Surveys and quizzes are becoming increasingly popular tools for online lead generation. This holds true for both the B2B and B2C market segments. Don’t confuse the two, they have different goals and can be structured quite differently. Traditionally a survey is used to gather information, feedback or opinions. It is used by companies to strategize. Quizzes are used to test the knowledge of the quiz taker and in return to educate and provide solutions. This article will focus on quizzes.
You may be wondering why, or where, to start when considering using quizzes in your marketing. Maybe this article will guide you down the path to creating a simple quiz to generate leads for your business from your website. There are 3 main components to a quiz used for lead generation:
- A topic that interests your visitors.
- The right mix of question formats and information.
- The offer (the value) at the end of the survey.
The other (almost obvious) piece of this formula, is a way to capture names and contact information. There is a little debate on when to capture this information so a little testing should provide you with what works best for your quiz (pre-quiz questions, post-quiz questions).
Why Use a Quiz?
For one, it gives you a chance to re-purpose an already created marketing piece such as a white paper, ebook, report, or helpful guide. Since you already invested the time and effort into publishing a marketing piece you can promote it again using a more personal touch.
What do I mean by ‘more personal touch’? I mean that by using a quiz, you are having an online “conversation” (or interaction) with your site visitor. And we all have it ingrained in our brains that creating a relationship with someone is how to convert them to a meaningful lead (and a sale!). We want them to feel like a friend or think of us as an authority they trust.
Another reason to consider the usefulness of a quiz is to direct someone down the right decision making path. Your quiz could be a series of questions pertaining to your products which ultimately leads to a narrowed down selection. An excellent example I came across recently was a quiz on a travel site which directed me down a path to decide the destination. The offer at the end of the quiz was a travel guide for the country I was matched up with.
Where to Start?
A quiz can be fun or it can feel like school. Your aim should be closer to fun than school so that you aren’t frustrating your site visitors.
With that advice you’ll need to determine the topic of your quiz, keeping in mind what you are offering as value at the end. Ideally you’ll choose a topic that both relates to your offerings and to what your site visitors are looking for. Your quiz needs to answer the questions that your visitors have in mind. You don’t need to be a prophet; a bit of market research or analysis of your sales history should provide some content.
Next, you’ll need to take your content and put it into question form. You should use a mix of multiple choice questions, true/false (yes/no), and ranking a list (assuming you have more than one question). There are other question types but they are essentially the same, you’ll just want to stay away from any text input questions like essays or fill-in-the-blanks (save those types of questions for surveys). As to the number of questions…well that’s tricky. Again we want this quiz to be fun and not feel like school. We also want the visitor to complete the quiz. There is no hard and fast rule about how many questions, it will depend on your content and the level of detail you need to offer the value at the end. My advice is to start with fewer questions and monitor your success rate. Another piece of advice is to sprinkle in some facts to educate your quiz taker; this will reinforce your authority position.
Finally…
When your site visitor completes the quiz you will supply them with something of value. This may be that ebook you published or a buying guide or even how they stack up to others that took the quiz. The biggest decision left is where to capture the quiz takers’ contact info.
- before the quiz?
- after the quiz but before the value?
- after the value?
Again, there is no hard and fast rule to when you should capture contact information. You can test this and compare abandonment rates (the lower the better!).
Conclusion
Consider using a fun quiz for lead generation. It gives you an opportunity to reuse an already created marketing piece, it gives value to your site visitor and it creates an interactive exchange of information leading to a relationship.
Take a moment to review what marketing pieces you have already, pull out some facts and convert them into questions. Place your marketing piece behind a lead capture form and gather some leads for your sales funnel.
If you are ready to try some new content marketing practices and you need assistance with question formulation or landing page development reach out to Caffeine for a free 30-minute consultation.