One of the fastest growing areas of content marketing is “interactive content.” This kind of content responds to your audience’s actions and finds ways to better serve them as they’re engaging with it. It’s something I’ve wanted to experiment with on my site.
There are lots of tools out there to create interactive content, but often they’re expensive, bulky, and confusing to implement. I’ve always been a big fan of things that are simple and elegant in their design and use. This is where Interact comes in.
Interact is a quiz building tool that creates beautiful interactive quizzes and has a lot of powerful features that are easy to use.
Online quizzes are one of the most popular forms of interactive content. You see them all over Facebook: “Which Harry Potter character are you?” or “What’s your spirit animal?” and so on. But there’s much more to quizzes than the simple clickbait you see circling around your Facebook feed. They’re a powerful way to engage and understand the audience on your site.
In this article I’m going to show you my own quiz experiment in creating “What Content Strategy Is Best For You?” and what I learned in the process. I hope it makes it easy for you to build your own quiz.
Why Use Online Quizzes In Your Marketing?
Everyone loves quizzes, but they are also a great marketing tactic that encourages engagement and brand awareness. Check out the benefits of online quizzes below and see why marketers say that interactive content is an effective tool in differentiating your brand from your competitors.
How To Set Up Your Quiz
There’s plenty of ways to build a quiz, but it can be intimidating when you first get started. I want to share my process for building a quiz so it’s easier for you to get results fast.
1 – Choose A Format
There are 3 basic formats for a quiz in Interact.
- Assessment – Test people’s knowledge of this classic format. There’s only one right answer to every question and they get a grade at the end.
- Example – How much do you know about ___?
- Scored – Slightly different than the assessment. Questions have different point values that are added up at the end. It gives you results based on your total score.
- Example – How much of a “New Yorker” are you?
- Personality – This asks questions with each answer linked to a different result. You’re presented with the result that closest fits your personality.
- Example – Which David Bowie album cover are you? (Someone please make this quiz…)
For my first quiz, I chose the “personality” type because it best fit the content I had already created and I thought it provided the most opportunity to learn about my audience.
2 – Choose A Theme And A Title
One of the most important elements of your quiz is choosing an interesting theme and a compelling title for the quiz.
One of the most popular downloads from the resources page is my “Content Strategy Template,” so I figured that a quiz based on content strategy would have the best chance at engaging my readers.
Here are a few basic tips for a quiz headline and cover image:
- Focus on the reader – Pose your headline in a way that focuses on the reader and what they will discover about themselves. I honestly think my headline could be a little better, so if you have a suggestion please let me know in the comments.
- Make a promise – Be clear what someone will get after taking the quiz. How will they be better off as a result?
- Put a person in the image – Images of people looking right at you tend to do best for quiz covers. They’re engaging and draw you in. I know I didn’t do this on my quiz.
3 – Leverage Existing Content
If you want to get a quiz up and running fast, you don’t want to spend a lot of time developing new content to fit. Think about the current content and frameworks you use in your business and how you could apply them to a quiz.
I decided to build a quiz around some of the pillar content on my site. My article and infographic How To Create Content For Every Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey get a good flow of traffic, but I thought I could help my audience more. I already had a lead magnet at the end of that article that fit the quiz format nicely. It gives five different content strategies with some recommendations on what content to create to get started on each of these strategies.
I thought this was a perfect opportunity to build my quiz around this already great content, so I set it up in a way that the questions would reveal the best strategy for them and give them some inspiration for content creation.
4- Come Up With Questions
Putting together a quiz was a fairly unique content creation experience for me. Getting started with it was a little less intuitive than I expected. I created a grid on a piece of scratch paper (you could use a spreadsheet too) with a column for questions and for each “result” at the end of the quiz. I filled out the spreadsheet using the following steps:
- Started with the results – I picked the results I wanted to create for my quiz.
- Created questions – Once I knew what my results were, it was easier to come up with questions.
- Create responses – Once you know your results, then coming up with responses to each question that fit with the various results at the end was easier.
- Match the responses to the quiz results – Interact makes it very easy to map results to the responses in each question. You don’t have to go 1 for 1, either — an answer can lead to multiple results if you want. Here’s a screenshot of the results
5 – Promote The Quiz
Once my quiz was ready, I found a few easy places to start promoting it.
First I sent it to my list. I wanted to get a baseline for how people responded to the quiz and if people felt they got value out of it. I got a few very excited emails back right away, and some suggestions on what questions to ask or how I could add more value.
