Why forum websites such as Reddit and Quora can be a game changer for businesses

On the All About Digital Marketing blog this week, we have another fantastic guest blogger. Ankit Iyer is an experienced Digital Marketing Consultant and he founded searchenginecorner.com.

Over to Ankit…

Hello, I'm Ankit Iyer, a Digital Marketing Consultant, and the Founder of searchenginecorner.com. I'm here sharing a case study of how forum websites (also known as Question and Answer websites) such as Reddit and Quora can improve our organic traffic and increase sales.

Finding the right online channel to promote your business can be challenging, especially if you are working with a B2B, SaaS niche. My client Mr Cole Scott, President of FuseBox One, provides Digital Asset Management in the US. He commissioned us to run a campaign to increase our website traffic for his business and to learn more about existing DAM users and what they are looking for when choosing a DAM so that these leads could be converted into sales.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is software used to centralize digital assets. It helps to streamline business workflows, manage files and handle brand guidelines. For example, suppose it is a hectic Monday and you have to find a file from your system. There might be thousands of digital assets such as photos, videos, graphics, or PDFs. Normally this could be a time-consuming process, but DAM allows you to apply advanced tagging so that you can find the file that you need in no time.

When promoting your business, the competition is high, and we must compete with the big brands. We experimented with many platforms, creating infographics, videos, and guest blogs. However, the return on investment was not satisfying. After a few months, we found Reddit and Quora can be a game changer.

Why did we try out Reddit and Quora for the campaign?

SEO is all about the search engine traffic and platforms like Reddit and Quora attract large amounts of that search traffic. That is because these web pages are popular among individuals and businesses who use it to share their issues and achievements with others. Reddit is called the homepage of the internet and Quora ranks well for many queries generally. Both of these channels have very high amounts of user-generated content. The high amount of such content means that Google gives them priority on the results page of a search.

Also, these sites categorise their pages so we can easily find those users who are already familiar with DAM software. Being able to target users who are familiar with DAM makes life a lot easier for us. The users on these sites can turn into customers if you can provide some value for them.

What we did

Our team joined the relevent Reddit subreddit (aka community or group) and this becomes a game-changer for our Organic Campaign. We could now interact directly with DAM users and turn them into potential clients.

What we found

We found that many DAM users received no technical support around the clock and that many programmes had outdated features in their software despite the fact that the customers paid a high price for it. Our findings allowed us to be the ones to solve the DAM users' problems whilst making them aware of our brand at the same time.  

Growth in Traffic

With a forum website your brand gets attention from the audience who are looking for your products. Reddit and Quora have that audience and by connecting with them there we can grow our referral traffic by around 22%. By being involved with Reddit and Quora we also get a lot more exposure from Google Updates because forum sites get a lot of visibility on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), meaning that we were beating our competitors to appear when high-volume keywords were searched for.

Increasing our authority by engagement

Forum websites are a good means you can use to build a strong bond with a community. We search and find subreddits with Digital Assets or Brand Asset Management and then engage with the audience to solve their problems. Through this we can give them updates on Digital Assets by sharing tips, quizzes, and tutorials. These activities increase our authority and now people come to us in inboxes for suggestions.

The challenges of using forum sites

While working on Reddit, the biggest challenge was to increase our karma points and gain a lot of upvotes.

Karma points are the number of interactions taken on the forum page such as upvotes (like Likes on Facebook) and downvotes. You can earn Karma points by engaging with the Reddit or Quora community by creating posts and making comments.

We also think that the moderation is way too high on Reddit, whilst with Quora things were more straightforward. We have to promote the brand in a natural way so that we don't sound too promotional or salesy.

Pro tip: Never add just your website in the suggestion but add a few from your competitor as well so that you look natural.

Closing with Conversion

Showcasing out brand on forum sites played an important role in our organic strategy. We improved our site visits and purchase volumes. We added review badges to build trust and we added a pricing page. Search Engine updates are inconsistent, and algorithms may change in no time, yet despite this, for SEO Professionals this is a great place to experiment, although remember that no channel that works every time even if you are successful on a forum site.

Thank you Ankit for contributing to All About Digital Marketing! If you would also like to contribute, comment below or email louisaguiseauthor@gmail.com.

Share

Thanks for reading All about Digital Marketing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.