Pop quiz: What’s a great way to engage buyers, encourage them to rate or assess their current strategies and connect them to an end goal or potential? The not-so-surprising answer is quizzes and assessments!
Your buyers are gravitating to more snackable, easy-to-digest assets: Up to 84% say they have started to prefer more interactive and visual content that they can access on-demand. But marketers are facing a predicament: Only 33% of buyers said they thought the assessments they engaged with were valuable.
What’s causing this gap?
Quizzes and assessments are relatively new to the B2B marketing mix. As consumers, we’ve engaged with magazine quizzes and even their digital counterparts on social networks and online publications. Very few organizations, though, have been able to translate these fun experiences for more professional audiences.
If you’re looking to craft high-impact quizzes and assessments that engage your buyers and encourage them to take action, here are a few tips and best practices to guide you:
1. Make it quick and easy. There is a place for detailed questions, but a quiz or assessment isn’t one of them. Save those for your research studies and surveys. By design, quizzes and assessments are meant to be quick, easy and actionable for your buyers. They’re supposed to move through the process and receive their results seamlessly. We usually encourage companies to keep their assessments to eight questions or fewer to keep users engaged.
2. Tell them something they don’t know. One way to keep your audience engaged is to include fun facts that align with your questions. While it’s important to design concise questions and responses, supporting factoids educate your audience and add value to their experience.
3. Allow buyers to benchmark against their peers. Nearly all buyers (95%) recommend that marketers provide more benchmarking data in their content — hence the value of surveys. But surveys are typically expensive and require long lead times to collect data, analyze it and aggregate it to tell a comprehensive story. Custom-built assessments and ROI calculators can be custom coded so your buyers not only see their end results, but also the aggregated results of all participants. This allows them to easily benchmark against their peers and determine if and how they should change their current processes or strategies.
4. Provide actionable insights and best practices. I consider assessments a prime example of value exchange between buyer and brand. Your buyers are taking time out of their day to answer your questions and share personal information, so the least you can do is share valuable insights and recommendations to help them do their jobs better. Offer participants a few quick tips and best practices to reward them for their time.
5. Show them how to move forward. All effective content has a compelling call to action, which may differ based on your campaign goals, your target audience and their content preferences. In some cases, it is most effective to promote a more detailed follow-up content asset at the end of the quiz. Other times, offering a free consultation with a subject matter expert to discuss quiz results and recommendations is a powerful way to continue the conversation. Regardless, the goal is to encourage your buyers to take some sort of next step after they complete the quiz. This helps you stay top of mind and gives you a prime opportunity to reconnect and re-engage with them.
6. Make your quiz a part of your content journey. Of course, there’s no point creating a quiz or assessment if you can’t get your buyers to engage with it! Although you should promote your final piece across all promotional channels, we encourage brands to think about the role assessments play in their content journey. Try to package quizzes and assessments with related content on a specific trend or topic. After your target customers collect some background information or research from those initial assets, they may get the urge to see how their company stacks up.
New content consumption trends and preferences tell us that your buyers want interactive and easy-to-digest content. More importantly, they want quick yet detailed feedback on their businesses’ current strategies and how they stack up against their peers.
Quizzes and assessments are powerful content formats that can help you engage your buyers and arm them with new knowledge. With the proper strategy and design, you can also compel your buyers to learn more about your solutions and services. Now, answer our quick quiz by sharing your feedback in the comments section below. Or, you can contact us directly to go through samples and any questions you may have!
Alicia Fiorletta is a Content Strategist for Content4Demand. In addition to writing for and managing the C4D blog, she helps clients identify new content marketing ideas and experiment with innovative formats. Fiorletta is a fan of all things digital and interactive, and uses the art of ideation to help clients see the content marketing possibilities. She also helps G3 Communications’ family of brands plan and execute killer events and ramp up their cross-channel marketing results. When she’s not dwelling over all things branding, messaging and content strategy, she’s spending quality time with her nieces and nephews, binging on Netflix or eating guacamole.
