Guest post by Stefan Debois, the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, an online software tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes and assessments. Besides kitesurfing, Stefan is passionate about the use of technology to build professional relationships with people, at scale. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn 📩
As the year is drawing to a close, it’s time to rethink your content marketing strategy for next year.
What worked? What didn’t? What can we do better in 2020?
Have you ever considered using quizzes in your content marketing strategy? If not, you might miss out on a valuable opportunity—quizzes are effective both in a B2C as well as in a B2B content marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll show you how can easily integrate quizzes into your strategy. But before we talk about the “how”, let’s start with the “why”.
Why use quizzes in your content marketing strategy?
Maybe the question should be: why not? For content marketers, quizzes are not only versatile, they provide a wide range of engaging possibilities when it comes to your brand. Quizzes are engaging, insightful, highly shareable, and - perhaps most importantly - effective lead generators.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into these advantages:
- Engaging. Quizzes have this great ability to engage audiences. In fact, a CMI study found that 81% of the interviewed marketers agreed that interactive content, such as quizzes, grabs attention more effectively than static content.
- Insightful. Quizzes provide your leads with instant feedback. Based on their answers, you can create highly targeted and useful follow-up content for them. And with the right topic and a handful of relevant questions, you can find out valuable information about your target audience. The quiz can - and should be - insightful for both you AND the respondent. You can do this by providing personalized final screens pushing them towards the right product or service based on the answers selected or by sending specific follow-up emails, provided you ask for the email address, of course.
- Shareable. Hello Buzzfeed! People want to share insights about themselves with the world! That’s why quizzes are known to drive loads of social traffic towards your website. They are the perfect tool in your social media marketing mix.
- Profitable. Depending on what products or services your brand features, you could even use a quiz to help drive real revenue! Interactive content such as quizzes generates twice as many conversions as static content. With a lead generation quiz, publish quizzes on your landing pages, pair them up with a lead capture form, and watch as the leads come pouring in to your business.
How to integrate quizzes into your B2B content marketing strategy
To integrate quizzes into your content mix, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel (promise!). For example, Buzzfeed quizzes have become quite popular, and a lot of B2C content marketers have jumped on the bandwagon.
But somehow B2B content marketers missed out, as recent research showed that a staggering 92 percent of B2B companies (midsize professional services companies) didn’t include interactive content on their website.
But there’s quite some evidence out there to prove them wrong:
- A Forrester study found that two out of the top six content sources business professionals prefer to read/use are interactive content tools.
- 81 percent of marketers find interactive content more attention grabbing than its static counterparts.
- 75 percent of marketers use interactive content for education, and 59 percent use it to engage their customers.
So what does this all mean for content marketing?
It’s no surprise that your content should be personalized to your specific audience, but content marketing is shifting to an even higher level of customization. Let’s look at this style of interactive content in-depth and share some ways you can include it in your marketing plan.
Repurpose existing content on your website
Creating a quiz can sound like daunting work, but it’s really all about working smarter, not harder.
Quite often, there’s already a ton of material available to businesses looking to build a quiz on their website. Whether it’s white-papers, well-performing blog posts, landing pages, a YouTube video, or podcast, all this content can be reused or repurposed into a quiz.
Look at the content your brand has already published and/or any upcoming content you’ve planned. Do any complementary quiz ideas pop into mind? If so, add them to your content strategy for a quick win.
EcSell Institute knew this and tapped into this human desire with their Growth Rings Quiz. Their TedX talk on the “growth rings” served as a massive traffic generator. With over 2.3 million views, it attracted a lot of eyes, but it still left a lot of people wondering which “ring” they would fit into and more importantly if and how they could improve themselves. That’s exactly where the Growth Rings Quiz comes in.
It’s these opportunities you should look for in your existing content and attach a quiz to. It moves this traffic further down the funnel.
Personalize quizzes with custom PDF reports
Everyone loves learning more about themselves, both personally and professionally. The Growth Rings quiz focused on providing respondents with in-depth insights into their current work and life experiences using a personalized document based on their answers. That information helped participants dive deep into their professional and personal development.
Providing respondents with a quiz wouldn’t be enough to claim success—EcSell knew that their audience yearned for personalized insight that could better themselves and their businesses, so they provided personalized documentation like the one below!
Image courtesy of Survey Anyplace
Make your quiz interactive and conversational
The very basic concept of marketing is fulfilling a need your audience has. However, there is so much noise online with everyone fighting to help consumers. You need to make sure you stand out with your quiz to cut through all that noise.
That’s exactly what Eneco - one of the largest suppliers of natural gas, electricity, and heat in the Netherlands - aimed to do with its “Calculaadtor,” or “Calculator.”
They wanted to promote their “Electric Vehicle Service Equipment (EVSE)”, a home charger for electric cars. They built this great landing page with a massive amount of information about their product. But there were a lot of ifs and buts whether a home charger would or wouldn’t be beneficial.
So how did they solve this conundrum?
They build a quiz that provided respondents with a calculator that would give them an idea of how much it would cost them to buy a home charger for electric cars, based on their answers.
Participants were treated with a fun, interactive quiz that opened up a conversation with them instead of spewing a massive amount of information at them.
In fact, presenting respondents with this easily understandable quiz helped Eneco collect 1000 leads in six weeks!
Now what?
Quizzes come a lot of forms and shapes, you can use them in your social media to attract traffic, or you can use them as an extension of existing content to help people further down the funnel.
So, do you think quizzes a suitable addition for you content strategy? ✅