Learn about your leads to send them personalized content
29 July 2021 by Jordan Bishop
Quizzes have become an extremely important tool for online businesses. They are enormously
effective in improving brand awareness, revenue, and marketing strategies, due to which many
have decided to start implementing them on their websites, blogs and social media.
Many companies today run blogs due to their cost
effectiveness, though by not using quizzes to interact with those blog readers,
they’re leaving valuable engagement opportunities on the table.
Additionally, in the cases where companies do implement quizzes, there are certain mistakes
that people tend to make when designing them, which end in clients or readers losing
interest. Keep reading to find out which those mistakes are and, more importantly, how to
avoid them.
What Are Quizzes For?
As we mentioned, quizzes function as a powerful marketing tool. Some of the benefits these
instruments offer are:
A boost in reader engagement with your site.
Virality on social media.
Reduced bounce rate - people are 3x more likely to finish quizzes than forms.
Valuable insight about your audience based on their answers.
Get Started: Make A Lead Generation QuizUsing One Of Our 200+ Templates
What's Your Fashion Personality
What Personality Type Are You
90s Nostalgia Quiz
Test Your History Know How
What Type Of Reader Are You
Love Test
IQ Test
What's Your Travel Type
There’s a lot of ways of showing your quizzes through videos, websites, or pictures. Videos
are always a powerful way to get a message across to your audience. If you find making
videos too time-consuming, you can always use a tool like Fastreel or Biteable to create high-quality videos
via drag and drop.
It’s common to see highly engaging quizzes that spread like wildfire on social media. This
type of reaction can boost your traffic and, by extension, your passive
income, so you want to make sure to keep an eye out and avoid all of the following
mistakes:
1. Not Establishing Clear Objectives
The first mistake when designing quizzes happens even before writing question #1. Every quiz
should have a clear purpose from the start, because that purpose will guide you throughout
the entire creation process.
Be it to increase user engagement,
to gain specific insight about your audience, or to establish yourself as an authority in a
particular niche, you must define the purpose of the quiz before doing anything else;
otherwise, the final result may not be what you hope for.
2. Asking Unnecessary Questions
One of the most common mistakes when designing a quiz is to overload it with unnecessary
questions. Remember that your goal is to keep your customer's attention, and to do that, you
need to make sure that your quiz doesn’t drift away from the main topic. Asking unnecessary
questions will only increase the chances that the person who’s solving the quiz will lose
interest.
To avoid these types of mistakes, you should first create a draft of all possible questions.
After that, you should review each of the questions you wrote down, one by one, and ask
yourself: does this question contribute to the quiz’s objective? If the answer is not a
clear “Yes,” then strike it out and move on to the next one. This is why it’s so important
to have a clearly defined set of objectives for your quiz, even before you actually start
writing it.
3. Being Unclear
Another common mistake is writing questions that are not easy to understand or over
complicated. If people don’t understand the quiz, odds are it’ll bring inconsistent results.
Writing a question without having a clear context can also create confusion in your
audience, so it’s a good idea to explain why each question is important.
The key to avoiding this mistake is to write your quizzes in a way that anyone can
understand. Even if it is intended for an older audience, imagine that you’re writing a quiz
for little kids; avoid using long and complicated words and keep things as short as
possible.
It’s usually a good idea to have a friend or family member read the questions out loud and
then rewrite any questions they don’t understand or that are in any way unclear.
Also, always remember to keep your targeted audience in mind. Do your best to get a deep
understanding of who they are and what their needs are before crafting your content, in
particular your quizzes. That will help guide you in terms of how complex or simple your
writing can be, but regardless of that, make sure to keep things short and to the point.
4. Getting Too Wordy
When designing a quiz, it’s common to find that you’re adding too much detail to each
question. This can make questions tedious to read and cause readers to lose interest. Not
only will it look overloaded, but you will likely overwhelm those who are answering the
quiz.
One way to avoid getting too wordy is to use standard prompts like ‘Who? What? Where? When?
Why? and How?’ to start each question. This tends to force you to cut to the chase right
away without digressing, helping you keep your questions simple and concise. Another tip is
to limit the questions to one sentence each.
5. Providing Too Many Answers To Choose From
This mistake can go unnoticed since some quiz creators prefer to offer a wide variety of
options to their readers. They seem to think that adding more options is better for the
user.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. Too many options mean more time to read through them
all and might make users click out of the quiz or the website altogether. That’s definitely
something you want to avoid at all costs.
But there’s a much deeper reason to avoid too many options: it can reduce the accuracy of the
results you hope to gain from the quiz. The results of the quiz will not give straight and
objective answers, but on the contrary, they'll be vague and broad. So, as you can see, not
everything is how it looks. That being said, a better way to avoid this mistake is by
limiting the number of possible answers to 3 or 4.
6. Accurate answers
Apart from being relevant, clear, concise, and short, you have to provide your audience with
an accurate set of answers. This means that you should always make sure that the answers
you’re providing fit the questions you’re asking.
Additionally, you should always try to add a middle or “neutral” answer to every question.
This is not always possible, such as in Yes/No or True/False questions, but you should do it
whenever it makes sense. As you can see in the screenshot below, the person that designed
the quiz didn’t put a neutral option, which means you're leading the audience with your
questions.
The Bottom Line
Quizzes can be a strategic part of your digital marketing efforts and help grow your brand,
so they must be implemented in the best way possible. A quiz can become an income-producing
asset for you when done properly, generating new leads without any upkeep or additional investment.
So, for you to implement quizzes successfully and for them to provide you with the results
you expect, always make sure to avoid the mistakes we covered here and follow these
tips:
Establish clear objectives for your quizzes.
Avoid adding unnecessary questions.
Avoid using “fancy” or complicated vocabulary.
Avoid wordiness.
Provide simple and accurate answers.
Include neutral options.
Creating high-quality quizzes is a great and easy way to boost your customer engagement and
potentially increase sales. If you haven’t been leveraging them on your site,
it’s about time you started doing so.
Get Started: Make A Lead Generation QuizUsing One Of Our 200+ Templates
What's Your Fashion Personality
What Personality Type Are You
90s Nostalgia Quiz
Test Your History Know How
What Type Of Reader Are You
Love Test
IQ Test
What's Your Travel Type
About author
Jordan Bishop is the founder of Yore
Oyster and How I Travel,
two sites to help you optimize your finances while living an international life. He recently
published his first book, Unperfect, an exploration of problem solving.