Why Quizzes Work: Your Customer Wants to Be Understood
At the end of almost every talk or workshop I give on social media, I open up the floor to questions. Often times, someone will ask me how they can increase engagement with their audience.
“We run ads, but we’re not seeing results,” they’ll say.
“Are you speaking at your audience? Or are you trying to engage in a dialogue with them?” I’ll ask.
Here’s the thing. No one wants to be broadcast to. Ads in the social media space feel obtrusive. One minute you’re looking at your brother’s cute dogs (hi Nigel and Shae!), and the next you’re being bombarded with some product or service. “THIS IS WHAT WE DO,” they blast.
Don’t Broadcast—Engage
As businesspeople, it’s easy for us to think that this is something that our audience doesn’t mind because it happens every day. But it’s still obnoxious. Why do you think ad blockers are on the rise?
Want to know what audiences love to do on social media though? Even more than looking at cute animals? They want to be heard. They want to be understood. They like to take quizzes or evaluations. They like to test their knowledge, and they want to be validated.
That’s why sites like Buzzfeed and Playbuzz have grown such huge followings. When you can spend two minutes finding out what your dim sum order says about your personality (an actual quiz I took yesterday), you get an immediate hit of dopamine. The quiz lets you feel like you belong to a group greater than yourself.
Connect Your Audience to a Broader Tribe
I teach Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in my graduate classes (you may remember from your Intro to Psych class that Maslow says that we can’t address higher needs until baser ones are fulfilled), and I always tell my students that the magic of marketing in this current age is that we are able to address people’s higher needs.
Whether it’s belonging, love, esteem, or self-actualization, there’s something about classification and being grouped into a tribe that makes us feel accepted. It says, “There are other people like me in the world.”
To that end, we recommend that clients integrate quizzes into their toolkits as a straight-forward way to engage their audiences.
Whether you’re a non-profit, B2C, or B2B company, a quiz is an opportunity for you to:
- Collect data and learn about your audience
- Customize contact with your audience base on their needs
- Nurture your relationship with existing customers
Use Interact to Build Quizzes and Grow Your Customer Base
So how do you get started? At Media Volery, we use Interact for building our own (and client) quizzes. What we like about it is that it:
- Offers pre-built quizzes for a wide variety of topics/industries
- Allows super-easy customization and custom quizzes (see below)
- Integrates easily into most automation/email tools
The WYSIWYG interface makes it easy to build and edit quizzes and the results that come out of them.
We were able to create a fully customized quiz to implement on our website in only a few hours—and if you want to use a pre-built quiz, implementing one can take just a few minutes.
Now, quizzes aren’t a silver bullet. You still need to have highly relevant, engaging content within them and to promote them in the right channels. However, they can be effective when they are a part of an integrated marketing approach, one in which the quiz leads to lead nurture which leads to better conversion on the part of your audience.
And when it comes to engaging with your audience on their terms, understanding what they need, and becoming a more effective organization, a quiz can be a powerful entry point to start engaging with prospective customers.
Media Volery is an Interact Certified Partner, and we received access to the platform to use and evaluate it. However, all opinions shared here are ours.