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Online quizzes have been around for a decade or more, but recently they’ve gone far beyond the ‘What Disney character are you?’ type of online quiz that has no real purpose. Quizzes are now one of the most popular types of online marketing content for engaging with your target customer. If you’re on social media, you’ve undoubtedly taken a quiz at some time or another. Websites like Buzzfeed have solidified their reputation and become massively popular through their quiz content

Why Are Quizzes So Hot Right Now?

Quizzes are enormously popular. Qzzr, a network for quizzes, recently reported a 330% month-on-month growth rate. OkDork reported that 8 of the 10 world’s most shared articles in the first months of 2017 were quizzes. Buzzfeed’s popular “What City Should You Actually Live In” quiz has been taken by over 20 million people. What accounts for the wild popularity of online quizzes in recent years? Here are some of the reasons quizzes are so effective as content.

Quizzes Encourage Engagement

Quizzes are addictive. They have a way of hooking people. When a quiz comes across your Facebook feed with an interesting title, you can’t help stopping whatever you’re doing and taking the quiz.

The reason quizzes are so engaging is that people get actively involved when they take one. People passively watch videos, read text-based content, and look at images. But you have to think a little to complete a quiz, so the quiz taker is interacting with your content.

Quizzes Use Gamification

Quizzes use the concept of gamification, which means adding game elements to a task to make it game-like and fun. If you gamify a work task, for example, it makes you feel like you’re playing a game, even if the task is the most mundane work you must do. The game elements create motivation. We all perform better when we’re having fun. This is another reason for the allure and natural engagement of quizzes.

Quizzes Are Personalized

A quiz answers a very basic human desire – the desire to express yourself and be heard. Everyone wants to give their opinions. This gives a quiz an inherently personal aspect. Since people naturally enjoy giving their opinions, they’re more likely to take online quizzes than interact with other types of content.

Some quizzes are not informational but geared toward personality types. These are the ones you see that say something like “What Type of Sandwich Are You,” “Which Country Do You Belong In,” or “How Good Are Your Bargain Hunting Skills.” The quiz not only asks you about yourself, but also evaluates your personality and tells you about yourself. This appeals very highly to the nature of social media and the information-seeking side of the internet in general.

Easy to Share

Online quizzes are shared like crazy and often go viral. This is because of the engagement, personalization, and gamification mentioned above, but also because they’re perfectly designed for social media content. A good quiz is quick and easy to take. You get results within a minute of starting. Most quizzes give you the option of sharing your results on social media, and this is irresistible. When your friends see your quiz results, they naturally want to take the quiz themselves.

Shared quizzes on social media are also conversation starters. Your friends will compare their results and discuss with each other, which means more engagement with the content.

Excellent for Lead Capture

Like other forms of online content, quizzes are great for capturing leads and bringing people into your sales funnel. You can get your quiz takers to sign up for your email newsletter or follow you on social media easily once the quiz is done. Quiz platforms offer the option of forcing quiz takers to sign up in order to see their results. Another option is to offer a free incentive for taking the quiz. All of these tactics can be used to bring people on to your list of leads.

Data Gathering

You can fashion your quizzes in such a way that they become a tool for gathering data about your target market. Create a quiz that asks questions about the person’s opinions, but which also tell you how they shop, what they like in a product, what they’re looking for, what brands they love, and so on.

The Essential Elements of the Ideal Online Quiz

Multiple Outcomes

For a quiz to work, there needs to be multiple outcomes. If everyone who takes it gets the same result, it’s not a personalized experience anymore, and it’s certainly not very interesting. Once people start sharing it, they’ll realize it’s not a very well made quiz. In addition, one person may take the quiz multiple times and get different results.

Personalization

Your quiz needs to feel personal to the quiz-taker. They should feel that it’s designed for them (You can create quizzes that feel this way by knowing your target market well). The quiz needs to be about the person taking it, and the result needs to feel accurate.

Visuals

Visuals add to the fun, game-like element of a quiz. A good visual also helps it attract people’s attention when it appears in their social media feed. It gives a sense of what they can expect from the quiz and can also be used for branding (for example, all your quizzes should use the same visual format).

