Should You Get Quizzical With Your Content Marketing?
Josh Haynam, Co-Founder Of Online Quiz Maker Interact, Outlines How To Make Quizzes An Effective Part Of Your Content Marketing Strategy
On August 1st 2014, Hostelworld.com published a quiz titled, “What type of traveler are you actually?” Within a week that quiz had 30,000 views, and it continues to receive traffic from both social media and SEO sources.
Hostelworld isn’t a massive website; nearly all of those 30,000 visits came from social sites and organic searches, and the success can be attributed to a well-executed quiz strategy rather than having the benefit of a massive user base. Hostelworld is just the latest in a long string of success stories from companies who have used quizzes to lend an interactive element to their content marketing strategy.
My goal today is to break down the reasons why this particular Hostelworld quiz was so successful, and arm you with an actionable guide to using quizzes as part of your content marketing efforts.
Without further ado, here are the five things you need to know to effectively make a quiz a part of your content marketing strategy.
#1: Know Your Objectives For Making A Quiz
What are a thousand visits worth if none of them ever come back to your website? The answer is not much. Unfortunately, that’s what happens with some quizzes when the marketer who creates the quiz doesn’t know what their goals are before publishing.
Quizzes can be designed to accomplish many objectives, but here are a few ideas and best practices to get your creativity flowing:
Personalize Your Content
As most marketers know, personalized content is integral to content effectiveness. Personalized products sell three times better than their generic alternatives, and personalized calls to action have a 42% higher conversion rate.
Using a quiz, you can make the content itself personalized to each blog visitor. All you have to do is include a link in each quiz result that links to a a specific article or tool on your site that is most relevant to that particular person, based on their responses.
Forbes did this to personalize their college recommendation quiz by including a link for each prospective student according their personality type. The result is that over 50,000 people have taken the quiz in the last three months.
Collect Email Subscribers
Quizzes can be built as gated content to drive email subscriptions. At Interact, we’ve found that by adding a “gate” between the quiz questions and results, and — most importantly — having a well-worded call-to-action, you can achieve conversion rates of up to 50%.
Quizzes work for lead generation because of how personal and engaging they are, leading to opt-in rates of 50% or higher in some cases. Check out this example from Booker, which made a fun quiz about holiday marketing and connected it with their CRM to collect new leads.
Run A Contest
Combining elements of personalization and email collection, quizzes can be used to run unique contests for your audience. Use the quiz to collect email subscribers as outlined in point #1, then select one email address at random as your winner!
Baroque.org did this for their audience and the result was a 5x lift in Facebook engagement and hundreds of opt-ins for future contests and email newsletters.
#2: When It Comes To Quiz Ideas, Follow The Leaders
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be creative with your quiz ideas, but you should at least start by following what’s been proven to work. Here are three data-backed quiz concepts that nearly always work:
The “Which ____ are you?” Quiz
This is the category that the aforementioned HostelWorld quiz falls into. It’s a simple personality quiz applied to a variety of topics from travelling to computers to bags. Many of the most popular quizzes have been in this category, and at Interact, we’ve confirmed the effectiveness of this quiz format based on our quiz interaction data.
We ran a test of 1500 quizzes created using Interact, and compared quizzes with the words “which” “are” and “you” in the title versus quizzes without those words.
The result is a drastic increase in views for quizzes containing all three words. Now, admittedly, this isn’t a perfect test, and a lot of variables are unaccounted for, but there is certainly a correlation between quizzes with this title and greater quiz interaction.
The “Actually” Quiz
Consider quiz questions like, “Which person would you actually be?” Titles with the word “actually” transform a normal quiz into a challenge to see if people are “actually” what they think they are. Take a look at this example from HostelWorld below:
We did another split test on quizzes with the word “actually” versus quizzes without, and again found a strong positive correlation between the use of the word “actually” and the level of quiz engagement.
Now, to put this in more relevant terms, let’s look at an example from the ZTA fraternity headquarters. They made the quiz “Which ZTA Founder Would You Actually Be?” and shared it out. The quiz became a hit on Twitter, with people voicing their opinions about whether the quiz was right or wrong.
As with any piece of content, it’s important to analyze both the quantity and the quality of the interactions received.
The Celebrity Comparison Quiz
Everyday we are exposed to 7000 celebrity references. That’s a made up statistic, but we really do get inundated with celebrity talk to the point where it’s only natural to compare ourselves to these famous people.
Perhaps that’s why celebrity quizzes perform so well; in our analysis, quizzes that included the word “celebrity” saw nearly 10x the traffic of an average quiz.
Now, many sites creating celebrity quizzes are dedicated to entertainment and practice click-bait, and are therefore receive a lot of lower-quality traffic (leading to inflated views), but they are still on to something here.
Much like the strategy behind linking content to trending hashtags on Twitter, relating your quiz to what people are already talking and thinking about helps to position it in a way that makes it more relevant.
#3 Write Your Quizzes With Personality
The best quizzes are natural, and sound more like a pub conversation than an online article. It turns out, there’s a reason for that.
In our everyday conversations, a full 60% of what we say revolves around ourselves, which means we use a lot of personal words like “I” “you” “we” etc. This is just our normal, casual way of talking.
In our analysis, we’ve found that writing quizzes using these personal words leads to more overall quiz views. There is a strong correlation between instances of personal words and overall quiz views.
This method of writing should carry through your entire quiz, from questions to results. It’s important to remember that a quiz is a one-on-one conversation and should be treated as such, instead of as a one-to-many broadcast.
Take for example this quiz question from Boston.com. It not only feels like a natural question, but also uses a vernacular that’s specific to the target audience: New England Patriots fans.
#4 “Close The Loop” So You Don’t Lose Users
Anytime you create content that gets a lot of social shares, there is a risk of losing some users to Facebook or Twitter (News Feeds are mesmerizing). To combat this, we’ve developed a system called the “closed loop” that guarantees you don’t lose your visitors.
For marketers, it is very important to set up your quizzes like this, or you risk giving away hard-earned traffic. Having a loop like this also helps with brand consistency; you never have to send visitors away from your site.
#5 Test And Optimize!
I’ve seen companies whiff several times when making quizzes before they finally land on one that takes off and becomes a high-traffic piece of content. Quizzes are a different, engaging format, which means that if you make them a part of your marketing strategy now, you’ll be ahead of the curve. But it also means there’s some experimentation to be done before you really hit your sweet spot.
Conclusion
Quizzes can be extremely effective pieces of content for your brand, and can even give you an advantage over competitors who haven’t started using them. However, if you want to have success using quizzes, you’ve got to do it right, or risk wasting massive time and money.
This guide is meant to give you some insider knowledge to help you get started. Now it’s your turn to start making quizzes. and test and optimize until you discover what resonates with your audience.
Josh Haynam is the Co-Founder of Interact, the easiest way to create a lead generation quiz.
