Quizzes — The Latest In Effective Marketing Trends

Quizzes and Lead Generation.

Guest Post ByThe Quiz Collective, Inc.

If you’ve worked in marketing for more than ten minutes, you know that generating fresh leads is the backbone of everything that happens in the marketing world. Today I’m going to look at how quizzes – those viral, share-able, pieces of content that just won’t go away, can be turned into lead generation machines that feed the top of your sales funnels.

Quizzes - Communication StyleTo better understand how quizzes for lead generation work, we are going to follow the process of three companies whose quizzes combined to bring in 5,570 new email leads. We’ll look at the exact method each marketer used to formulate these quizzes and we’ll walk away with actionable ways you can create your own quizzes for lead generation.

Step 1. What to make a quiz about

Before you do anything, you need a subject to create your quiz on. To learn more about how this works, let’s meet our three example companies and see how they landed on the quiz ideas that worked so well for bringing in new subscribers.

UNiDAYS: This company is an E-commerce site dedicated to University gear. Their method for selecting a quiz idea was to scour the likes of Buzzfeed and Zimbio to find the top quiz content and use those ideas for themselves. This is also known as the skyscraper technique, which means finding out what’s worked for others and improving on it.

Unless you aren’t on Facebook, you recognize the title “Which Celebrity is Your Soulmate?” – it pops up in one form or another on almost everyone’s newsfeed. I especially like this example because it shows that any quiz can be turned into one that brings in new email subscribers, this is quite literally the same quiz title that’s been used hundreds of times before, but this time it will be used for growing UNiDAYS’ email list – stay tuned to learn how.

Quizzes - WWF Grizzly World Wildlife Fund: This organization is one of the worlds’ largest dedicated conservation-based groups. They work around the world to protect endangered animals and environments. For their quiz, they used something called quiz purposing, which means creating a quiz based on past popular content. In simple terms, the World Wildlife Fund discovered that the most popular articles on their website were about the various animals they were protecting (this was done by looking at Google Analytics). Then they created a quiz where the results led to one of those popular articles.

This method is great because it’s easily replicable on pretty much any site, you just have to look at the top articles and group them into a quiz format.

Viewsbank: This is a website that pays you to take surveys which companies want respondents to. They create quizzes to grow their email list which can then be leveraged into more customers (people who take surveys). The quiz strategy from Viewsbank is based on events. They’ve done Halloween “Which Monster Are You?”, Christmas “What kind of gift giver are you?”, and Valentine’s Day “What Kind of Valentine are you?”

Again, I like this quiz strategy because it’s not very specific to the particular industry – holidays are applicable to everyone and can be adapted to virtually any business application.


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2. How to build out your quiz

The first thing people see when they agree to start taking your quiz are the questions. For a quiz that’s designed to collect new email subscribers, the questions must build up some trust with the people taking your quiz so they’ll be more inclined to subscribe at the end of the quiz. Let’s look at how our three example companies built rapport using questions.

Quizzes - Drink ChoiceUNiDAYS: Following the topic theme of pure entertainment, the questions in this quiz are meant to just be fun. The example here is “What’s your drink of choice?” which doesn’t have much of a direct bearing on the results of the quiz but does work to break the ice and create some conversation. This tactic works to build trust by just having a good time, at the end of the quiz when the opt-in form comes up and asks for an email address, people are more likely to give over their email address because it feels personal.

World Wildlife Fund: The World Wildlife Fund has a different but equally effective technique for their quiz questions. Their goal is to make you start thinking about what you really believe in and what you stand up for. The question below “What’s Your Communication Style?” makes you stop and consider for a minute what your best communication style is. This starts to open your dialogue up and when you are asked for an email address at the end of the quiz it’s not such a big deal.

Quizzes - ValentineViewsbank: This quiz gets really personal, another great way to ask quiz questions. People are surprisingly willing to answer personal questions when taking quizzes online, and personal questions double as an excellent way to build trust with someone you don’t know who is taking your quiz.

3. How to use the quiz for lead generation

After the quiz questions (and before the results) is when the email opt-in form pops up. This is where you get to collect personal contact information from your quiz takers and continue the conversation beyond the quiz into the future. The way you ask for the email address can determine the conversion rate, let’s look at a few prime examples of this opt-in text.

UNiDAYS: The UNiDAYS quiz is all about fun. It’s lighthearted from the start and the quiz questions are enjoyable. The call to action reflects this theme by asking for an email address in a simple but direct way. This fits with the general idea of the quiz, which is perfect, and led to a very strong conversion rate.

