The Lowdown on Creating Personalized Quizzes to Boost Your Marketing

Boring content won’t generate the amount of leads you want. As a content marketer, you want to be able to find some form of content that consistently performs well with your audience. Pair that up with personalization and you could improve your click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%, according to Aberdeen Group research. But what kind of personalized content can deliver those kinds of results?

Consider how popular social media quizzes have become in the past couple of years. Are you seeing a connection? What if you could integrate quizzes with your marketing strategy to gain the upper hand in audience engagement? Throw in personalized results and we’re talking about a substantial increase in lead generation.

Today, I’m not just going to tell you to create a social media quiz to generate leads; I’m going to show you how. You heard me. I’ll even show you how to distribute your quiz on social media, and how to follow it up with marketing automation to warm up those leads and convert them into customers. The brand in the example is BioLite, which collected 4,852 leads by following this simple step-by-step guide.

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Let’s get started.

Part I: Create your own lead-generating quiz

Since BioLite develops and manufactures energy-efficient products, it was only natural to come up with the What Would You Do With 10 Watts? quiz. The aim was to repurpose existing resources to generate leads.

Your reasons for creating a quiz may vary, but the result for every content marketer is the same – to generate leads.

Step 1: Formulate a concept, pick a quiz type

Every new piece of interactive content starts with an idea, so let’s start formulating yours. First off, what does your brand stand for? What are your company’s goals? Once you have a good feel for the kind of content your brand brings to the table, incorporate that in the form of a quiz.

Once the concept is there, it’s time to pick the kind of quiz. Here are a couple of suggestions:

• Personality – This is the kind of quiz often found on social media networks, and the most effective type for that same reason. The personality quiz categorizes the audience into personality types based on their answers. If your brand focuses on selling products, this is the perfect way to match personalized product recommendations to each personality type.

• Knowledge – This is another popular type of quiz found on social media networks. It gauges the knowledge of the audience on a topic and delivers results based on accuracy. It’s more of a challenge, and few people like to back down from a challenge. Your marketing strategy could involve testing your audience on how much they know about your brand or for fun, a trending topic.

In BioLite’s case, the quiz gauged the preparedness level of the audience for situations in which there are few or no electrical resources. Completing the quiz placed the audience in different personalities based on preparedness. Regardless of the outcome, BioLite was able to suggest personalized product recommendations to the quiz-takers.

Step 2: Create the questions

It’s time to work on the questions. This is the body of your quiz, and your main medium for establishing a one-on-one connection with your audience. Use this knowledge to your advantage.

Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind when crafting your questions:

• Inject personality into your quiz – Approach your audience as if you were talking to them in person. Put some of your personality into the quiz to create a more natural conversation. You want to encourage your audience to get comfortable so that they’re more likely to opt-in later.

• Use images for questions – Using visuals keeps things relevant and fun. Including images in your questions can make your quiz feel like a game show, and that’s pretty entertaining if you ask me. I’d rather play a game than answer a bunch of text-based questions.

• Keep things simple and short – Having six to 10 questions is the sweet spot. People don’t have long attention spans these days, so keep things short for the sake of simplicity.

BioLite emphasized the concept of a power outage, so it purposely used a black background with no images in its quiz. Visual deprivation probably was the intent and it’s effective. It also kept the number of questions to five.

Step 3: Create a lead capture

Before you give the audience the results, it’s a good idea to gate your quiz with a lead-capture form. You’ll be able to collect your audience’s contact information so you can follow up and work on converting them into customers.

Here’s a short to-do list when creating your lead capture:

• Promise value to your audience – Did you offer an incentive to your audience to encourage them to opt in? Incentivize your lead capture by offering a weekly newsletter, a free e-book, or, in BioLite’s case, an entry to a free giveaway, which proved to be successful.

• Be honest with your marketing strategy – Did you let your audience know that you’ll be contacting them if they opt in? Be honest about your marketing strategy. If you’re going to email your audience, let them know. You don’t want them to mistake your emails as spam now, do you?

