How To Conduct a Quiz in 6 Simple Steps

You’ve probably already got the primary areas of content marketing covered. You may have a blog you try to contribute to regularly, and you might even create whitepapers and eBooks to boost your content marketing strategy. If you’re really adventurous, maybe you even throw an occasional video or infographic into the mix.

Quizzes aren’t entirely going under-the-radar, however. They’re being put to use cleverly by larger brands and websites like Red Lobster and ZGallerie.

It’s smaller businesses that are realizing now is the time to catch up and start creating interactive quiz content of their own.

As with anything new in the business world, it can be daunting to branch out and take on quizzes as part of your marketing strategy.

To make it less of a challenge, we created a comprehensive 6-step guide, highlighting everything you need to know how to conduct a quiz that will consistently grab your audience’s attention and shift the way you’re marketing and capturing leads.

How to Conduct a Quiz – Step 1: Get to Know Your Audience

This isn’t a step that only pertains to creating quizzes. Any truly engaging content that’s going to drive leads needs to be relevant to your audience. This is perhaps one of the most important things any content creator or marketer can understand.

Take a look at the Luxus Drafthorse graph below which shows how the use of automation for personalized content marketing is driving higher revenues at lower costs:

impact of publishing systems on the cost and complexity of content operations

Consider the following graphic from OHO Interactive, showing how important personalization is versus how much content digital marketers feel is actually tailored to the audience. There’s quite a gap present here.

personalization

According to the Aberdeen Group, if you personalize your content you can improve click-through rates by as much as 14%, and conversion rates by up to 10%.

personalized emails

You’ll have to accept that no matter how entertaining or witty your quiz is, you’re simply not going to be able to reach every single person. So instead, think about who you’d like to target ideally. The more specific you can be with the details, the more likely your quiz is to resonate.

The VentureBeat chart below highlights personalized emails, although it’s still relevant to any marketing effort, including quizzes.

impact of personalization

Understand not only who this ideal target is, but also how you’ll reach them and what about the quiz will be compelling enough to convince them to share their information with you (which is, after all, the point of a lead capturing quiz).

The best means of understanding your audience is not just research, but also developing targeted personas. Ask your employees and coworkers for ideas, and take time browsing through your existing content to create personas. Look at your social media channels and see where conversations are happening. Look at blog post comments and shares. You have the information you need to create a background for your quizzes if you know where to look.

You can also look at your competitors’ content and social channels. Gauge how people are receiving information, what they’re saying about it, and what they seem to be most engaged with.

Step 2: Come Up With a Topic and Title

This is where you need to focus the majority of your creativity. 80% of decisions made by consumers as to whether or not to click on something are based on the title.

If you don’t have a title that draws in your targeted audience it doesn’t matter how witty your questions are, or how insightful the results. You have to make sure the title is attractive, is going to draw your audience in, and is also short and to-the-point.

This isn’t an area where you should try to be obscure or so clever people don’t understand what your quiz is getting at. There are a couple of tried and true options that tend to work well for quiz takers:

  • The “which are you” quiz: This quiz title style is just what it would seem. You’re guided through a series of questions to determine which type of personality you are. You’d likely be amazed at how many ways this type of quiz title can work. You can show users what type of personality they have. It’s a remarkably simple-yet-effective title style.
  • The comparison quiz: These are most often used to compare your audience to various public figures. It can be anyone the audience would find entertaining or amusing to be compared to.
  • The “how much do you know” quiz: This is more of a traditional quiz style. You’re asking your audience to gauge how much they know about any particular subject. It’s much like those pop quizzes we all used to take in school, except when you’re creating this type of marketing content, you want to make sure you’re not leaving users with a negative or inadequate feeling. This type of quiz can be a bit trickier to master, because the goal is to ensure the questions are challenging enough to make users feel like they’re accomplishing something, without making it so hard it pushes their ego to a negative place.
  • The “really” quiz: All of us just know we’re destined to live somewhere else, have another career or just be something different than what we “really” are. This is a popular concept with many marketing quizzes. They show insight about yourself. Users answer questions that then lead to a result of who or what they’re really meant to be.

Need a little title inspiration? Take a look at the interesting graphic below, which highlights some of the most popular Buzzfeed quiz titles.

Step 3: Crafting Questions

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re doing well. The title is an incredibly significant factor in whether or not your quiz will meet the objectives you’ve set forward.

Once you get to the point of crafting questions, there are a couple of important concepts to keep in mind.

The first is to keep them short and sweet. People taking a quiz they found on social media aren’t going to dedicate more than a couple of minutes to the task. Don’t create lengthy or complex questions that are going to leave your audience scratching their head or becoming bored.

Another crucial element of good quiz questions is infusing your brand’s personality. Keep it light, keep it brand-focused, and keep it conversational.

While quizzes are meant to be fun, they’re also meant to be a useful marketing tool, so consider crafting questions that can be used as a data analysis mechanism for your future marketing activities. Also, create questions that are going to easily lead to a result which is positive, but also related to your business.

Step 4: Write The Results

When you’re writing the results for your quiz, it’s about creating a sense of balance.

If you’re creating a quiz that can potentially produce a negative result, make sure you let your audience know they haven’t done too well in a positive way. People aren’t going to continue on and share the quiz or continue to the CTA if they feel inadequate or embarrassed by their results.

The language you use can have a big impact when you’re creating the quiz results. Be positive and encourage quiz takers to feel good about themselves even if they don’t end up with the optimal result. For example, if someone receives a “Beginner” result at the end of their quiz, you should give them some advice and let them know you can help them improve rather than drawing attention to their weaknesses.

Marketing is all about emotion, so you never want to evoke any sort of negative emotion in your audience.

The graphic below from Buffer highlights the most commonly evoked emotions in viral marketing campaigns:

viral images and positive feelings

If you’re creating quizzes with certain formats such as the “Which Are You” one, you obviously won’t face these issues which is why these formats can be so convenient for lead capture.

Step 5: A Call-to-Action

The purpose of your quiz is not only to generate attention, but also (more importantly) to capture leads. You want your users to opt-in to your mailing list, or perhaps take some other next step you’ve defined.

This requires a strong call-to-action. The CTA will be added along with the results, and will come up only after the user has completed the quiz and entered their information to receive results.

Below is an example of requiring users to enter their information before they can see their quiz results in a Conscious Kids Club quiz.

conscious_kids_club_results

You may want to incentivize your audience beyond the quiz results in order to most effectively gain leads. You could do this by offering them the opportunity to be entered in a contest or giveaway, or giving them something such as an eBook for free.

Step 6: Make It Shareable

At the core of any quiz is the hope that it goes viral. We’ve all seen those quizzes that have gotten 20 million views on Facebook, and that’s because they’re designed to be inherently sharable.

Remember this when you’re creating and writing.

Along with a shareable and intriguing title, you should also aim to make results that encourage sharing.

Your audience isn’t going to share results if they aren’t uplifting or they feel like they’re displayed in a negative light. They’re going to share the results of a quiz that makes them feel good or smart, so always keep this in mind. You want to make your users feel like bragging about their results to all their social media followers to increase your reach through positivity.

When sharing via social media, you’ll want to include an image with that is likely to have broad appeal to your audience, and you should include a caption and a shortened link as well.

Conclusion

There you have it—6 simple steps on how to conduct a quiz. This is a formula that works across various industries, businesses, and audiences. It’s one that can easily be used as a template time and time again, either to create completely new quizzes, repurpose old content into fresh quizzes, or create a variety of quizzes around a similar topic.

LeadQuizzes makes it even easier by offering beautiful, pre-designed quiz templates.