Many people consider online quizzes an unproductive waste of time, but there may be more than meets the eye. Big businesses like Disney, Hilton Hotels, Red Lobster, and others take the time to craft beautiful and engaging online quizzes for the audiences like which Disney Dance move you should do or Red Lobster’s which flavor of endless shrimp they are. These businesses are not just creating quizzes for kicks, they are tapping into the potentially viral, lead-generation, customer-converting, SEO-boosting, and data-collecting power of online quizzes.
Not bad, for a piece of content that requires only a few minutes of a customer’s time.
Online quizzes, even the weird ones like Buzzfeed’s “Which Pop Star Should Be Your Best Friend?”, allow businesses and their audience to connect in a more interactive and personal way than a survey or podcast. At its core, online quizzes tap into a customer’s need to know and share themselves in a way that is more insightful than other forms of marketing, like a survey or a blog post.
Online quizzes feature insanely high completion rates (approximately 96% from BuzzFeed surveys), shareability (the average quiz gets 1,000 shares and Buzzfeed can get millions), and revenue (businesses have reported more than $75,000 in revenue from quizzes), online quizzes are marketing content that your business should not ignore.
Quizzes, however, can do more for a business than just “go viral”. They provide data and engagement opportunities from the moment you launch a survey. If you are still on the fence regarding online quizzes, here are five more reasons to convince you that you need an online quiz in your marketing future.
1. Build & qualify your prospective customer list
Online quizzes are a non-disruptive way to direct traffic back to your website or content. This is can be ideal if your business wants to generate interest in a new business or drive renewed interest in a former product or service. For example, if you recently launched a new product, course, or book and wanted to get the word out, you might consider a fun quiz with answers leading back to your website for more details.
Online quizzes are also good for building email lists as well. Since participants are already invested in the process, they have a higher incentive to opt-in for the email. Since participants are already invested in the process, they have a higher incentive to opt-in for the email (around 50% do). Businesses can use that information to provide coupons or other relevant content tailored to their quiz taker’s potential interest.
Online quizzes are more than a lead generation or list-building magnets, however. With a good quiz, you can qualify and direct those leads like a well-trained salesman. Quizzes help customers and businesses determine if a good fit exists or make product recommendations that can shave time off your lead-gen activities.
Examples
- Elephant Pant’s” What Pair of Elephant Pants Are You?” quiz Results: Raised $8,500 in Kickstarter campaign
- Payscale’s “Find Your Inner Purple Squirrel” quiz Results: 1,000+ leads and increased traffic to their offline booth
- SideShow Convertible’s quiz Results: Survey open rate of 80% and $75,000 in extra revenue
2. Educate your customer on important issues
Online quizzes can don’t have to be focused solely on “fun” topics like Which Disney character are you or what pop star would be a good friend (For some reason, it’s Britney Spears for me!). Online quizzes can be used to educate and inform. Successful educationally-theme quizzes have been used to share environmental issues, health information, and even linguistics in an entertaining and engaging way.
Examples
- Red Cross’ “Do You Know How to Swim” quiz Results: Generated 600+ leads for their social media app
- Wold Wildlife Fund’s “Who’s Your Animal Soulmate?” quiz Results: Viewed over 2,000+ views and a 38.5% response rate
- Portland Monthly’s “What’s Your Portland IQ?” quiz Results: 30,000+ views and 2500 shares for a site that normally gets around 500 visits
3. Boost your SEO stats
As mentioned above, quizzes have high completion rates, which translates to three key metrics for better SEO: lower bounce rate, higher time spent on your page, and social shares. Improving these statistics can improve your Google rankings, which boosts your business’s visibility on Google.
4. Get data for future business use
Online quizzes don’t just reveal what your current audience wants, they can be used to predict what your future audience might want. Quizzes can be used to help business owners such as determine if they are a good fit for a loan test our marketing ideas or concepts, or a good target for Facebook advertising.
5. Learn more about what’s going on in your customer’s brain
Online quizzes reveal more than your customer’s interests. They also reveal your customer’s psychographics. Like the term, “demographics”, psychographics reflect differences between one person and another. Psychographics; however, are based on mental differences, such as interests, behaviors, and habits.
Psychographics, a new and growing influence on marketing, help marketers understand customer behavior. As it turns out, there might be a better way to target customers than dividing customers by demographics like a zip code, age, or gender. That way is by psychographics. If a group of customers has more political beliefs in common than age, it might make more sense to target political beliefs in your marketing.
Conclusion: Use Quizzes Wisely To Make a Viral Impact
Online quizzes are definitely a way to get your website traffic. Your quiz has to be engaging, relevant, and entertaining, however, which is the hardest part. Conquering this challenge is difficult, but extremely worthwhile. Quizzes work because in the few minutes a customer gets involved, they are reinforcing a story that is important to a customer, themselves. By helping customers build and share their stories, your business invests in your customer in the process. That investment will be vital in an era where relationships can end with just a click.
