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How to Create an Interactive Quiz for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

 

Interactive Quiz

Content marketing was the most important digital marketing trend in 2015. Plus, with 55% of B2B organizations expecting to increase their content marketing budgets over the next year, you’re going to want to make sure you’re spending on the right tactics.

As a marketer, what kind of content can you use for your marketing strategy that allows you to drive traffic and generate leads at the same time?

Answer: interactive quizzes. Using quizzes in your content marketing strategy will increase social traffic and help generate leads. Today, we’ll show you how to create your own quiz for lead generation, how to distribute it, and how to follow those leads up through marketing automation to convert them into customers.

We’ll be following the story of Cloud Sherpas and the quiz they implemented to simultaneously generate and qualify leads. This is an exclusive inside look, so here we go!

Part I: Creating a quiz

As an enterprise software company, leads are incredibly valuable to Cloud Sherpas. They created their quiz, “How mature is your ServiceNow instance?”, in an effort to both generate and qualify leads.

Their quizzes may not attract the interest of the common Internet user, but to their target audience, Cloud Sherpas’ quizzes are critical to helping assess performance. Cloud Sherpas promotes the quiz on their blog and on Facebook, bringing in 3-4 qualified leads every day.

Cloud Sherpas interactive quiz

Have a concept, then pick your quiz type

Every great quiz starts with a basic concept. Your concept can be based off your brand, its products, or even a trending topic. Once you’ve laid out the basic concept for your quiz, come up with an intriguing title.

With your quiz idea and title set, it’s time to choose what kind of quiz you’re going to make. Here are two of the most popular types of quizzes that you can base your concept around:

  • The personality quiz: One reason personality quizzes work so well is because of the “self-serving bias”, which ultimately says that we like to hear good things about ourselves. The personality quiz does just that as it categorizes individuals into personalities that compliment them based on the answers they gave during the quiz. For an example, let’s say your brand focuses on product sales. Based on the personality a quiz-taker receives, you would allow you to make personalized product recommendations.

  • The knowledge test: This type of quiz gauges the knowledge of your audience and gives results based on accuracy. It becomes more of a challenge and it’s a fun way to test someone’s knowledge. You could ask your audience how much they know about your brand, its products, or even a trending topic.

Cloud Sherpas went with a personality quiz disguised as an assessment. Based on their answers, individuals would be placed into different “level” personalities that gauged how much they knew about the ServiceNow instance.

Come up with questions for your quiz

Now that your quiz is underway, it’s time to fill it up with questions. This is where you establish a one-on-one connection with your audience, so make it count.

Follow these guidelines as you come up with your questions to make the most out of them:

  • Inject your personality into the quiz. Approach your audience as if you were talking to them in person and don’t be afraid to be casual. If your quiz takers are comfortable with your tone, it will help out when it’s time to have them opt-in at the end of the quiz.

  • Utilize images for your questions. Sometimes text-based questions are fine, but don’t hesitate to include images either. Pictures keep things interesting and relevant. Including images can also make your quiz feel more like a trivia game show!

  • Keep things short and simple. You want to have to have between 6 to 10 questions in your quiz. This makes the quiz last for about 2-3 minutes, which is just enough time for us to maintain an audience’s short attention span.

Sample quiz question layout

Cloud Sherpas’ approach was pretty straight-forward. The quiz itself did not have any images and the questions did not require any kind of personality. As it was meant to be an assessment, the quiz had 6 questions that got straight to the point.

Create a lead-capture form

The purpose of a lead-capture form is to gather contact information from your quiz takers. This will allow you grow your email list and, if it’s a part of your marketing strategy, allow you to follow up with the leads, (ideally!) converting them into customers.

A form’s placement can be crucial. Since you want your audience to fill it out, you’re going to want to place the lead capture right before your audience gets their results. This will allow your audience the option of opting into your brand.

