As more and more content gets published on the web, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to capture the attention of their audience.

More and more marketers are beginning to create more personally relevant content – and most are using interactive content to do this.

Interactive content refers to any form of content that requires your audience to participate – like a quiz or a calculator.

According to a poll carried out by CMI, 81% of marketers agree that interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content. Not only that, but 79% also agree that interactive content enhances the retention of brand messaging when combined with traditional marketing tactics.

In essence, interactive content not only captures the attention of your audience better than static content but also leads to them remembering your brand for longer.

Quizzes as a content marketing tool

The problem with creating more interactive and personalized content is that, up until recently, it used to be too expensive for smaller companies. Only large companies could afford to create truly interactive and personalized experiences for their audience.

In fact, the second most common reason why marketers weren’t using interactive content was because of budget constraints.

Quizzes are a great content marketing tool because they’re an easy and inexpensive way for companies of sizes to create more personalized experiences.

Quizzes work best as top and middle-of-the-funnel content, which means they’re better at attracting and engaging people who are unfamiliar with your brand.

Here are a few examples of how Quizzes can help your content marketing:

1. Lead generation

It’s getting harder to capture the email addresses of your website visitors. It’s no longer enough to set an opt-in form on your website and simply ask for it.

People’s inboxes are getting crowded and so we need more creative ideas to generate leads.

The interactive and personalized natures of quizzes make them the perfect tool to help you generate more leads since 57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts.

Hanneke van der Heijden and Rik de Vette discovered just how powerful a personalized quiz can be when they used it to collect almost a thousand leads within 6 weeks.

This number is even more impressive when you consider that they only had 200 people on the list before the quiz.

Hanneke and Rik worked for Eneco Netherlands, one of the largest producers and suppliers of natural gas, electricity, and heat in the Netherlands.

They were looking for an easy way for their website visitors to get information about the equipment they wanted to buy.

They wanted their customers to not get bogged down by complicated technical explanations and also wanted a way to collect information from these customers that would help their sales team later qualify and sell to these people.

So they created an interactive quiz that potential customers could answer and later have a report sent to their email with personalized information.

That way the customer got more detail on the equipment they wanted to buy and Eneco salespeople knew what the customer wanted and had a way to reach them.

2. Lead segmentation

Besides just using a personalized quiz to gather leads, you can also use it to segment your customers more efficiently.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich has a prominent quiz on his homepage.

The quiz is short – only seven questions – after you’ve completed it you get a report on your earning potential. Ramit uses this quiz for more than just collecting email addresses though.

Depending on the answer you choose and the result of your quiz, Ramit will segment you to a part of his email list where he can send you content that more closely aligns with your interest.

For example, if on the quiz you show interest in entrepreneurship, you’ll be segmented to a category on his email list for people who want to start their own business.

Ramit will then send you emails on finding a business idea, validating the idea, and so on. Since the content you’re receiving from him matches your interest, you’re more likely to open and engage with his email.

3. Increased engagement

We’ve already covered how hard it is to get people to pay attention these days. Well, it’s even more so when your content is on a subject that most people consider boring.

In these cases, a bit of interactivity might just be what you need to get people to pay attention.

Camelback, for example, created a quiz known as the “Hydration Calculator.”

Using the Hydration Calculator, visitors on the Camelback website can get an accurate estimation of how much water they should drink for a given sporting activity.

They knew that writing a detailed blog post that explained the relationship between gender, age, weight, and hydration would be too complicated for most people to understand.

So instead they created an interactive quiz that people could answer to get more personalized information on how much water they should drink based on their body type.

The quiz was a more memorable and engaging experience for their visitors.

4. Boosting website traffic

One of the best things about creating interactive content is they attract a lot of shares.

Quizzes are so effective at creating shareable moments that according to BuzzSumo, the average quiz gets shared 1,900 times and in 2015, quizzes were among the most shared content on the web.

Take this quiz from Buzzsumo for example:

This simple quiz has been engaged with over 88,000 times across the web in a little over a month.

Quizzes are like social dynamite and can often generate more traffic to your website than static content.

Features of a great personalized quiz

We’ve covered why quizzes are important and how they can help improve your content marketing.

But what truly makes a quiz personalized and interactive?

A good quiz shouldn’t just ask questions, it also needs to be conversational. Here are a few features of a great personalized quiz:

1. Piping

Piping variables in your quiz allows you to dynamically include answers that were chosen in previous questions. Piping variables make your survey adaptive and personalized for the respondent.

Here’s an example of how piping looks like in a quiz:

Say your quiz had a question: What is your favorite city trip destination?

And you gave your respondents the following choices:

1. Berlin
2. Amsterdam
3. Paris
4. London

If your respondent chose the 4th option, then subsequent questions will mention London.

For example, the next question would become:What do you like about London?

By referencing responses the user gave, your quiz becomes better at engaging the respondent. Rather than generic questions, each question is now adapted based on the respondent’s former answers.

2. Skip logic

This helps you improve the flow of your quizzes by changing which questions appear so they’re more relevant to your respondents.

When your quiz has skip logic implemented, your respondent can move to a specific question while avoiding others that would not be relevant to them, based on the answer they gave to a preceding question, quiz score, or contact data.

Here’s an illustration of how Skip logic works:

This means that your respondents get more personalized questions depending on their answer and don’t all see the same generic string of questions.

3. Custom scoring & outcomes

This feature allows you to give a score for each answer a respondent chooses so that an overall score can be calculated at the end of the quiz.

Attached to that score could be a personalized outcome. Simply put, it will show the respondents a final screen based on their score or show a screen based on criteria that you have specified (for example, a score lower or higher than the quiz average).

This is a perfect opening to offer some personalized value and hook your visitors. Or even convert them into leads!

Here’s an example of an outcome based on a users response where some added value was given:

With outcomes, you choose what message you want the respondent to see based on the responses they give.

4. PDF reports

This feature adds another layer of extra value to your quizzes and makes them a perfect leadgen tool). You can set up an automatic PDF generator that sends additional, personalized content as a report.

These reports vary based on the respondent’s choices and feel more valuable due to their personalized nature. More elaborate content, tips, whitepapers, … can be shared this way. And they feel like they’re tailor-made for each separate respondent.

Here’s an example of what your PDF report might look like:

In conclusion

In a world where there’s more content being produced than people to consume it, the only way to stand out is to make your audience part of the content creation process. Interactive content like quizzes makes that possible.

They not only create personalized and engaging experiences that make them perfect for generating leads, but they also create shareable moments that can improve engagement and boost your website traffic.

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