Why Quizzes are the Next Big Thing in Marketing
I’ve been researching quizzes as a lead generation tool for a few months now and have really started to see greater use of quizzes as a marketing tool, especially in the info-products business.
I think that quizzes are fast-approaching the tipping point where they’ll go from an interesting tactic to a primary tool for most marketers to capture the attention of their target audience and then move them through their sales funnel.
In this post, I’m going to explain why I think quizzes are going to become a primary tool for marketers and then I’ll go through what you can do with quizzes to maximize their usefulness in helping you grow your business.
Let’s dive in.
Why do people(including you) take quizzes or use online calculators?
It starts off with an intriguing question like one of these.
-
- “What kind of Rockstar are you?”
-
- “What kind of Entrepreneur are you?”
-
- “What endless shrimp name are you?”
-
- “What’s Your Core Purpose?”
-
- “Is Your Idea Profitable?”
-
- “What’s The Best Social Network For Your Event?”
-
- “What’s Your IT Personality?”
-
- “What’s Your Makeup Brand Spirit Animal?”
- and so much more…
I’ve talked to a lot of people about why they take quizzes, and most of them answer with “I LOVE taking them”.
From older gentlemen to techie young women, there’s no discrimination when it comes to who likes to take quizzes.
I did some research as to what makes quizzes so enticing and here is what I discovered.
1) Humans love Self-expression
According to a study by TIME Inc. 40% of the words we’ll say in our lives are about ourselves.
We actually feel good when we talk about ourselves. Studies have shown, we’re even willing to get paid less if part of our job is self-expression to a captive audience.
Now think about traditional marketing tactics, blog posts (like this one), webinars, e-books, white papers, checklists, videos, the list goes on.
All of those content types are broadcast mediums, meaning you are sending out a one-way message, and don’t offer a good way for people to interact and respond in their own right.
Online Quizzes are the only marketing channel that will let your audience answer personal questions, interact and have an interactive experience with your brand.
That’s quite powerful, and probably the biggest reason why people keep taking quizzes.
2) Narcissism
Have you ever noticed that quizzes always tell you that you’re awesome even if you’re not based on the quiz results?
That’s not by accident (sorry if I burst your bubble and now you’re going back to all your favorite quizzes to see if they’ll give you a negative result).
We tend to share positive things about ourselves on social media. For example, you rarely see people post on social media about getting fired from their job?
But I bet you have seen plenty of posts about getting hired at that new job.
“I got a new job!”
So quizzes have aligned themselves with this trend and always spit out enormously positive outcomes regardless of how you actually did.
3) Inclusion.
Another very powerful thing we enjoy as humans is inclusion. We love to feel apart of something. We want to be part of the group.
Being a part of something that feels personal to us is important, and also releases pheromones in our bodies if you want to get scientific.
This comment thread below sums up what I’m trying to say here. I mean, just look at the people who are bonding over the fact that they all got recommended Garlic Scampi shrimp from Red Lobster, it’s like a regular pow-wow. This interaction going on on your brands’ channels create memories and stories for people to share.
Again, this phenomenon is unique to quizzes, there isn’t another type of content that is simultaneously divisive and inclusive that lets this kind of comment bonding happen.
However, it’s important to note that a quiz is pretty useless if it’s not driving business results for you, even if a million people take it.
Hopefully,you’re convinced that quizzes can be a powerful tool for your marketing.
Let’s jump into how you can use quizzes.
How you can use Quizzes and Calculators to gain real results:
There are three main ways that quizzes drive results for your business.
1) List building.
The biggest reason people are adopting quizzes for marketing is their usefulness as a list building mechanism.
A quiz averages a 50% conversion rate, meaning that 1/2 of everyone who starts taking your quiz will end up opting in.
With quizzes, you can also segment the new emails by how they do on your quiz, which personality type they get, or even how they answer a specific question.
2) Audience insights.
You can pull in information about your audience, just like a survey and act on that data to help you come up with new marketing ideas and blog posts and content.
It’s helpful to know what your audience likes because then you can create products for them that they’ll actually be interested in.
3) Social growth.
I put this one third because I was just mocking it as a strategy up a few paragraphs ago.
It’s still true that social interaction without action is pretty useless, but sometimes social media connection does lead to real sales, and that’s when you can win.
Check out the Red Lobster quiz post below, it’s got 177,000 likes, which is absurd, and I have no doubt they sold a lot of shrimp with those numbers, but it’s harder to track which is why I don’t rank it as importantly.
Quizzes are coming on strong, they’re getting too big to ignore, and at some point in the near future they will be a tool in the arsenal of every marketer, it’s already starting to happen.
Get started now so you’re ahead of the curve.
Here are some tools to help you get started.
Marketing Quiz & Calculator Applications
There are a few very powerful quiz platforms out there that you can use.
Interact Quiz Software
This post was written using details from Interac quiz platform.
If you want to create a quiz and try this method for yourself, you can do that for free at tryinteract.com
Here are other software applications that provide similar functionality and allow you to create all kinds of quizzes that will engage your audience.
ClickFunnels Sales Funnel Software
Clickfunnels has functionality for creating short quizzes for the front end of your sales funnels.
Outgrow Quiz Software
Outgrow provides outcome quizzes, numerical calculators and other grade quizzes for engaging your audience and capturing leads.
Hope you found this post helpful and will give quizzes a try in your marketing and lead generation efforts.