Here are some ways to increase the opt-in rate of your lead capture:

  • Offer value to your audience. Incentivize your lead capture to help encourage your audience to opt in. Offer things like a weekly newsletter, a free eBook, or an entry to a free giveaway. These incentives will help convince your audience that it’s worth joining your email list.

  • Be honest about marketing strategy. It’s not always evident to the audience that you’re going to contact them when they opt in, so be sure to let them know. You don’t want them to mistake your emails as a form of spam.

  • Only ask for contact information you’ll use. There’s no need to ask your audience for anything other than their name and email unless you have some use for it in your marketing strategy. Keep it short and sweet for better conversions.

Cloud Sherpas quiz lead capture form

Create share-worthy results for social media

You want to come up with results worth sharing as this is how your quiz can go viral. The more appealing your results are, the more likely they’ll be shared.

Here are some things to keep in mind when coming up with results that people will want to share:

  • Keep things honest and positive. Positive emotions lead to an increase in sharing content on social media. By creating results that evoke positive emotions and compliment your audience, your quiz has a better chance of being shared.

  • Use images worth sharing. Just like how you used images for questions, it’s a good idea to use images for your results. These images, however, should be highly appealing since they will be what shows up when shared across social media.

  • Direct your audience to more content. After your audience gets their results, direct them to your brand’s website or products. This will allow you to help your audience familiarize themselves with your brand. This also prepares them for any follow-ups you make afterwards.

Cloud Sherpas quiz results page

Part II: Distributing your quiz on social media

Now it’s time to let your quiz run free in the wild! Social media will be your playground, so this is where we’ll be dropping your quiz off. Here are some ways to promote your quiz:

Share your quiz on your social media platforms

If you’ve followed the steps above to create engaging quizzes with catchy titles, imagery, and results, sharing on your social platforms (mainly Facebook and Twitter) gives them a high chance to be re-shared among your audience.

Be sure to share the quiz with an image and description as well as a shortened link to track results.

Use paid advertising to promote your quizzes

Promoting your quiz on Facebook can be a fairly lengthy process, so we’ll save you the time by highlighting a couple of the more important factors regarding paid advertising:

  • Target-audience selection: A target audience can be created based off of location, demographics, behaviors, and connections. To get really granular, these categories can be narrowed down even further. Take location, for instance — you can break that down by country, state/province, city and zip code.

  • Custom-audience creation: A custom audience isn’t as complicated as it might sound. You pretty much get to work with a pre-existing list that you’ve uploaded ahead of time. Facebook then generates an audience based on that list.

Part III: Using marketing automation for follow-up emails

After your quiz has done its rounds on social media, it’s time to take the leads you’ve generated and follow-up.

Before you convert those leads into paying customers, there’s a 4-step sequence that you should follow if you want to be successful in lead-to-customer conversion:

  1. Thank your audience for taking your quiz. This step is mandatory. Immediately after they opt in, be sure to send out an email thanking your audience for taking your quiz. This will remind them of what’s to come.

  2. Encourage your audience to take more quizzes. A couple days later, inform your audience about the other results they could have gotten in the initial quiz or present them with similar quizzes you have created. This is the perfect transition from your “thank you” email to presenting your audience with other content.

  3. Use customer case studies or testimonials to build trust. After a week, send the next email in the series. This email should highlight a testimonial or customer case study. This encourages your audience to trust your brand from the opinions of other customers.

  4. Convert your leads into paying customers. After two weeks, your hard work of maintaining contact with your leads should pay off. By now, your audience should be well-informed about your brand. It’s time to have them invest in it by closing the sale. Throw in some incentives like a webinar sign-up or coupons/discounts to help close the deal.

Let’s take a look back

You’ve just learned how to create your own quiz from the questions to the results. You even got a couple pointers on how to promote your quiz as well as how to follow up on the leads you’ll obtain.

That’s a handful of valuable information! Use everything you’ve learned today for your marketing strategy and let us know how it worked out for you.

Just how valuable can quizzes and interactive content be to your bottom line? Find out in our webinar: How to Engage, Generate, and Qualify More Leads Using Interactive Content.

 

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