Conversion rate: 68.5%

World Wildlife Fund: This quiz integrates a contest with the email capture form. The main call to action still references the fact that the lead capture form comes before the results, so the person should put in their email address to see the results, but since there is a skip step that’s not always enough to entice someone to input an email. This quiz has a contest attached to subscribing, it’s not a big contest (a Patagonia jacket is worth about $100), but it gives some level of extra incentive beyond the quiz results.

Conversion rate: 39%

Quizzes - Results ViewsbankViewsbank: This one is interesting. Viewsbank is a site that pays people to take surveys, and you have to be a member to take those surveys and make money. Their quiz asks for an email address in return for showing the results and getting your own personal invite to Viewsbank. This is a very direct tie-in to the product behind the company producing the quiz, but it turned out to be effective in this case.

Conversion rate: 81%


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4. How to write quiz results that get shared

When someone inputs their email address (or if they choose to skip that step), they are then taken to the quiz results. This is your very first interaction with a person who has given your company their email address, and it is important to building the type of connection that can lead to long-term customers. There is a lot of pressure here to make a good impression on new quiz takers, let’s see how our example companies handled that stress.

UNiDAYS: As you can see below, there’s not much to this quiz result besides a picture and some share buttons. This is on purpose. UNiDAYS primarily targets young people, who are active on social media. The quiz results, which tell you who your celebrity soulmate is are all very popular and attractive celebrities. Getting a well-known celebrity as your quiz result is like a badge of honour for these University students, and sharing those results is the primary objective. That’s why the results are limited to a large image and the ability to share.

Quizzes - Lead Generation EmailWorld Wildlife Fund: The quiz results from The World Wildlife Fund have the primary objective of getting quiz takers to continue interacting with the website. There are two large orange buttons that point to “learn more about Grizzly bears in Alaska” and “learn more about grizzly bears” These buttons provide an easy and natural opportunity to continue engaging with The World Wildlife Fund, which is exactly what they want.

Remember, because quizzes get shared so much on Facebook and Twitter, the people taking them are often complete strangers to the brand behind the quiz. There needs to be some sort of connection really soon after the quiz to connect people to the brand, and articles about bears are the perfect way to achieve that.

Viewsbank: This quiz wants to reach as many people as possible, and the main way it gets traffic is through social shares. They take a short and simple approach to getting shared, with a very brief description that’s uplifting. Sometimes shorter is better like this scenario where what really matters is the result title more than the full description.

5. Beginning the customer connection via email

After the quiz is all said and done, you have a stranger’s email address and the permission to email them. The key to beginning a successful relationship with this person and eventually converting them into a paying customer is to have a smooth transition into an email connection.

There is a ton of pressure put on marketers to bring in leads all the time, that’s just part of the job. When emerging technologies like quizzes can help with generating new subscribers, that’s an amazing thing.

Phone chats are always free – 1-888-502 3523 or contact me here!


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Engagement — 4 Quick and Easy Steps

Encouraging engagement, of some type, is what every marketing campaign is ultimately about. Unfortunately, many campaigns miss the mark by forgetting that the message should be less about the information of your features, and more about the emotional relevance and benefit of your widget or service to your target audience.

As such, when you are writing to your audience — e.g. a prospect or someone who is higher up the food chain and who is extremely busy — it is important to engage with your best storyline.

This can easily be done with a simple exercise and if you are reading this, you are in luck; sign up here for an online complimentary mini-coaching session on copy-boarding. This is for new clients only and is about 1-hour in length.

That said, it is often a challenge to develop what you want to say without is sounding like a cold-form-letter.

Engagement Matrix

Encouraging Engagement Like A Professional

Tim Ferriss (the number one business podcaster) shared this simple template in an interview:
1st paragraph: “I know you are very busy and get a lot of emails so this will only take 60 seconds.”

2nd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences about who you are and how that’s relevant to the person you’re contacting.

3rd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences with a specific question the recipient can answer quickly.

4th paragraph: “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply. Even a 1-to-2-line response will make my day.”

Engagement

Encouraging Engagement Old-School Style

Note this could also work if you picked up the phone and called. This seems to be a dying art as many would rather sens an email or text message.

I believe it is because people like to think things through before they speak.  Additionally, they like to hear from other thinkers. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think, but doing that via a call can be scary for some.

