Here Is a Quiz: Should You Be Doing Quizzes?

“Small Business Stacey” and “Digital Dave” discuss Quizzes and how they can give a huge boost to your content marketing strategy.

Episode Transcript

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology. I’m your host, Small Business Stacey, and today, I’m joined by Digital Dave and we’re going to be talking about a topic that can really give a boost to your content marketing strategy. It’s called quizzes.

Stacey: Now, Dave, I bet a lot of people out there are thinking, “A quiz? That sounds like a four letter word to me. Who wants to take a quiz, right?”

Dave: Quiz is a four letter word.

Stacey: Well, what if I asked you, do you love me?

Dave: Of course.

Stacey: That’s a test.

Dave: Yeah.

Stacey: Another four letter word.

Dave: Is that a quiz?

Stacey: Well, today, we are talking about quizzes. They are a great content management strategy because when people think about content, usually they’re thinking blogs, eBooks, reports, tip sheets, all these things that can take a lot of time and effort to put together. But quizzes bring a great advantage because they can be used for lead generation, they can go viral, and as you see, we’re going to demonstrate some quizzes. They can be a lot of fun.

Dave: Yeah. Actually, I like taking quizzes online. Sometimes, some of them are good, some of them, not so good. I think when we go through this today, we’re going to share with you some ideas that hopefully will help you have some fun quizzes that work well for you. So, what goes into, Stacey, making a successful quiz? What do you think are some of the key things that our listeners should be thinking about if they’re going to be putting quizzes out there?

Stacey: That’s a great question because you don’t just want to slap a quiz out there. Otherwise, you’ll probably get a pretty low response. There are five key things that we’re going to be covering in today’s episode that we feel make a really strong quiz. The first one is the title. So, kind of like when you’re creating an email, I’m always preaching that subject line, subject line because that’s the first thing people are going to see and make an immediate decision to move on or to stay. So, the same thing with the title of your quiz.

Let me give you an example of some titles that can work really well when crafting your quiz. One strategy is to use a quiz title that has the word “actually” in it because when you do that, people view it as a challenge. So, instead of saying, for example, “How much do you know about the Golden State Warriors?” That could be a quiz title.

Dave: A zero.

Stacey: But if you say, “How much do you actually know about the Golden State Warriors?” it’s kind of like a challenge because you think, “Well, I know something. I’m going to prove to you how much I know.”

Dave: I know one thing now. I know their name.

Stacey: We did this really successfully with one of our clients who sells promotional products. We came up with a quiz, How Much Do You Actually Know about Promotional Products? That worked very well for them. So, that’s one type of title that you can use. The other type of title that works really well is Which Blank Are You or What Type of Blank Are You. Now, I know what you may be thinking there. But we mean it in a goodhearted way. We’ve done a lot of these types of quizzes for our clients. Later on in the show, I’m going to be demonstrating one such quiz that we use called Which Hawaiian Shirt Are You, and that worked really well.

Dave: It did. It worked great.

Stacey: People were so curious of what Hawaiian shirt they were. At the end of it, they actually had the opportunity to buy it. So, Which Type of Blank Are You can work really well for a title. Then the third type of title is anything that really has to do with celebrities. What Celebrity Are You or What Personality Celebrity Would You Be because everybody loves celebrities, right?
Dave: Yeah. Absolutely.

Stacey: So, any of those three make a really great title. Dave, if you were to come up with a quiz, what would you have the title be?

Dave: What’s a Good Title for a Quiz. How about that?

Stacey: Throwing him over the edge here.

Dave: You did. That’s my quiz. What’s a Good Title for a Quiz and we’ll choose which one, right?

Stacey: All right. The second criteria, the second important thing to make a successful quiz is to know what type of quiz that you’re going to create.

Dave: All right. So, Stacey, what are some fun types of quizzes or some good types of quizzes that our listeners should be doing?

Stacey: There’s two types of quizzes. There is the personality quiz where we were talking a little bit about that, either what type of celebrity or what type of Hawaiian shirt are you, those are personality types of questions where it really gets into our head. We want to know more about ourselves. Once we do, we want to share that. So, personality quizzes are great for going viral. People like to share those. The other type of quiz is a knowledge quiz where you may test somebody on their skill, their ability, their knowledge. These can be scored with a lot of the software tools out there.

