In this hyper-shareable Social Media-driven world, people voraciously search for answers to seemingly innocuous questions. What breed of dog are you? What color is your personality? And of course, which Harry Potter House do you belong to?
Quizzes are one of the most shared contents on all of Social Media – and have been for a while. Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. When you consider the enormous popularity of sites such as Buzzfeed, this begins to make sense.
Online Advertising is changing. Ad blockers are on the rise, potentially causing advertisers up to $40 billion in revenue loss this year. Adding further insult to injury is the rise of the deadly disease, “Banner Blindness”, where consumers are ignoring what they perceive to be advertisements at an increasing level. Clearly, additional strategies to combat these trends are needed.
Savvy Digital Marketing using quizzes to reach audiences allows you to avoid many of these modern-day problems and have proven to be effective tools to monetize. Simply put, if your company is not using quizzes, you’re missing out on a marketing gold mine. Here’s why.
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Taking Advantage of the Social Media-Driven World
A side effect of Social Media is, lowered attention spans. People are simply less likely to engage with content and unwilling to spend more than a few minutes with it. It’s an unfortunate reality that having a “clickbait” title is oftentimes more important than the actual content. With the current trends, it’s more challenging than ever to increase page views for your site.
Quizzes are a unique answer to these modern-day problems, engaging with the audience from the start while being perfectly tailored for lowered attention spans. A well-designed quiz – which can include content ranging from personality tests to surveys to polls – is fun and interactive for the user in a bite-sized, quick to complete format.
Many users, especially those on mobile devices, look for content to fill in the downtime between commercials or while waiting for a friend. Look no further than popular games such as Candy Crush or Clash of Clans, which are designed to be played no more than a few minutes at a time. Quizzes are designed in a similar manner: A well-tailored quiz should take no longer than three minutes – short and sweet, so the user doesn’t feel overwhelmed by a time-consuming endeavor.
The ultimate goal is to get the person to share the results of their quiz to their followers, increasing the number of people viewing your site in a potentially endless chain of shares. Well-designed quizzes hold a high virality – meaning they have a high likelihood of being shared. Quizzes allow you to take advantage of our societal inclination towards virality to increase the page views on your site.
When people share content on Social Media, they typically want to appear either humorous or intelligent to their followers. By designing your quiz results in this fashion – to either make their followers laugh or be impressed – the likelihood of it being shared is increased. In fact, there is a whole industry of freelancers who specialize in writing witty quiz results geared towards increasing page views.
Getting Those Leads
Another important component of quizzes is their effect on garnering leads for your company. Collecting the name, email and other information from interested leads is an essential marketing channel for businesses – and works especially well with quizzes. Why? Showing a lead generation form during the quiz before the results work well – the user is emotionally invested after answering questions and more likely to give their contact information in order to continue onward to their results.
The email opt-in rate, or the percentage of people who give their email through a specific campaign, is critical in Digital Marketing. Quizzes can often get a 40 percent email opt-in rate – up to 20 times the average opt-in rate for all other campaigns.
Of course, there is an art to this; you can’t just blatantly ask for the information. Mandatory lead-in forms to gain access to the quiz results have been proven to drastically lower the user response. In fact, you are more likely to receive an obviously fake email than a real one, as the user simply wants to receive the results of the quiz. Optional lead-in forms offering some kind of benefit – for example, a free consultation around their quiz results – are a much better way to gain user engagement.
Quizzes also allow you to gain information about the customer in real-time in order to better suit their needs. It’s quite simple – instead of guessing what a customer needs, why not simply ask them?
Take, for instance, a customer entering an e-commerce site that specializes in selling sports shoes. In order to more specifically market their products, the company will need to know more information about the customer – are they interested in running shoes, basketball shoes, or tennis shoes? A quiz can be geared towards gathering this information without being too forward with the customer. At the end of the short quiz, a lead generation form collects the data and the marketing team is able to send them much more detailed information tailored to each lead’s taste in shoes.
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Continued Compatibility with Traditional Online Marketing
Quizzes also allow for monetization in the form of in-quiz ads. This is one of the most traditional of ways to monetize and typically works due to the emotional connection that a consumer has to a quiz after spending three to five minutes answering questions.
Hulu has perfected this in the video streaming industry, knowing that consumers are willing to wait the allotted time in order to finish watching their current program. The same works after devoting time to completing a quiz – you’re not just going to walk away before learning which Hunger Games character you are, are you?
Another way to monetize with ads is to include a “call-to-action” button with a link to a relevant item. Banner blindness may be a disease, but with quizzes it is treatable. Going back to the sports shoe example, a link could go directly to a purchase screen for a specific shoe, depending on the results of the quiz. These tend to have great engagement rates from the customers.
Millennials and the rapidly advancing Generation Z are warier than ever of online advertisements. In order to jumpstart your Online Marketing, an interactive, engaging quiz experience can be the best medicine – for both the customer and the marketer alike.