So off to the email engagement campaign, and HubSpot’s Barry Feldman suggests “prompting your audience with one of the following ‘What do you think?’ strategies:

  • Probe their personality. Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or weigh in on something.
  • Play the “test your knowledge” game. It’s irresistible.
  • Post a poll. It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook. In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
  • Respond to my email. Email from brands are bound to ask you to click-through to read, watch, and try or buy something, but how often do they simply ask you to write back? I find this be an enormously engaging strategy and have seen it work for my brand and many others. Notice I wrote, “Respond to my email,” not “our email” or “this email.” A human-to-human first-person approach will be the engaging way to call this play.
  • Just ask. Interactivity 101: simply post a question. Whether done so in a social stream, blog post, online group or community, or on a Q&A site such as Quora, I’ve witnessed asking followers relevant, provocative, and timely questions create some of the most engaging and thought-provoking social media activity of all.

Learn how to write more compelling content with a personal copywriting and copy-boarding session, or contact me directly for a chat.


 

A Conversation Is Always The Marketing Goal

A conversation is not often spoken about, but at the end of the day, it is crucial to the overall goal of every campaign.

Internet marketing campaign goals require thorough planning. Be specific when you decide on your marketing goals, objectives and strategies to build a winning marketing campaign.

A Conversation in a Natural Language
Quote From Joshua Keiser at Capco

A Conversation Equals An Engagement Moment

It’s not enough to reach people, you have to engage them with high-quality, informative, interesting, and most importantly, emotionally-engaging content. Many try to get views, and views are good, however, engagement is a way to tell how good your content is at answering your target audiences’ most important questions. Or it can show you how well you are distracting your target audience from their biggest headaches (by entertaining them.)

“Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.” ~ Boris Groysberg & Michael Slind in Leadership Is A Conversation

Some common engagement measures:

  • Pages per visit
  • Average time spent per visit
  • Bounce rate
  • Social actions (likes, shares, comments)

A Conversation Equals A Touch-Point Conversion

I reject any notion that content marketing shouldn’t demonstrate a return on investment. As such, conversion has to be an important goal for any content marketing program. The only reason to execute a content marketing program is to drive business outcomes. And those outcomes come in the form of actions taken by the readers you are attracting. And while they may not be direct sales conversion, they should be conversions from one stage of the buying process to another.

Some common conversion metrics:

  • Newsletter Subscriptions
  • Registrations to gated content
  • Clicks to your “Buy Now” button (or “chat now” or “call now”)
  • Leads from your track-able 1-800 number
  • Visits and conversions on other landing pages

A Conversation Is The Key To Success in Online Marketing

A Conversation and Facebook LikesLastly, I wanted to point out that many confuse their online-messaging with online-postulation. In other words, many try to tell their social-media/advert/website/email reader gobs of info believing that they are passing along the important information; forgetting that a conversation should be a natural two-way engagement.

Unfortunately, you can only provide so much info before people will tune out, so, make your conversations “emotionally-meaty”, speaking to the potential benefits and not the features. You will find that your conversion (and engagement) rate will dramatically increase when you do!

So, let’s have a chat about your marketing conversations!

The Secret To Understanding Why People Buy

The secret to “knowing why” is powerful. In fact, for the most part, sales and engagement are strongly driven by knowing the “why”.

Scientific Marketing

The Secret To Scientific Marketing

We’re creatures of habit and studies of human nature strongly suggests that some people still replace unknowns with what they “feel” sounds right to them, rather than accept that it is just unknown. The anxiety of the unknown drives our feelings-centre in our brains and this is why some people say, “I feel [whatever].” when looking to make a decision about what the choose to believe. It is well-known amongst the scientific community that in human nature, we replace info, logic and reason (a.k.a. research and facts) with the info that may not be correct.

I mention all this as this is not psychological, but biological. Our brain has regions that do certain & specific things. One region, the NeoCortex, only understands info, logic and reason; it has zero emotional capacity. Another region, the AlloCortex (a part of the brain’s limbic system) has zero capacity for info, logic and reason and only understand emotions; this is why we use the verbiage “feel” when describing why we did something. “…I felt it was right…”, “…this purchase feels right…”, “…no thanks, that does not feel right…”, etc.

And while our NeoCortex can influence our actions, 100% of all decisions are from the limbic system or predominantly, the AlloCortex region.

I have covered this before but in this post-factual world — whether you are dealing with the politics of a debate on social media or a marketing campaign — it is important to know the secret of what will influence and eventually convert a person to engage you.

The Secret Of Target-Awareness In Marketing

Funnel Timing ThumbA place to start (always) is understanding the awareness of your target audience. Awareness is key to producing the right message at the right time, as without your target knowing that they have a problem, your solution holds zero value. This holds true for every stage of the awareness funnel.