A Clear Goal

Your online quizzes need to lead somewhere or else they’re a wasted effort. The purpose might be as a lead magnet to get new leads for your business. The goal could simply to be raising awareness of your brand. Your quiz puts you on your target market’s radar so that they start looking at other content. Whatever it is, you need a goal since it’s the starting point that decides who you target, what questions you ask, and how you build your quizzes.

Share-ability

Quizzes MUST be sharable. If the quiz is entertaining, highly targeted, and achieves its goal, it will certainly be shared by those who take it. This is how a quiz goes viral.

Relevance

The topic of your quiz must be relevant to those who take it. You must know your audience and choose a topic that is interesting or entertaining for them.

Set Up & Launch Your Quiz

Setting up your online quiz is easy using a quiz platform or plugin. Once you set it up, you should test it to make sure it works and delivers the results the way it should. Then, once you launch it, monitor and measure results to make sure it’s working the way it should be.

Here are two quiz platforms that I have personally used on my client’s sites and that I highly recommend.

Thrive Quiz Builder

This is a tool that’s also designed for businesses to use. Thrive Quiz Builder is a WordPress plugin so it’s easy to add to a WordPress blog or site. It’s designed to make designing, sharing, and embedding your quizzes easy and offers an array of templates to choose from.

Simple Quiz Engine

Simple Quiz Engine is also a WordPress plug in that makes it easy to add a quiz to your WordPress web site or blog. With each purchase, you also get a quiz checklist that walks you through the entire setup process from start to finish – no prior quiz building experience necessary.

Both of these platforms integrate easily with many auto responder /enewsletter tools such as aWeber and Mailchimp.

When You Use Your Quiz as a Lead Magnet

For lead capture, you’ll need to outline and write a sequence of emails to follow the quiz.

The first follow-up email should offer the results of the quiz if that’s how your quiz is designed and thank the person for subscribing and remind them of the benefits that they’re going to get through their subscription. For example, thank them and tell them they’ll get a weekly news roundup and occasional exclusive promotions. This confirms to the person that they’ve signed up for the right list and reaffirms the reasons they signed up.

You can use your subscribers to further narrow your target market. At first, you identified the target market for your quiz and your offer. If done successfully, you’ve gotten people from this market to sign up for your list. With different quiz outcomes, the right quiz platform will let you then segment your sign-ups based on their resulting outcome. Now, you can send them relevant, informational content and offers, and use this to further narrow and understand who they are.

List management software allows you to track things like open rate and click-through rate. Your offers help you to further qualify prospects. If you offer a free information product, those who download the product are those who are most interested in your content and offers. You can offer small ticket items to see who buys, and then you know that these are your potential buyers.

Where to Publish Online Quizzes

There are a number of places where you can publish your quizzes. Quizzes can also be embedded on your website or blog. Since quizzes work so well on social media, you should definitely publish your quizzes on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else you have a social media presence.

Here are some other ways to get traffic to your quiz:

Promote on Social Media.

When you post on social media, your content gets shared, liked, and commented upon, and then quickly disappears as new content comes along. All major social media platforms offer a way to ‘boost’ your post. These are paid methods which are reasonably priced, and pushing your quiz back into people’s newsfeed can really amplify its engagement.

Promote Your Quizzes Elsewhere.

In addition to sharing your quizzes, you can also create content about your quizzes. For example, write a blog post sharing the answers to your latest quiz. You can tell your readers that the average score on your English grammar quiz was 70%. This makes your readers want to take the quiz themselves to see how they fare against others.

Promote Your Quiz Offline.

On offline promotional material, mention your quizzes and give people a URL where they can find them. An even better idea is to offer a QR code that people can simply scan and then take the quiz on their smartphone.

Easy to Set Up, Fun to Share and Great for Growing Your Community

Online quizzes can make a big difference in your marketing efforts. They are easy to set up, create a fun and interactive way for your web site visitors to engage with you and give you the information you need to offer your audience what they are looking for!

Do you want to see how easy it is to build a quiz? Let me show you! I am hosting a “peak over my shoulder” demo that I invite you to attend – check it out here: www.webpagesthatsell.com/quiz