So, it could be How Much Do You Know about X Topic. So, I could come up with a quiz about marketing and people could answer some questions and at the end of it, they would be graded. So, it’s an opportunity to hone your skills and see where you can improve. So, those quizzes do very well as well.

Dave: Okay, awesome. So, I guess my last question for our listeners is what are the tools or what are some good tools out there that people can use to do quizzes online?

Stacey: There are a lot of tools out there. Our favorite that we use internally for our clients at the Small Biz Marketing Specialist, we use a quiz tool called Qzzr. Q-Z-Z-R. The nice thing is that our clients don’t have to then take the time, the effort, the expense to learn the software. We do it all for them. But Qzzr is a great tool because it allows you to set up both types of quizzes we just talked about: the personality quiz and the knowledge quiz. It has a lot of cool features in it and I’m going to also be demonstrating some of the quizzes that we’ve set up for our clients to give you a sense of how those can work for you.

Dave: That’s a great idea and I guess when you show them how we set the quizzes up, maybe show them some of the results for some of the quizzes that we’ve done as well, I think that’ll be very enlightening for them to see the types of numbers of people that have actually taken some of these quizzes. Right?

Stacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. That’s a great point, Dave, because these software tools, especially Qzzr, you can add lead generation on there. So, after somebody completes a quiz, before they get their results, they have to give you their name or email, whatever. You can set it up what contact information. You get a lot of great statistics. So, you actually see your funnel from how many people saw your quiz, how many took your quiz, how many completed your quiz.

You can see actually the answers. If there’s sort of a trend, like if you’re doing a knowledge quiz and you see that certain people are struggling on a certain question, well, maybe you create a piece of content about that. Another great feature of Qzzr is not only can you share quizzes on social media, but you can actually embed them on your website.

Dave: Awesome.

Stacey: So, I know that you like doing that, Dave.

Dave: Awesome. Yeah. Absolutely. You definitely want to put these on your website. We’ll actually show you that when Stacey demonstrates Qzzr right now.

Stacey: All right. Okay. So, here we are inside of Qzzr. This is our dashboard where we have all the different quizzes that we have created for ourselves and our clients. What I’d like to demonstrate for you first is the quiz that we were talking about, which is What Type, What Blank Are You. So, we have a quiz set up, What Kind of Men’s Hawaiian Shirt Are You. But before I show you this, I want to show the viewers how this looks when it’s embedded within a website.

So, our client, KTC Hawaiian, has a website and in a piece of content, they set up a blog post, What Kind of Men’s Hawaiian Shirt Are You. You scroll down and there’s a little bit of information here. Then it opens up and then you can actually take this quiz from within the blog post. So, you can click the start button and then you’re still within the website. So, you never really lose the person. They’re still within your piece of content.

Then at the end upon completing the quiz, they have the opportunity to share it and leave a comment. That kind of a thing. So, you can either use the quiz as it is and post it directly to social or you can embed it within your website. So, I’m actually going to have Dave take this quiz within Qzzr, What Kind of Men’s Hawaiian Shirt Are You, and let’s see how this works for Dave.

Dave: Oh, boy.

Stacey: So, go ahead and take this quiz, Dave.

Dave: Let’s see what kind of Hawaiian shirt I am. All right. So, start. Let’s see. What is your favorite color? Okay. That would be green. What drink best describes you? Oh, wow. Let’s see. Mixed drinks, hard liquor. Yeah, that’s a tough one. Probably have to go with margarita.

Stacey: A margarita man.

Dave: All right. Let’s see. Which kind of music best describes your personality? Well, definitely, let’s see, hip hop, no. Country, no. Jazz, maybe. Headbanger, rock and roll, soft rock, punk, pop, classical, techno. I’m going to have to go with rock and roll on that one. Oh. Uh-oh. Which celebrity would you look like in your Hawaiian shirt? Which celebrity would you look like in your Hawaiian shirt? Oh, boy. Wow. This is going to be a tough one. I’m going to have to go with Jim Carrey. I’m a goofball. I admit it.

If you were a Hawaiian island, which one would you be? I’d be Maui. That’s easy. My favorite thing to do on vacation is go fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, surfing, be a tourist, watch the sunset, go for a walk, run on a bike, play in the water, sit on the beach, hiking, or mountain climbing. Wow. That’s a pretty wide choice. I guess you can’t go mountain climbing if you’re at the beach, but let’s see. Oh, and I missed surfing. So, let’s just say I guess my favorite thing to do is be a tourist.

