Many business owners marvel at the sheer popularity of Buzzfeed’s quizzes, which often get thousands of social media shares and generate buzz for their sponsors.
A quiz is a great way to break up your other pieces of content, as well as provide some interactivity to your website and online brand presence. If you break it down, there are several components of a quiz that make it successful as a piece of online content from a marketing perspective. It can drive links, shares, traffic, and brand awareness.
Some of the important aspects of quizzes include accurate results, an easy social sharing button, and a fun topic that is universal to a large majority of your audience. In this post, we’ll go over the ways a quiz can help your marketing and increase your online relevance and visibility.
A Catchy, Timely, or Curiosity-Driven Topic
What the quiz is about is key to its success. What makes Buzzfeed’s quizzes get thousands of views and social shares is how specific they are.
For instance, a recent Buzzfeed quiz was titled “We Know Which Christmas Movie You Should Watch Based On The Things You Buy At Lulus,” which is an online women’s boutique. Users answer questions about their favorite clothing pieces and are then presented with a Christmas movie to watch. This approach works because Christmas is fast approaching and Lulus is a popular clothing boutique.
A lot of Buzzfeed quizzes play on this common motif — taking two seemingly unrelated things (what clothes you like and Christmas movies) to give you a result. At a deeper look, how these are connected starts to make more sense. For instance, a more eclectic style would probably enjoy a movie like The Grinch, whereas a preppy or conservative wardrobe might lean more toward Christmas classics, like White Christmas or A Christmas Carol.
When creating your own quiz, think about what aspects of a person or object can tell you something applicable about them. For instance, if someone completed a quiz about their dream dog breed, that could likely give you enough insight to offer the quiz taker a recommended bathroom remodel style (using the same line of thinking as the Lulus and Christmas movies logic).
A Pull of Nostalgia or a Common Feeling That Connects us
Whether your quiz is about pop culture or some specific topic relevant to your industry, remember a key part of what makes it fun for people: either the drive to find out useful insights (such as personality type) or a sense of curiosity tied to a common experience.
Nostalgia or universal experiences can be useful ideas. To make a lighthearted quiz, think about common elements of your industry that make people laugh or complain. For instance, if you run software tools for project managers that rely on Salesforce, a quiz like, “Which Terrible Salesforce Feature Are You?” could be just cheeky enough to make your target audience (project managers) laugh. Of course, you want to avoid being too hard on any business or tool, so make sure to balance it out in the intro with a few things you appreciate about the quiz subject.
Other common experiences can also be relatable and fun for users. Quiz ideas like “Which Type of Hold Music Are You?” or “How to Get Out of a Conference Call Based on Your Personality Type” could be fun content that is almost universal to most office workers.
To use nostalgia, creating quizzes about the history of your industry (e.g. “Which 90s Technology Logo Are You?”) can give users a view down memory lane that makes them want to share.
Photos
Just like in regular content like blog posts, appealing visuals with quiz results can definitely hold users’ attention for a longer period of time. Jeff Bullas’ post on visual statistics states that the brain retains 65% of images for three days, compared to only 10% of text content.
Furthermore, studies have shown that images are shared more than text-based pieces of content. Using photos in the quiz itself to break up the text questions, as well as customized images for each result, will likely get more social shares and quiz completions than a quiz only using text.
When using stock photos, make sure to choose photos you have permission to use through creative commons, or that you’ve purchased the license to. Creating custom graphics with the results can be more visually appealing since they are unique and users have never seen them before.
Accurate Results
Silly or not, the quiz results are key to its success. It’s also what makes people share their own result on social media or ask others to sign up.
For quizzes that tell users about their own key traits, such as personality type or politics, a quiz can actually serve as an insightful way for someone to learn more about the person they are. Esquire lists seven quizzes that are worth taking that range from career options to IQ level. Each of these is actually providing real value to the people taking them.
Even Buzzfeed’s silly quizzes are usually offering some value. For instance, a quiz like the Christmas movie example listed above gives users a movie recommendation, which is extremely useful when you don’t know what to watch. So even if the quiz is fun, you can still provide value to your users.
Easy Share Buttons
People enjoy taking a quiz that gives them insight about themselves and what they’d like, But people also love displaying their knowledge.
This SEO (search engine optimization) expert quiz from Moz has 50 questions about SEO and lets users determine just how much of an expert they are. At the time of publication of this post, the quiz page has almost 4500 social media shares and a few backlinks (websites linking to the page). While an industry knowledge quiz such as this does need to be updated as the industry changes, it can be a piece of evergreen content that continuously gets traffic from people wanting to show their knowledge.
After users take a knowledge quiz, they have a high likelihood of sharing their results on social media (especially if it’s impressive). When designing a quiz, think about what results would be useful and actually entice someone to share. While a quiz should never give false results to garner more shares, the result types can be written or chosen in a way that is entertaining to the quiz takers.
Proper Promotion
Marketers can’t rely on the quiz takers to be the only ones promoting the quiz on social media and other online platforms. Whether the quiz is a lead generation tool or a fun piece of content designed to drive engagement, running a paid campaign, featuring the quiz on your homepage or blog, or sharing it heavily on social media can all be great ways to make sure it gets seen by more people.
From quiz creation by choosing a fun topic and then crafting the questions and results, to promoting the quiz with a social media or paid campaign, quizzes can be a great way to break up other pieces of content and drive engagement and leads (e.g. “which of our products is best for you?”).
Make a Personality or Trivia Quiz
Woobox allows you to create a trivia or personality quiz for your website quickly and easily. You can even use features like implementation with Facebook, data integration with other tools using Zapier, and use as an embeddable widget. Try it for free today and see how easy it is to create quizzes for your audience.