GUEST BLOG BY JOSH HAYNAM, CO-FOUNDER OF INTERACT
Since the days of Cosmopolitan Magazine quizzes, we’ve been obsessed with finding our results. More recently, with the rise of Buzzfeed and other content sites that have perfected the internet quiz format, there has been a resurgence of the quiz as a center point of discussion.
There’s no limit to who likes quizzes. As co-founder of Interact, I’ve been talking with people about them every single day for the last 6 years and without fail every single person either loves taking quizzes themselves or knows someone who is obsessed with them.
What I’m here to do today is show you exactly how those quizzes we all love so much get created and how they can bring your content marketing to life.
Warning: this may ruin quizzes for you once you know how they work
The Quiz Idea
It’s one thing for Buzzfeed to make a quiz about which Kardashian sister you are because they can make literally anything they want, it’s all just for fun. It’s another thing entirely for you to make a quiz for your brand because you have a serious brand reputation to uphold, and a silly quiz could tarnish that.
We’ve dealt with this issue countless times and have discovered the secret to how you can create the perfect quiz idea that will not only draw in your audience but also keep your brand integrity intact.
Step 1: Define your audience in 1 or 2 words. Break it down until you can describe your audience in one or two words. For example “Business Owners” or “Entrepreneurs” or “Marketers”
Step 2: Fill in the title template. The template is “What Kind of (Blank) Are You?” or “Which Type of (Blank) Are You?” where the blank is the title of your audience. Check out the screenshot below for an example in action, “What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?” from Marie Forleo.
Now you’ve got a title that is relevant to your audience, has strong appeal, and stays on brand.
The Quiz Questions
The next step in a quiz is to create the questions you’ll ask people to help them discover their personality outcome. Quiz questions are where the real magic happens, because it’s where you give your quiz takers the opportunity to talk about themselves, and because people love to talk about themselves it’s a totally unique chance to establish a connection with people so they’ll want to opt-in to your list at the end of the quiz.
After working on 1000’s of quizzes, I’ve got three rules to follow for writing quiz questions.
First, write to one person. A quiz is a one-to-one medium, meaning that it’s just you and the quiz taker talking when they are answering the questions. This is fundamentally different from what we’re used to as marketers where most things we create, like blog posts and videos, are designed to be consumed by a large audience, not just one person.
This can be a gigantic advantage, but not if you write like you are talking to a crowd. Instead you should write to one person, and ideally, you write to a real person and send them the quiz when you’re done, asking them if it sounds natural to them.
Second, write 7 questions. This will take your quiz takers two minutes to complete, which is exactly the right amount of time to get them engaged with the content and curious to see their results, but not so long that they’ll get bored and leave.
Third, write text questions with image answers. This is the optimal format for quiz questions and one of the major breakthroughs that made Buzzfeed quizzes really take off in the first place. The reason it works better is that images make the quiz feel like a game and they are so much more expressive than text could ever be, so you’ll establish a stronger connection with the quiz taker through the images.
The Quiz Opt-In Form
Once someone finishes answering the questions of your quiz they’ll be presented with an opt-in form in order to see their results. I’ve got two must-do’s for how to write the copy on this opt-in form in order to achieve the famed 50% conversion rate that quizzes boast.
#1: Tell people they’ll see their results. This might seem obvious, but so many people have been disappointed by lame quizzes that don’t give you your results, or hold your results until you take some further action. Let them know they’ll see their results right away if they opt-in.
#2: Tell people you’ll send personalized recommendations for improvement. We all want to improve - we live in a world that’s obsessed with it. If you promise to tell me that you’ll help me improve based on my unique personality, I’m all in. That’s exactly what your quiz opt-in form should say.
The Quiz Results
Once someone opts-in to see their quiz results they’ll expect to see something great - after all, they just opted in to see this. Here’s how to be great with your quiz results.
Write them in a positive manner. Tell everyone they’re great, because no one wants to take a personality quiz where they tell you personal things about themselves and then you tell them they are not cool. The way to always tell people they are great is to only focus on the good aspects of the result and avoid anything negative.
Write them in a list. Other than quizzes, the most shareable type of content is lists. By writing your quiz results as a list of elements you can combine the two most-shared types of content into one for a giant shareable conglomeration.
Quiz Promotion
Once your quiz is all set up, you have to put it in front of people. We’ve identified three main ways to do this and put them below.
As an Announcement Bar
Announcement bars are very popular because they bring attention to content (the quiz) without being overbearing and annoying. I recommend the announcement bar to anyone who’s looking to get leads from their website with a quiz because it’s non-intrusive but also effective enough to get opt-ins.
As a Popup
This option is pretty in-your-face and not everyone likes to use it, but it will get you a ton of new opt-ins. If you’re trying to make the most of your quiz, this is how you’ll want to promote it.
As a Facebook Ad
Quizzes as Facebook ads can scale enormously and bring in leads at an extremely low cost. You can set up a quiz to run as a Facebook ad by emulating the exact same quiz as a post and then pointing to the quiz itself embedded on your site.
In Conclusion
Everyone loves quizzes, they’ve got a unique appeal that is really unmatched by any other type of content. Now that you can use quizzes to also build up your email list they’re truly an unstoppable force.
Ready to try your hand at making one for yourself? Check out interact quiz builder.
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