How to Create a Marketing Quiz for Lead Generation

Marketing is more than just creating awareness about your business. If it were that simple, then all you would need to do is to generate attention in order to create success.

Your business exists to solve a problem. In order for you to find and connect with customers, there are two elements of awareness that are really important to the equation:

1. Does the customer know that they have this particular problem?
2. Does the customer know that your business can solve this problem?

Most businesses go straight to the second point — and the result often amounts to “shouting” about your business to an audience that doesn’t care.

But the first point is what can get you in the door. It can open the conversation, and starting building the trust that you need to ultimately lead a customer to choose your product or solution.

A quiz can be a great instrument to achieve this. Let’s unpack this a little and see how these things work together.

Awareness of the Problem

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that the customer doesn’t truly understand their own problem. But sometimes we can’t see that we’re struggling with something, even when it’s right in front of us. Often, it’s more about a lack of clarity. It might manifest like so:

• The customer is getting “stuck” or encountering a “roadblock”
• A process has stagnated and is no longer effective, or
• Something has changed and what was working before doesn’t work anymore.

In any of these cases, it might not be blatantly obvious to the customer — just a feeling that something’s “off.” If they can’t articulate what’s wrong, it’s very hard for them to understand the solution they need.

Awareness of the Solution

If you can help someone gain awareness of the problem they’re having, then you can put yourself in a position to offer the solution to them. You can’t get all the way to a sale yet — you have to build trust in order to achieve that. But a customer who’s on the right track:

• Understands the parameters of the problem
• Can articulate the problem as it applies to their situation
• Can see what success looks like once the problem is solved.

At this point, you can help them “map” their problem to your solution. Helping a customer see potential solutions (yours!) can make them aware of the problem they’re having, and can even give them ideas about next steps to take. What’s more is that you’ve actually helped them in the process — which builds the trust you need to earn a transaction.

This is what content marketing is, in a nutshell.

1. You earn trust by helping someone.
2. You are the logical next step when they’re ready to pay.

Why Quizzes Are Good for Content Marketing

A quiz can be the perfect starting point to help customers understand the problem they’re having. Let’s look at why that’s the case — and how to implement a strategy for your own business.

Quizzes are good for generating leads for one simple reason: People like to find out about themselves.

Any good salesperson knows this. Selling is about listening. The urge for marketers is to start telling the prospect about your product or service, and all the great things you can do to help — to keep talking until they relent and make a purchase. That rarely works.

People like to talk about themselves. Let them. If you are truly listening, they will tell you what they need. Maybe not directly, but you’ll be able to discern whether or not you can actually help them. If you find that you can’t, that’s the next best thing to finding out that you can — so you can move on and not waste time trying to convince someone who’s never going to become a customer.

But if it’s a match — and the customer can see it clearly — again, you’ve helped them. You’ve earned trust. You now have a leg up on any potential competitor. You are the go-to. And the kicker is that they feel that they’ve come to the decision on their own. That will not only cement the sale, but could lead to advocacy — where customers bring you new customers.

This is how you scale a business. Hand-to-hand selling is slow. Advocacy is an accelerant.

Designing the Perfect Quiz for Lead Generation

A quiz gets people talking about themselves. It puts them in “learning mode” or “discovery mode.” It helps them match their own behavior to that of others. It helps them see their own experience through a different lens.

Of course, like anything in content marketing, the quiz has to be well-designed, well-constructed, and well-presented in order to be effective.

Let’s work backwards to create a really well-designed quiz.

STEP 1: Start with your solution.

Since it’s your business: Let’s start with your solution or solutions. There are two potential cases:

1. You have one solution and you want to find out if a customer is a match.
2. You have more than one solution and you want categorize customers.

STEP 2: Identify the customer outcome.

Now turn to the customer. What are the outcomes they are looking to achieve? What are the results they are seeking? What do they want to achieve? What changes do they want to make? Obviously, this should be tightly matched to your solution in STEP 1.

STEP 3: Create questions that lead to that outcome.

When your solution(s) and the customer outcomes are aligned, then it’s time to design questions that serve both. In designing any kind of assessment, think about what kind of questions lead to a particular outcome that you can measure.

When you turn the process inside-out like this, your quiz will help lead from 3) question to 2) outcome to 1) solution.

Different Marketing Quiz Types and Their Applications

There are different types of quizzes that you can use, depending on what you want to achieve — and what will benefit the user too. Let’s look at how to design a quiz to do both.

I’m going to break this into three different types, using a rubric that I got from Interact (affiliate link). Interact is my preferred quizzing application and the one I use personally (and whenever I can with clients too). They have three different quiz types, each with different uses: Assessment, Personality, and Scored.