• Ask only for necessary information – Did you only ask for their name and email address? You can ask for more information as long as you use it. You don’t want to ask your audience for their phone number if you’re never going to call.

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Step 4: Create shareworthy results

As much of an emphasis as we placed on the questions, the results are equally important. The virality of your quiz will be determined by how frequently it is shared, so you want to create results worth sharing. The more people share their results, the more people will take your quiz. It’s as simple as that.

Here are some key practices when formulating your results that will make people want to share them:

• Be positive and truthful – Deliver results that compliment your audience. Positive emotions generate leads. Regardless of the outcome, BioLite always complimented its audience through the results.

• Use captivating images – When it comes to social media feeds, the first things that catch our attention are images. Include a captivating image with your result so when people share, your quiz results are the first thing their family and friends see.

• Introduce your audience to something more – Your interactions with your audience don’t end with the results. Encourage them to visit your website or to check out your products. BioLite links three products for each personality type in the quiz results to maintain audience interaction after the quiz.

Part II: Distributing your quiz on social media

It’s time to put your quiz to the ultimate test. It’s not enough to just embed it on your website. There’s no better way to distribute it than through social media.

Here are just a couple of ways to promote your quiz through social media:

Encourage test-takers to share their results on Facebook and Twitter

1. Make sure you use an attention-grabbing image to represent your quiz.

2. Come up with a captivating headline for your quiz.

3. Share both the image and the caption with a customized shortened link to track results.

Use paid advertising to promote your quizzes on Facebook

The process of promoting your quiz on Facebook is a topic unto itself. I’m going to truncate that by highlighting the key elements of it so we can move right along:

• Select your target audience – Your audience can be categorized into location, demographics, behaviors, and connections. Each category can be broken down further. For instance, location can be narrowed to country, state/province, city, and ZIP code.

• Create a custom audience – Use a list that you already uploaded. Then Facebook can generate a custom audience based on that list. It’s pretty convenient.

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Part III: Use marketing automation to follow up

You don’t want to be that one-quiz-stand that doesn’t call the freshly acquired leads the next morning, do you? Or maybe you do, I don’t know, but as a content marketer, you probably want to convert those leads into paying customers. Remember that lead-capture form we made? We’re going to use it for this very reason.

Let’s warm up those leads using marketing automation. Although automated follow-up emails are executed in a fraction of time, we stretch the process over two weeks to avoid spamming our leads and to make the transition from a simple thank you to a sales pitch as natural as possible.

Here’s a four-step sequence you must live and die by if you want to successfully convert your leads into customers:

1. Thank your audience – The first thing you need to do is thank your audience for taking your quiz immediately after they opt in. It reminds them that they signed up in the first place and it helps assert your brand. Skipping this step will ultimately screw up your quiz strategy and any other emails will be mistaken as spam. Don’t mess this up.

2. Transition from “thank you” to other content – Give it a couple of days and then send a follow-up email regarding the other possible outcomes they could have received. This encourages your audience to retake your quiz. It might even prompt them to share it again. It’s the perfect transition from your initial thank-you email to other relevant content.

3. Build trust with case studies or testimonials – It’s been about a week. Now is a good time to send another email to your audience. This time, highlight some customer case studies or testimonials to build trust with your audience as you slowly convince them about your brand and what it stands for.

4. Close the deal with your audience – After two weeks, it’s time to close the deal. This is where you convert your leads into customers after keeping them interested in your brand for a reasonable time. Entice your audience with incentives such as coupons and discounts, or even a webinar sign-up. People like free things, and it’s no cost to you when you have them buy into your brand.

And there you have it

You’ve just successfully learned how to create your own quiz. You even learned how to personalize the results to get the most out of your audience. Since you know how to distribute your quiz as well, following it up with marketing automation should be a breeze. You can almost hear the sounds of success.

When you create your quiz, think about other marketing strategies to which you could tie it. The possibilities are limitless. As cliché as it sounds, it’s true.

Get the tools and know-how you need to build and support a successful content marketing program with CMI’s how-to guide about launching or enhancing your content marketing program.

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixabay.com 

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