My favorite time of day is, I’m going to go early morning. When going to a party, I like to wear, oh, boy, I like to wear casual. This is easy. Nothing? Is that why there’s no picture there? All right. So, we’ll do casual. Ah, see, so now it asks me. I can’t get the answers until I put in my name and email, right? So, let’s go ahead and do that, if I could type. Then it says, “What’s the magic here? Dude, whatever style Hawaiian shirt you are, you can get it or pick from 3,000 other ones at KTC Hawaiian. Order your Hawaiian shirt, enter the code ‘shirt quiz’.”

So, not only am I getting the answers to the quiz, I’m getting the opportunity to buy my shirt or a shirt at a discount. So, I’m going to go ahead and hit submit here and here’s my results. My result is I’m the Hang Loose Cotton Hawaiian Shirt.
Stacey: That is so appropriate.

Dave: Yeah. “Super laid back, all about summer fun. Yeah, that’s you, Mr. Fun Guy. But sometimes, your personality flip flops to more aggressive side. No, we don’t think you will be in the boxing ring. You’re quick to blow it off and back to your fun and joking self again.” That’s pretty darn true. I like this one. All right. So, now I can buy my Hawaiian shirt now.

Stacey: Okay. So, there you go. You see how fun and easy these are and when you have them embedded either on social or a website, there’s actually even a share button.

Dave: Oh, wow. Okay.

Stacey: So, yeah. So, you get your results and then you can share it and the quiz. Why I wanted you to take it in here was I wanted to show the stats because you get some really good information on each quiz from within Qzzr. You can see that this has been taken over 6,000 times. Right?

Dave: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Stacey: People spend a lot of time on this, over two minutes. 76% of the people are completing people.

Dave: That’s amazing.

Stacey: 11% of the people took the conversion rate, so went and bought a shirt, right?

Dave: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Stacey: So, talk about pretty much free marketing. This shows how the funnel works, from how many people viewed it, how many people started it, how many completed it, how many shared it. Look. 248 people, or 5% of the audience, shared this.

Dave: That’s cool.

Stacey: Right?

Dave: Yeah. That’s very cool.

Stacey: What great information and here shows you what kind of shirts are the most popular. So, what it looks like, the Beach Chopper is the most popular.

Dave: Wow.

Stacey: So, we have some muscle cool beach men within our-

Dave: That’s pretty funny.

Stacey: … within this audience. So, that’s why using a tool like this … As you saw, when Dave entered his information at the end, that then gets stored in a database. So, then we know that he is this laid back kind of guy and what kind of shirt he likes and we can do very targeted marketing to him. So, this is a great example of a personality quiz. Let me show you an example of a knowledge quiz. So, if we go back to our dashboard, and one of the quizzes we have in here is … Dave, would you rather do How Much Do You Really Know about Hawaiian Food or the one we referenced before, How Much Do You Actually Know about Promotional Products?

Dave: Let’s do promotional products.

Stacey: All right.

Dave: Let’s do something. Let’s do something. I haven’t done this one before.

Stacey: So, we used the word “actually”. It’s like a challenge. How much do you actually know?
Let’s see.

Dave: Probably actually nothing. But let’s give it a try.

Stacey: We’re going to find out.

Dave: Think you know about marketing stuff? Take this quiz and find out how you actually know about swag, giveaways, and promotional items. Oh, I’m in dead trouble here. The largest percentage of people keep promotional products for how long? Oh, I’m going to go with, all right, let’s do seven to 12 months. Okay? What year was the first trade show held? Wow. Ah. I’m going to say that’s probably a long time ago, I’m guessing. I’m going to go with, let’s go with the oldest one here. What percentage of people remember the advertiser of a great promotional product they get? Those are all high numbers. Who cares? That’s a great, great list. Let’s just say 75% because it’s not the low or the high.

Which promotional product do consumers rate as most useful? Well, wow. Calendars, drink wear, caps, USB drives, or pens. That’s a really tough one. That’s a tough question. Wow. Let’s go with, all right, pens, drink wear, calendars. They’re all … USB drives. I’ll go with USB drives just for the heck of it. Where do people keep their promotional products? In the bathroom? Really? I’m going to go with workspace. I think that one, I might have gotten right. Select all that apply. Why do promotional products work? The products are useful, they retain by the recipients, engages the senses, all of these, they’re appreciated by recipients, low cost impression. I’m going to go with all of these because I got a feeling that they are all.

