Colibri has recently partnered up with Interact Quizzes to explore the benefits of using customized quizzes as part of our ever-expanding digital marketing arsenal. We’re really excited about the possibilities and the creative aspect of quiz-making. Here’s a convenient little breakdown of some of the different applications to give you an idea of how valuable quizzes can be in a digital marketing toolkit.
The Value of Online Quizzes
Back in the early Paleolithic era of the Internet, before YouTube or Facebook, quizzes were getting started. Beginning as trendy email forwards, like interactive chain letters, anyone who was anyone was sending a quiz to fifty of their friends and binge-reading the answers instead of doing their math homework. It wasn’t long before several sites caught on and offered a simple service: create your own quiz, send links to your friends, and revel when your best friends ace it.
A lot of the questions were pretty straightforward, with typical multiple-choice quizzes asking everything from “how old am I?” and “what’s my favorite food?” to “who’s my favorite actor?” and “what city was I born in?” A user would input the correct answers, as well as three or four spurious ones, and let the respondents take their guesses.
Most of those early sites are still around for reasons that should be immediately obvious to any marketing professionals. These quizzes, even in their nascent form, are a veritable gold mine of market data. Any user who makes a quiz fills out a databank of information, ties it to an IP address, browser history (from cookies), device type, OS, and monitor resolution (which, taken together, can imply economic status), and supplies the database with the emails of a dozen or more of their friends. The site needs only to sit back and collect the data as it rolls in.
Even though that particular fad rose up over a decade ago, it illuminates another basic truth: people like being asked stuff. People like responding to quizzes and surveys, especially younger people (for whom a quiz is frequently a rare opportunity to hold court over what they think about the world).
So Let’s Look at Interact Quizzes
Interact has taken this business model and seriously improved upon it. By offering its services to high-profile clients, quizzes can be written that simultaneously appeal to certain demographics and ask probing questions to provide a particular subset of marketing data. With an almost unlimited number of potential questions, and the ability to target quizzes with names or topics to draw in the right kind of audience (“find out which famous robot is your best friend,” “what’s your ideal vacation destination?” and so on), precise answers to arcane questions become readily available.
But the benefits of a digital marketing agency using quizzes don’t stop there. Let’s see what else quizzes can do.
Interact Quizzes can…
Generate Leads
By adding an email capture form to your quiz, Interact reports a conversion rate of close to 50%, meaning that about every second person will give you an email address for future remarketing or outreach. We’ve written before about how email marketing continues to turn the highest return on investment of all the major digital marketing techniques, and coupling that email address with the data derived from the quiz’s responses leads to even more accurate email marketing and a higher ROI.
Drive Sales
Consumers like to feel as though they’ve taken possession of a thing before making the move to buy. There’s an old business adage about how you need to get a product in someone’s hands before asking for the sale, and you can see the same philosophy at work on store shelves and product demos. That kind of tactile ownership is harder to get through cyberspace, but quizzes have a neat trick. If a product or service is recommended in response to the answers a person has provided, that person feels a greater sense of connection and participation. A consumer is, according to Impact’s figures, more than twice as likely to buy based on a tailored recommendation following a quiz than a standard pitch.
Grow Social Reach
Social media thrives on people who want to share the minutiae of their lives. When they’ve been to a place, eaten a meal, participated in an activity, or made an impact, they share their experience with their social networks. That isn’t true for everyone, but it’s certainly true for many. If you want your brand to grow a more diverse social presence, quizzes are the way to go. Of Interact’s quizzes, a full 10% are shared to social media networks (that may not sound like much, but ask yourself how many articles aren’t being shared in a day). A quiz might be a five-minute procrastination avenue for a consumer, but the simple act of sharing the results (“I got KITT from Knight Rider as MY best friend…”) is eternally valuable to a brand or a client.
Best Practice for Creating Quizzes
If you’re building your own quiz, here are a few quick guidelines to help you towards success:
Don’t make it too obvious what you’re angling for
Your quiz should have a mix of generic and specific questions. Nonetheless, only a fraction of your specific questions should target your real intent. Be subtle.
Don’t ask leading questions
Market data is worthless if it isn’t genuine, so give options where options are due.
Be Creative
Interact Quizzes are like a game that you’re guaranteed to win, but no one likes to see them that way. Make sure the experience is fun on the way by.
Embrace unexpected results
Leave open the possibility of unexpected results. Even if you’re expecting answers to fall within a given range, allow for outliers, so you don’t miss out on unanticipated data.
Don’t bet it all on one horse
You can make infinite quizzes. You can make quizzes on any and every topic from now until the heat death of the universe. If you can find the server space to host it, you can make another quiz. Don’t worry about answering every little question all at once. Every single question you pose to your target demographic should be reflected in a single quiz.
So There You Have It
That’s Interact Quizzes in a nutshell. They’re a brilliant data capture tool. They lead to a lavish increase in conversions and sales. They’re low-cost high-reward marketing tools, and, most of all, they’re fun.
We, for our part, are desperately eager to see what they can do for our clients and for us, and we hope you’re just as excited to try them out yourselves.
Colibri Digital Marketing
We’re the digital marketing agency San Francisco trusts to focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Based in the Bay Area, close to Silicon Valley, we’re the team with the sneak peek into the future of digital marketing. If you’re ready to work with San Francisco’s first and only full-service B Corp-Certified digital marketing agency, drop us a line or click below to schedule a free digital marketing strategy session!
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