These days, the attention span of your audience is at its lowest point in human history.
We know that 55% of visitors stay for 15 seconds or less on a page and that their attention span is limited to, more or less, 8 seconds. As a consequence, you have these 8 seconds to capture their attention and another 7 seconds to deliver them something worthy in order to convince them not to leave your page.
A common mistake marketers and business owners frequently fall into is trying to attract everyone to their product instead of focusing on attracting the right people.
You need to come up with something that speaks to people on an individual level in order to trigger the best results.
Moreover, you are dealing with an audience that was raised by social media, the same social media channels that keep them engaged at all times and give them a voice.
Can you give them a voice as well? Can you actively engage them in your content marketing process? You can, and with this article, I will try to pinpoint the best strategy towards this end: the “personalized quiz”.
What is a personalized quiz?
Digital marketing may transform your business but interactive content will take it to another level.
A personalized quiz provides interactivity because it involves the user directly and gives them a personalized experience based on how they answer the questions. Plus, quizzes have higher engagement rates than surveys or almost any other type of content.
These types of quizzes were made popular by social media and are very popular these days on all channels.
However, in order to understand a personalized quiz better, we should try to take a quick look at two types of quizzes that are generally used by content marketers today:
The Regular Quiz: Delivers a general result, a score without much additional information.
The Personalized Quiz: Delivers results that are especially relevant to the respondent.
This allows you to offer a first recommendation within the outcome of your assessment. But, more importantly, it might be a good choice for lead generation. It opens up a window to ask for the respondent’s email and send over more customized recommendations or resources. A relevant example, in this case, comes from this Boot Camp Digital case study.
Personalized quizzes are more than a mere interaction between a marketer and their audience.
According to Wordstream, a quiz can get you a conversion rate of up to 64%. This is huge, considering that there are lots of (costly) options you can try without even getting close to this number.
On top of that, personalized quizzes have an 81% completion rate. (Ever published a social media post, article or blog that could live up to that?)
Why use quizzes as a marketing tool?
Quizzes have a huge conversion and completion rate. These generate leads and allow you to convert casual visitors into paying customers. They also offer a level of interactivity that regular posts are incapable of.
According to this study published by Demand Metric, conversion rates spike high when the content is interactive, compared to passive. The cost per lead can be decreased up to 90%.
According to the same report, the amount of shared content also has a lot to do with interactivity, as we can see from the following screenshot:
What types of interactive content should you use? Are personalized quizzes effective in this case? Well, according to the statistics, they are.
In fact, almost half of the interaction includes quizzes these days, surpassed only by infographics, contests, and calculators.
In sum, the answer is yes, quizzes and especially personalized quizzes, are great marketing tools and you can use them as an effective addition to your overall marketing strategy. All you need is to know your audience, know what questions they ask themselves, what they need to know and the answers they seek.
Which quiz questions should you ask to boost lead generation?
This question you ask depends mostly on your strategy and your ultimate goals. For instance, you should start by asking yourself what is it that you want to gain from the respondents and how may it help you improve your success?
Capabilities of an effective quiz
- You learn more about your respondents. Quizzes allow you to learn more about your target audience and as a consequence, to better strategize your marketing tasks. By knowing who they are, what they are like and why they would benefit from using your products and/or services, you can optimize what follow-up content you use to keep hold of your audience’s attention.
(As well, you can use them as a basis for case studies which can be converted into other pieces of content marketing that may be helpful in the long run.) - Allow the respondents to learn more about your business. Through your quiz questions, they get to know you, your brand and some of the benefits of becoming your customers. If, for example, you create a five-minute quiz that works like a decision tree, you can direct respondents to a page about a specific service that is highly relevant to them.
- Help respondents learn more about themselves. They might not know about some services or products or about the fact that they need them. Quiz questions can help respondents understand the problems they have more accurately.
Think as a salesperson
In order to better understand this process, try to remember every time you had to talk face to face with a sales professional. They do not jump in straightforward and go for the sale right away.
Instead, try to figure out your audience’s concerns, pains, worries and let your quiz offer a solution to those pains. Knowing your audience may be one of the best assets you can use right away in a marketing campaign.
Let’s say that you are a marketing agency or a professional that works for a marketing agency. And you have been tasked with getting customers for content marketing campaigns. The customer’s “pain”, in this case, is how to generate more leads.
Which questions can you ask them?
You can start with questions like the following:
“How did you hear about us?” or, “What kind of results do you hope to achieve and when?”
Then, you can continue with the following questions or something really similar:
A. What activities do you currently have in place to collect leads?
B. What’s your biggest challenge with your current methods?
C. What’s your current cost per lead?
You can vary these questions and adapt to each of your respondents in particular. If you know a few things about them (e.g. They represent a company), things will be easier. If not, try to follow their lead and pay attention to what they are saying. Every little detail matters in such cases.
You should seek to ask for respondents’ contact information or other relevant data without being overly upfront about it.
How do you get their emails?
If you are afraid of losing a conversion if you ask about personal details such as the email address, you can always give something in return. There are three possible approaches here.
- Give something of monetary value (a voucher, a price reduction, etc.)
- Give something of intellectual value (personal report, redirect to online courses or blog posts that are relevant based on the person’s results)
- Give a small snippet of information at the end of the quiz, even if people didn’t leave their email.