What is the most popular type of promotional product? Again, interesting. Drink wear, writing instruments, bags, calendars, or wearables. Jeez. I don’t know. Bags? What type of convention is very popular for displaying and advertising promotional products? Well, I would say a trade show. Right? Let’s go with that one. Which industry buys the most promotional products? Wow. That’s a tough one. Buys the most promotional products. Let’s go with financial. What percentage of promotional items are used at least once per week? That’s still pretty good numbers. Try 44.

Again, I got to fill this in to get my results. Let’s see what we get. Drum roll. Did I pass? Well, I got to check. I scored two out of 10. I said I didn’t know anything about promotional products. That was my disclaimer before I started. It says, “You didn’t get the top score, but hopefully, you learned some new things about promotional products you never knew before. Just know that when you want your logo on it, the experts at Custom On It,” I guess that’s the client here, “will help you find the perfect products at the right price.” Then obviously, you can order this right here. This is great. It’s a great quiz.

Stacey: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Stacey: Yeah. Actually, it didn’t show it within here, but actually, as somebody is going through the quiz on a live site, it can be set up so as you get them wrong, it will tell you the right answer. So, you were questioning as you were going through.

Dave: That would have been helpful.

Stacey: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Stacey: So, we have other quizzes in here that are set up so actually, on each question, it gives you feedback, whether you got it right or wrong-

Dave: Yeah. That would be great. Yeah. That would definitely be helpful.

Stacey: … so you know along the way.

Dave: Yeah.

Stacey: All right. So, those are two examples of the different types of quizzes that you can set up within Qzzr. All right. We’re back. I had mentioned that there were five important things that you wanted to know about creating a quiz. One was to have a catchy title. Two is to make sure you’re setting up your quiz to either be personality or knowledge based. Three is you want to have the right kind of software, and Digital Dave and I just demoed some different types of quizzes that you can use in Qzzr.

There are some other options out there. Some other ones we’ve used are tryinteract.com and shortstack.com. So, there are a lot of options out there. We just tend to favor Qzzr. The two other things I want to cover to make sure that you know about quizzes, number four is lead capture. We had alluded to this a little bit before, but the whole point of getting people to take your quiz is to use it as lead generation.

Dave: Absolutely.

Stacey: Right?

Dave: Absolutely.

Stacey: So, you want to make sure that before you give them the juicy stuff at the end that you’re getting their name and their contact information. Then to build out a mini funnel because then based on their results, you actually know a little bit about them.

Dave: Oh, absolutely. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Stacey: So, on the Hawaiian shirt quiz, if we know that Bob likes parrots and we know a little bit about of his personality, we can then start marketing some parrot information and content and very targeted kinds of things.

Dave: Bob’s a parrot head.

Stacey: Bob is a parrot head. Absolutely. Absolutely. Number five that you want to know about when it comes to quizzes is you want to make them so they’re shareable. So, when you’re structuring your quiz and you are defining “the answers” of what somebody’s going to be, you want to position those in a positive light because if somebody takes your quiz and it says you’re an idiot, you’re just a failure, go jump off a bridge, they’re not going to want to share it, right? People like to go onto social to brag about themselves.

Dave: Absolutely.

Stacey: Right? So, when you’re structuring your quiz, think about shareability because that’s really important. If you make somebody feel really great about themselves that they just want to go brag, then they’re going to be more likely to share it. So, anything else, Digital Dave-

Dave: No, that sounds like a plan.

Stacey: … you want to add about quizzes?

Dave: It sounds like a plan to me. You should be doing quizzes. There’s no doubt about it. They definitely work.

Stacey: All right. Well, it sounds like we’ve just quizzed them on whether they’re going to do quizzes in their content marketing strategy.

Dave: Absolutely.

Stacey: We’d love to hear what you thought of the episode. Just leave us a comment below. And if you like to get a copy of all of the tools that we use to help our clients get their marketing done, go to smallbizmarketingspecialist.com/marketingtools. That’ll be a great resource for you to know all the different types of tools that you can use to grow your business. Anything else, Digital Dave?

Dave: That’s all I got tonight, Stacey.

Stacey: All right. Have a great day, everybody. Bye bye.

Dave: Bye bye.