Assessment Quiz:

This is a traditional quiz where you are simply testing a total level of knowledge with correct vs. incorrect responses.

• Goal for User: Test their knowledge about a particular topic.
• Goal for You: Assess product fit or to “fork” a funnel.
• Questions: Multiple choice, yes/no, true/false. Each question has one correct answer.
• Results: Measures the total number of correct responses (i.e. “You got 7 out of 8 correct”)
• Practical Uses: Good as a focused first instrument. It can help you determine what else the customer needs — for instance, which email lesson sequence to place them in (e.g. beginner or intermediate). Works best as a rapid-fire test of knowledge or terms. Questions should be focused and somewhat similar to one another so that the resulting score can measure properly.

Personality Quiz:

This is a quiz that puts respondents into different category types so they can better understand themselves or their needs.

• Goal for User: Matching to what others do/think.
• Goal for You: Customer selection by profile type (i.e. Is the customer a good “fit” or not?)
• Questions: Focused on behaviors, actions, opinions, or feelings.
• Results: Puts customer into “buckets” by profile types that you define (i.e. “You are savvy…”)
• Practical Uses: This type of quiz is really popular, because they are fun and focused on the user’s feelings. In other words, there are not really “correct” answers so there’s no pressure on the user. Works best when you have a really detailed result at the end for the user. It’s the most important part of this type of quiz, so take this as an opportunity to really showcase and underscore your expertise and why you are able to make these determinations for people.

Scored Quiz:

This is a quiz that’s kind of a blend between the other two — it puts respondents into different ranges based on weighted responses.

• Goal for User: Find a range where you fit: Level of expertise, savviness, readiness.
• Goal for You: Assess a level of readiness, product fit, or pricing level.
• Questions: Multiple choice; each answer is scored/weighted.
• Results: Score ranges (i.e. 0–4, 5–9, 10–15) that gives a different recommendation.
• Practical Uses: Good for more advanced applications, where you are really trying to drill down into a particular set of issues rather than just testing rote knowledge. Works best when you can integrate some conditional responses into the quiz to make the experience more personalized. This shows that you have a full understanding of the issues and what to look for, building trust with the user in the process.

Each of these three quizzes has their own application — which one you use depends on your goals. Let’s turn to the final section now, with some overarching principles for any marketing quiz you create.

Four Principles of an Effective Marketing Quiz

In using a quiz to generate leads, user flow is critical. It needs to serve the user first and foremost, and get them to their result as quickly as possible.

1. Concision. Stick to multiple choice, yes/no, and true/false questions. This isn’t research; no nuanced or complicated questions. Keep it moving. Your respondents don’t know you yet, so they’re not going to give you a lot of time to get to the point. You want them to be able to finish the quiz quickly.
2. Conversion. Ask for the respondent’s name and email at the END of the quiz. At this point, they’ve invested the time in taking the quiz, and they want their results. They are much more motivated to opt-in at this point in the process. Remember the goal is to get them on your list, into a lesson sequence, or ready them to purchase a product.
3. Conclusion. The result is the most important part to the user. You really have to deliver on this point. What’s the next step for the user? What can they do with the information they just learned? Tailored to their result, send them to a landing page or where they can learn more, give them access to a relevant module in your online course, or give them an ebook that helps them solve their particular issue.
4. Compliance. Good marketing is ethical marketing. Make sure that you have clear permission to add someone to your email marketing list. While this was always a good practice, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now enforceable, with stiff fines for non-compliance. Here’s more on how GDPR applies to your email list in particular.

Whichever quizzing platform you choose, stick to these principles and you’l have a very effective instrument for growing your email list. As I said above, I use Interact (affiliate link) — mainly because it’s in line with the four principles above. Their quizzes have a rapid user flow, are organized really well, make it easy to link to landing pages, and have GDPR-compliant checkboxes too.

Branching Logic

There are a number of quizzing products out there, and I’ve tried a bunch of them. Interact is the easiest one to use, with a really great visual interface for branching questions that is unlike the way that the other platforms function. I didn’t really want to get into comparisons between the different quiz platforms — the focus of this post is just to show you why and how quizzes can help align you and your potential customers.

Give it a try and see for yourself! Sign up for a free account here: Try Interact

Again, full disclosure — this in an affiliate link, which means that I might earn some money for this endorsement. However, I use Interact myself, so it’s a genuine recommendation.

Happy quizzing! Hit me up in the comments with any questions, suggestions, or — better yet — your successes!

Originally published on May 29, 2018 by Michael Boezi, How to Create a Marketing Quiz for Lead Generation.