- People who chose to leave their email get rewarded with more elaborate and detailed information.
Anyway, those who are committed to finding the right answers to their questions will have no problem in giving you their email address, their real names or a contact phone number.
Let’s look at a real-life case study from a retail company, Elephant Pants. It is all about a quiz that supposedly jump-started their business.
Their campaign was based on a quiz that started with the most simple and yet effective question they could have asked their audience: “Which pair of Elephant Pants are you?”
This is a very personalized quiz that starts with a personalized question and ends with a personalized response. In fact, it proved to be quite effective considering the results. At the end of the quiz was a link that led to their Kickstarter page. Here are the numbers:
They managed to raise the funds they needed in order to launch the business and at the same time, they have collected enough names and emails to establish a base of customers.
How to personalize your quizzes
Personalization is necessary to position the same product differently for different types of people. It prevents you from falling into one of the most common mistakes marketers make, one-size-fits-all marketing. It also makes it possible to attract a diverse group of customers with the same product without making material changes to it.
A. Offer information that is important to your audience
For instance, Disney knows what its audience is all about. They know that their stories and their characters are a common interest among fans and as a consequence, they adapt their quizzes to these interests. They give back information that is somehow valuable to the audience.
Here’s another example from Camelbak:
Camelbak develops and sells sporting goods that are supposed to “reinvent the way people hydrate and perform.” They are aware that there is a direct and strong relationship between sports and hydration and this is the main reason they have designed this interactive quiz, the “Hydration Calculator.”
This is an example of a “Top-of-funnel” quiz, aimed at visitors and customers who are interested in the topic of hydration but maybe not yet decided to buy the product.
B. Include all your important branded visuals and designs
Branded visuals show consistency and allow the audience to easily recognize you when they land on the quiz page or when they share quizzes across social media accounts.
They link back to your business, visually. They are easy to remember and easy to understand.
Plus, merely 80 percent of all the online content is comprised of visuals and it takes less than a second for a human being to form an impression of you based on what you are posting.
This means that the content itself, even if it is a well-designed quiz, will not contribute massively to your marketing campaign unless it is paired with some branded visuals. People might not remember your quiz or the answers they receive but the images will most likely be entrenched in their subconscious minds. And, when they come in contact with them again, they’ll seem familiar.
As a simple and effective example, take a look at the following screenshot:
Will you remember this quiz? Probably not. However, the official “Virgin” logo will most likely be stuck in your head. Or, maybe you have already noticed it. In case you know the company, there’s also a good chance you’ll take the quiz just because you trust their brand.
Whatever your motives are and whatever you feel the first time you see the logo, there’s one truth that applies to everybody – That little and apparently insignificant visual is probably the most important part of the quiz.
C. Ask relevant questions based on previous answers
Use skip logic and other similar features to ask only the most relevant questions based on the audience’s previous answers. Also, if you ask first for their name, address each individual by the given name in order to further personalize the quiz. You can also reuse answers for the follow-up questions.
What does the skip logic option mean? They will allow you to show follow-up questions based on the answers given by the recipient. Not everyone responds the same to a specific question and not everyone will see every one of your follow-up questions. However, the skip logic, when used, enhances the personalized experience and avoids asking irrelevant questions that can waste a respondent’s time.
The better you cover these aspects, the more you will grow the level of personalization.
You can learn from the above example and the way marketers make sure to use the respondent’s name a couple of times throughout the quiz. Thus, the entire process feels more like a personal conversation that stimulates the respondent to stay engaged and respond honestly. Also, at the end of the quiz, if they get wished a great day or other positive thoughts, this small gesture can prove to be quite effective in the long run.
D. Use a personalized results screen
Have you ever taken a personality quiz? I am sure you have, at least once in your lifetime. Remember the results? They usually divide the respondents into specific categories or segments. You can then deliver tips and advice based on the answers and the category the respondents were integrated.
A good example is this career quiz, which helps the students to make better career choices. It starts with a question most of us ask at some point in our early professional life – Which career is right for you?
Based on their responses, students get a specific suggestion to help them choose the best career opportunities and then, they are redirected to the most appropriate educational program.
Why would a university create a quiz like this?
By helping respondents make a better career choice, they manage to speed up the recruitment process. In fact, they acquire a minimum of 125 students per month.
Also, the quiz successfully replaces a series of other landing pages students should have to navigate through and read before applying for an educational program.
E. Offer personalized content based on the results of the quiz
For example, you can offer a personalized PDF report with tailored tips, tricks, and advice based on the scores of the respondents, access to an online course that seems relevant to them or a personalized voucher. If possible, the voucher should be based on a product or service offer according to the responses.
A good example, in this case, comes from Passions and Talents, a consultancy focused startup. And yes, their assessments are made through quizzes.
After the initial quiz, they offer a PDF report which comprises a series of advice and tips that lead to better career progression.
“The real insight for people comes with the second part of that PDF report. It contains a series of design thinking questions that help you reflect on your specific strength roles. It gives you a strong framework for an actual career search and serves as a guide in your resume writing, personal networking, job search, and interview process” said David Endean, the man behind the project.
Wrapping up
Quizzes are great marketing tools if you want to spice up your strategy with some level of interactivity. When personalized, these tools can really do wonders, generate leads and increase awareness for both the company and its customers.
Have you tried to conduct content marketing through quizzes? If yes, what were your results?
