Quiz. If ever there was a single word capable of ruining your day during those formative school years, the Q word fit the bill. Evil, hateful things. Sprung on you with no warnings.
Fast-forward to the present. Other than a post from your bestie, what’s most likely to catch your attention? Interactive quizzes – or basically any kind of interactive content – either shared by someone you know or a brand.
That should be a wake-up call for you as a marketer. Research shows that users are blind to more than 90 percent of online ads, and that includes sponsored social media posts. The exception to this bad news is interactive content. These visually appealing pieces are so effective at pushing a signal through the noise that they currently command a 35 percent stake of the $200 billion digital advertising industry.
We hated them when our teachers sprung them on us, but we love them when Facebook peppers our newsfeed with them. To be fair, we don’t have to take these quizzes if we prefer not to – and they’re one thing our teachers’ quizzes were not: enjoyable.
Interactive content is a potent and pleasurable way to be educated about a brand while learning about what differentiates it from competitors. There’s an amazing level of reciprocity, too. Brands see higher levels of conversions and are able to collect deep, insightful data about prospects. It’s difficult to find a lead-capturing device as powerful as a quiz. LeadQuizzes reports an average quiz lead-capture rate of 31.6 percent. Buzzfeed, the king of interactive quizzes, says 96 percent of participants finish their sponsored quizzes.
Interactive content is effective at all stages of a buyer’s journey. At the awareness stage, prospects are hungry for educational information as well as ways to validate their problem and gain perspective about it. Interactive content such as quizzes, polls, and assessments can help prospects learn more about both their problem and potential solutions.
The key is that they are interacting with you, which means you have their attention. You can interest and inform a prospect about a problem that might not even be apparent to them.
Interactive content remains valuable to buyers as they move on to the evaluation stage. Now they have to decide whether a brand’s product or service can fulfill their needs. They likely have a short list of products or brands and they’re looking for ways to compare. The interactive content that resonates best with buyers at this stage moves from being problem-centric to product-centric.
Calculators and interactive eBooks, or even interactive infographics, are effective in helping to deepen understanding of products as consumers search for ways to make comparisons.
Finally, in the decision stage, the buyer is ready to make a commitment and they’re looking for validation or reassurance that they’re making the right decision. Interactive content that rewards them with configurators and cost analyses helps to guide them to a purchase decision.
Testimonial-based interactive content is especially effective at this stage. How can you connect would-be buyers with satisfied customers in an interactive fashion through a quiz or calculator?
Like any other type, interactive marketing has best practices. Many of them model the tenets of social media audience-building – the most important being, educate, don’t sell. You didn’t like school quizzes because they put you on the spot. A sales pitch will do that too. Create interactive content that adds value by educating and gives prospects a reason to share what they’ve discovered with others.
One of the most effective ways to qualify a prospect is through self-identification. Interactive quizzes allow you to gather insightful information that you can use to present consumers with additional content that is specifically aligned with their needs and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
If the popularity of Instagram wasn’t enough to make the point, appearance does make a difference. Interactive content is, by its very nature, visual. Your interactive quizzes and polls have to be visually attractive, as well as entertaining. The most successful interactive quizzes create visual, immersive experiences that compel prospects to share them.
Kissmetrics founder Neil Patel believes that interactive content such as quizzes is one of the most underrated types of content, and something that every marketer should try. If you’re familiar with his work, you know he doesn’t make declarative statements like that without backing them up with kick-ass articles full of stats and examples. Read what he has to say, then go make a quiz.
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