Tips for marketers: how to use quiz to attract users

Quizzes as a tool to engage site visitors are incredibly popular. Marketers mercilessly use people's cognitive beliefs and their craving for passing tests, quizzes, guessing crosswords and charades. But how to make your quiz go over 20,000 times in just 3 days? We will tell you all the secrets in the article.

On July 5, 2014, a food blog called Food52 published on Twitter a quiz called “What kind of cake are you?”

The purpose of the quiz was to tell blog readers about the appearance of several new cake recipes on the site. After completing the quiz, each participant received their own “type of cake”, as well as a link to familiarize themselves with the recipe for this treat on the Food52 blog.

By the evening of July 7 (just three days after the quiz started), a post with a quiz was viewed more than 20,000 times - it was just a hit!

The success story of the Food52 quiz is not the only one of its kind in recent times. Over the past six months, quizzes are gaining popularity and are increasingly being distributed across the Internet.

Content marketers are also actively involved in this process, however, compiling and conducting a quiz that will succeed is not so simple.

To facilitate the task and get you acquainted with the mysterious world of quiz and quiz, I prepared some tips that were accumulated as a result of analysis of more than 1,500 quiz of different brands that I helped to create.

In addition, I will introduce you to three successful examples of content marketing quiz, and in the end, we will discuss various distribution methods that will help to attract as much traffic as possible for your quiz.

So, let's begin

Part one: How to create a quiz that is intriguing?
Here are a few key points to keep in mind when working on a quiz.

Choose a suitable topic . Before you start work on a quiz, you need to figure out what it will be about, what is its main idea. Some companies will not think about the answer for a long time, for example, for a blog about dogs, the quiz “What kind of dog are you?” Will be an excellent topic, but it happens that the object is not so obvious. Here are some tips to help you decide on a topic:
Build on your audience’s knowledge.Create a quiz for a specific group of people. Trying to reach all users is a bad idea. If you publish a quiz, first of all, for those people who are interested, the probability of success will be much higher, even if there are not many such users.
Address one person. Be guided by the user who really will like your quiz, and write for him. So, your message will look friendly and will be written in easy language. And if you can’t come up with a person who will be interested in your quiz, then maybe you should reconsider this idea?

Come up with a headline that can't be resisted

A quiz header is one of its core elements. If you write anything horrible, you will push away those who could pass your quiz, and the quiz will be doomed to failure. The good news is that there are special headline templates that are well received and motivating you to click on a link with a quiz:

“Really”: “What do you really know about the Football World Cup?” This is just a test that tests your knowledge about this issue, but, it’s worth adding the word “really” or “really”, how it turns into a challenge, and no one can retreat without accepting it.
“And what kind of you ... ..?”: “And what kind of cake are you?” Similar quizzes are based on the traditional Myers-Briggs personality test, you just need to replace personality types with types of something else relevant to your company.
Comparison with celebrities: “Which celebrity hairstyle will suit you?” This template resembles a quiz by definition of personality type, however you can come up with various quiz topics related to your business.

Ponder the questions

It is with the help of questions in the quiz that you can communicate with users and even build a favorable relationship with them. This is exactly the part where the magic of the quiz begins. Unlike many other forms of content, quiz allows you to communicate with each user who passes quiz, as if one on one.

Here are some tips to help you build your conversation competently:

Unleash your inner personality . Or, if you are communicating with users on behalf of someone else, emphasize his personality. The best quizs conquered people with their originality - yours or the person whom you create.
Follow the rule of the pub.Ask questions as if you were sitting with friends in a pub. This rule is named after the Irish Post, a British newspaper that managed to attract the attention of Irish people living in London with a well-thought-out style of quiz questions.
Do not be afraid to ask about personal data. Encourage people to tell you about themselves while answering quiz questions.

Design the results so that they are shared

The results of the quiz are your chance to ensure that users share them, advertise your products, click on the site, etc. Here are a few simple rules that, if followed, will increase your chances of success:

Be positive. We are used to sharing things that put us in a good light on social media. Make the results of your quiz consistently positive in order to increase the likelihood that users will talk about the quiz in the social. networks.
Do not lie. Being positive doesn’t mean dusting the eyes of users. Your positivity should be based on real facts. For example, if you tell someone that he is a truck, emphasize their usefulness and reliability, and not that they are big and dirty.
Design the results so that they are shared.There is a special formula for the quiz to be shared. It looks something like this: “I [my result] [name of the quiz]. For example: “I am a chocolate cake. And what kind of cake are you? ”In the process of creating a quiz, make sure that its results and title look good together when they are shared.

Part Two: Three Ways to Use Quiz

Quiz is a fascinating interactive multimedia element that is not perceived as traditional marketing.

Here are three examples of how companies use quizzes to promote their business.

To attract traffic from social networks,

Quiz can attract a lot of social traffic to your domain, where potential customers will continue their journey through the sales funnel.

The creators of the Food52 quiz, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, have done some serious work in this area. Each quiz result included a link to the recipe, and the quiz entailed thousands of clicks back to Food52.com from Facebook and Twitter.



To generate new leads

You can use quotes to collect new contacts by offering to provide an email address before showing the results of the quiz.

A good example of a company conducting a quiz to generate new leads is the Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), a fashion analytics company.

WGSN created a quiz called “What is your type of customer?” And shared it with potential customers. The quiz content demonstrates the solutions that WGSN offers to its customer. Before you show results that tell you what your “type of customers” are, you are asked to provide an email address so that WGSN can share a lot of analytic customer information with you.



A similar principle can be used in another business - just change the call to action and you're done.

To collect valuable visitor information,

Quiz Analysis will help you get extremely useful visitor information. Having understood what kind of people come to your site and what their interests are, you will be able to offer content in the future that will be useful to your audience.

A good example is Zlien, a site that helps artists get paid. They created a payment quiz and shared it on their blog. After the quiz passed several hundred times, analytic data showed what caused the readers difficulties, and Zlien used this information to create new articles on these topics in order to educate his readers.

Part Three: How to Spread Your Quiz

Once you have created the perfect quiz suitable for your marketing tasks, you need to advertise it so that users begin to take the quiz. There are 4 easy ways to do this.

On your website or blog, the

Quiz can be placed on any page, as well as YouTube videos. When a quiz is located on your site, all shareings, links and comments are made on your domain, and you do not risk losing users in the abyss of social networks.



On Facebook

There are two different ways to distribute quiz on Facebook, and each of them has its own advantages:

In your chronicle.Sharing quiz in your Facebook chronicle is the easiest way to share it. All you need to do is select a picture (or take one of those used in the quiz) and share it with a link to the quiz on your blog or on the quiz page.
On the user tab. If quiz is a permanent component of your Facebook page, you can embed it in a user’s tab. My favorite example is UCDavis. They embedded the quiz “What kind of famous landowner are you?” On their student’s page so that their potential students can feel how close they are to the school.



On twitter

The distribution formula of your quiz on Twitter works the same as in the Facebook chronicle. This is useful if you are using an image that gives a visual representation of your quiz. Share the quiz on Twitter on a weekday in the middle of the day, and then do it two more times over the next three days, and don’t do it anymore.



In the email newsletter

you can talk about quiz with the help of an email newsletter that will attract users to your site. Give the link leading to the page of the site, in which there will be only a quiz and nothing more.

In the end ...

Food52 managed to attract 20,000 users in three days using quiz - and you can do the same on your site!

Creating a quiz that will be popular is not easy, but one day you will realize that quizzes are part of content marketing and can be used as a new way to interact with customers.