In that awareness-funnel, there are five stages, the last being that your target is ready to buy from you. Those stages are:

  1. Not Aware
  2. Problem-Aware
  3. Solution-Aware
  4. Provider Aware
  5. Fully Aware

If you want to learn more about how to create conversion-driven copy for your marketing collateral or website, sign up for my limited-time complimentary one-on-one “Start Your 2019 Marketing Off Right Master Class”. This offering is only being offered in January this year, so hurry as there is less than 30-days to go!  Reserve your time slot here!

Top 5 Ways Marketing Professionals Help Your Business

Here Is Another Top 5 List To Help Your Business Grow!

Marketing ProfessionalsOkay, this will be a bold statement: “Marketing professionals are the unsung heroes of the business world.” There I said it. There is no glory, no fanfare, and no one — for the most part — understands what we do to help their business.

I am hoping to change some of that with this post!

So, Why Do Marketing Professionals So Often Get Ignored?

Marketing Professionals Know No Customers Equals No BusinessIn today’s world, the act of marketing often gets confused with sales, and while the act of sales is important and ultimately the end result, they are two very different methodologies.

Many businesses operate based on “sales-out-the-door” — and they should — as, without sales, there would be no business. However, what is driving the lead conversions to the sales team is the creative methodologies of your marketing team.

That all said, here in the information age — as it has been for hundreds of years before — the way business marketing is done can be the difference between success and failure in bringing in quality prospects to whom to sell your service or widget.

Marketing Professionals Feeling Ignored

Marketing Professionals Know That It Has Always Been This Way!

In fact, today’s funnel has been completely flipped on its head, finally giving validity to the power of not only the deliverance of leads but the deliverance of good, qualified leads that allow you to close the sales process faster.

That said, the biggest fault has also fallen upon the shoulders of your marketing team.

“A salesman’s mistake may cost little. An advertiser’s mistake may cost a thousand times that much. Be more cautious, more exacting, therefore. A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your trade. Mediocre advertising affects all of your trade.” ~ Claude Hopkins in Scientific Marketing

Marketing Professionals - New Marketing Funnel
Click For Larger Image

Today’s purchasing funnel is now 75% marketing and 25% sales, whereas even as recent as 15 years ago — circa 2002 — ‘sales’ was the dominant focus to drive business at 60% sales and 40% marketing.

Here is my Top-5 list for how we marketing professionals can help your business.

#1 – We Know Why People Make Decisions…

Trendsetters like Claude Hopkins or Simon Sinek know that when you market to the “emotional-why”, you are marketing directly to the part of the brain that makes a decision. This ‘direct response marketing’ methodology is used by 100% of today’s successful businesses such as Apple, Inc..

#2 – We Focus On The Perspective Of The Buyer…

There have been many times when I have seen marketing that is all about the features. Unfortunately, it is little about the benefit. You have the best widget or service, or you claim to have a low price, you may even claim to have all the right colours & all the right sizes — and within your message, it was forgotten that all the prospective buyer wants to know is how you will solve their problem or fix their need. Remember, benefits sell; features don’t!

#3 – We Deliver Better, More Qualified Leads…

The shorter the cycle, the faster you can grow. Good marketers deliver leads to your business. The ones that are qualified can then be given an offer from the sales team. Quite often businesses have their sales teams out there trying to market, but they do it like salespeople. Some will be successful, but the majority will falter. Today’s discerning customer has more direct access to your competition, and the bigger the impact, the deeper the relationship must be! Simply, driving better/more qualified leads to your sales team will bring in your profits faster.

#4 – Brand Continuity…

All us marketers say that consistency is important, but “why” is it important? Brand continuity affects what people think about your company. People are emotionally driven to buy and as such, an inconsistent brand will not drive confidence. The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding — whether via words, design, offerings or perspective. That’s why it’s so important to develop standards for brand consistency in your business.

#5 – We Are Professionals At Showing Value…

Price is often pitched as value and just as often, they are not related. There are two aspects to the definition of value: ‘desired value’ and ‘perceived value’. Desired value refers to what customers desire in a product or service. Perceived value is the benefit that a customer believes he or she received from a product after it was purchased. One-hundred percent of all generated value is delivered by your marketing team before they even talk to a salesperson.

And there you have it.  If you found value in this post, please share it.

Are you looking for some quick insight and/or need some help? Phone calls are always free. Call Toll-Free throughout North America 1-888-502-3523

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