it to Quora and they look after the issue to maintain quality standards. Users can also make suggestions to edit or improve an article. Quora recommends questions in the home feed of the user based on their interests and preferences. Other methods of garnering content from users include Daily Digest, where the user gets a mail from Quora containing set of questions, Related Questions, where a set of related question is displayed on side of the screen and Ask to Answer, where the users ask a question to a particular user who is seen fit to answer the question. Hence, this completes the marketing mix of Quora.
About Quora:
Quora is a question-answer based website founded by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009. Users can post questions and anyone who knows the answer can post, provided both are registered on the website, which is free of cost. The aim of Quora is to bring together a pool of first hand answers and experiences from people all over the world and share it. The company has very strict policies about the content people post on it and it makes sure they are of superior quality by using various tools to measure it like number if upvotes and downvotes given by other users to an answer, or if the users are reporting the content to the company directly regarding quality issues.
Apart from feedback from users, Quora also keeps check on the content by continuous monitoring. Similar information sharing websites like Yahoo! Answers, Ask me, Wiki Answers and Stackoverflow are some of the biggest competitors of Quora today.
Browse marketing strategy and 4Ps analysis of more brands similar to Quora. The Marketing Mix & Strategy section covers 4Ps and 7Ps of more than 800 brands in 2 categories.
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