Once I tested the quiz with my audience, I began placing it on my site.
The first place was right on my homepage. According to my analytics, most people land on my home page. I thought a quiz was a good way to welcome a visitor with some interesting and relevant content.
One of the simplest and most effective ways to get people to notice your quiz is to put a small ad for it in the sidebar of your blog content. Making use of the sidebar is less disruptive than pop-ups or so-called “welcome gates.”
You can use Q2W3 Fixed Widget to make sure your opt-in box stays visible and scrolls with the viewer as they go down your post.
One great thing about sidebar graphics is that you can use WordPress plugins like Widget Context to have particular sidebar ads appear on specific pages, or for specific categories on your blog. This is really useful for people who may have several different quizzes built and want to display the most relevant ones in their different categories of content.
The Results
My quiz has gotten surprisingly good results in the first two months of its use. It converts about 30% of the people who see the quiz and around 60% of people who start the quiz. People who take the quiz tend to stay on my site longer and visit more pages.
I found that my conversion rates did increase after implementing branching logic “easter eggs” to the quiz as well. I believe the anticipation of bonus content during the quiz makes the call to action at the end of my quiz more powerful.
It’s helped me resurrect some old content that was previously buried in my blog archives by sending people an infographic and cheatsheet at the end.
Next Steps
I’m considering adding the quiz to my welcome series of emails as an early value-add to new subscribers on my site. It gives me a way to learn more about new subscribers and provide them with extra value with my easter eggs. Though placing it in this series won’t collect new leads for me, it does give me insights and serves my readers.
3 Pro Tips For Better Quizzes
I learned a great deal from this first quiz and want to continue incorporating more quizzes and interactive content
1. Use questions to find ways to better serve your audience
The questions that you ask in your quiz should set you up to get some insights into your audience. Use what you learn from your quiz to create better content, come up with new products, and get a clearer picture of your audience.
After sharing the quiz with my audience, I found that there was a need for education on “lead magnets,” a critical part of any content marketing campaign.
I used this information to determine what kinds of content to create next on my site. Shortly after seeing these results from my audience, I released Winning Strategies To Grow Your List With Lead Magnets. This was one of the most successful articles on my site to date. Writing this article also improved my quiz in another way that I discuss in the next section.
2. Use branching logic to create “easter eggs” in your quiz
One feature I really enjoyed about the Interact tool was the Branching Logic feature. Branching logic enables you to personalize the experience of someone taking your quiz. Depending on how people answer a question on your quiz, you can serve them different questions or quiz results.
A good example of this would be if you had a quiz with various cooking recipes. You’ve got a question that asks if the quiz taker is vegan or not. They say “yes” and you make sure the recipient you recommend at the end of the quiz is vegan due to branching logic.
For me, I used the branching logic in a slightly different way. I used it to add value to the quiz and delight the takers with a little surprise.
Many of the questions I ask on my quiz assess the taker’s skill level and knowledge in a certain area of content marketing. For several questions, I set up branching logic to create some “easter eggs” for my quiz. Whenever someone answers that they need help in a certain area of content marketing, I would follow up with a question asking if they wanted some bonus content related to the topic.
Interact makes it easy with their integrations to send additional emails based on a taker’s behavior in the quiz, so I would send one or two bonus emails with extra content at the end of the quiz.
3.Warning – Be careful when making changes
The analytics for the Interact platform are very sophisticated, but it’s difficult to retain consistency in reporting on a quiz when you are changing the questions and their order. This means, when you publish changes to your quiz, much of the analytics from your quiz are archived. You can still access this information but in a separate place from your standard dashboard.
So, when making changes to your quizzes, make sure you are very intentional, or you may mess with your data.
I made the mistake of making minor changes to my quiz without really thinking it through. Even small changes to the quiz questions and structure can cause you to reset your data.
Make sure you plan ahead for big changes and only implement them when you’re ready.
To avoid this problem in the future, I created 2 versions of my quiz — one for live, and one for testing. I would edit the test copy, and when I was happy with it, I swapped it out with the live one. This allowed me to make edits and test the quiz out without interfering with my data or the user experience.
Conclusion
Interactive content is a fast growing trend in content marketing. It’s providing great results and insights for people who leverage it correctly. Again, there are lots of ways to create interactive content, but I think that online quizzes are one of the easiest and most accessible ways to do it.
There are many different quiz tools out there, and I suggest you do your research to find one that fits your goals. For me, I really enjoy Interact with its clean design, great analytics, and branching logic.