How To Create a Lead Generating Social Media Quiz

Question: What kind of content can you use as a marketer to generate leads, and save you time and money in the process?

Answer: Social media quizzes drive traffic and engage the audience while getting your brand’s name out there and collecting leads. This article will show you how to create your own social media quiz, how to distribute it, and how to follow up on those leads with marketing automation.

Having helped over 10,000 brands create more than 25,000 quizzes with Interact, we know the in’s and out’s of the quiz creation process and the following actions necessary to make the most out of a social media quiz. Aaron Brothers will be an example of a brand that we’ll be tying in throughout the article so that you can get an idea on how they made quizzes work for them.

So what are we waiting for?

Part I: Creating The Quiz

The Aaron Brothers brand should be a familiar name to most people. Aaron Brothers has been specializing in custom framing and art supplies for many years now. They created the colorfully entertaining quiz,“What’s Your Color?” to generate leads that they could convert into local customers.

By the end of the color campaign, Aaron Brothers’ quiz brought in over 500 leads and was the most successful part of it. The quiz went viral over 20 times, and we’re going to see exactly how that happened, but first, let’s get you started on making your own quiz.

Formulating An Idea Then Selecting Your Quiz Type

Before you make your quiz, you’re going to need an idea to base it off of. Your concept can solely focus on your brand or its product(s), so keep that in mind when thinking about the kind of quiz you want to make.

That being said, there are several kinds of quizzes you can create. We’ll take a look at the two basic iterations of a quiz and how they function so that you can see which will fit your marketing strategy the best.

• The Personality Quiz – This is the more popular quiz that you see around social media. This quiz categorizes the audience into personalities based on their answers. If your brand has a focus on product sales, you could personalize your quiz results by offering product recommendations to people based on the personality they get. For example, one reason personality quizzes work so well is because of the “self-serving bias” where we like to hear good things about ourselves.

• The Knowledge Test – This the other popular type of quiz that you can find on social media. This quiz gauges the knowledge of the audience and gives results based on accuracy. Your marketing strategy could use this kind of a quiz to test your audience on how much they know about your brand, your products, or even a trending topic.

Aaron Brothers created a personality test. By the end of their quiz, individuals were given a color based on their answers. It was a fun and entertaining piece that also generated leads, which we’ll get into later.

Crafting The Questions To Your Quiz

Once you know what kind of quiz you want to make, let’s roll with that idea and start working on the questions. This is your chance as a brand to establish a one-on-one connection with your audience through this medium of communication.

Here are some things you should do to make the most out of your questions:

• Infuse Personality Into Your Quiz – Talk to your audience as if you were talking to them in person. Don’t be afraid to be impersonal. You want to let your audience get comfortable with your brand through your questions. This helps with encouraging them to opt-in later on when prompted to.

• Use Images For Your Questions – Keep things interesting and relevant by using visuals. Including images in your questions also makes your quiz feel like a trivia game show, and that’s pretty fun.

Keep It Short And Simple – Having between 6 to 10 questions is a good idea when it comes to hitting that sweet spot of how many questions you should have in your quiz. People aren’t particularly attentive these days, so you have to make the most out of what you’ve got in the least amount of questions as possible. is the sweet spot for the amount recommended in a quiz. People don’t have much of an attention span these days, so keep things short for the sake of simplicity.

Aaron Brothers approached their audience casually, so getting them comfortable wasn’t a problem. They definitely made the most out of images as well. Aaron Brothers slightly went over the recommended amount of questions, but their quiz was still popular nonetheless.

Gate Your Quiz With A Lead Capture

We mentioned getting your audience to opt-in earlier, now we’re going to go more in depth with it. Before your audience reaches the results to your quiz, we want to gate it with a lead capture. This will be a little toll-bridge that asks your audience if they would like to opt-in and provide you with their contact information.

Here are some suggestions you may want to follow to increase the chances of your audience opting in to your brand before they get their quiz results:

• Promise Value To Your Audience – It’ll take a little more than a “pretty please?” to get your audience to get them to give you their name and email address. Incentivize your lead capture by offering something of interest. It could be anything from a free ebook, a weekly newsletter, or even an entry to a free giveaway.

• Be Honest With Your Marketing Strategy – The main reason you want to get leads is so that you can contact them later, so be honest with your marketing strategy by letting your audience know that you’ll be contact them. We don’t want to have people sign up and then receive unsolicited emails now do we?

• Only Ask For Information That You Need – Only ask for information that you’ll be using. First name, last name and email address are the most basic pieces of information you could ask for. If you want to narrow things down, you can ask for more. Aaron Brothers wanted to put an emphasis on location, so they asked for zip codes as well. This will help in targeting people who are near any physical Aaron Brothers locations.

Create Results That Are Worth Sharing

As much of an emphasis we placed on the questions, the results are equally as important. The virality of your quiz will determine how much it gets shared, so you want to create results worth sharing. The more people share their results, the more people will take your quiz. It’s as simple as that.

Here are some key practices when formulating your results that will make people want to share them:

• Be Honest And Positive – Positive emotions generate leads, so how do we evoke positive emotions? By being honest and positive of course! Never lie to your audience their the results. Tell them the truth, but keep things positive. Tell them how awesome they are, or include a description that compliments someone’s personality; that’s what Aaron Brothers did with their color personality results.

• Utilize Charming Images – This is pretty important. When people share your quiz’s results, the first thing others will see will be an image related to it. Use images that will grab people’s attention.

• Pilot Your Audience To Something More – This flight doesn’t end as soon as your audience gets their result. As much as they’d love to get off your plane, pilot them in a direction that benefits your brand. Encourage them to visit your website, or to check out other products from your brand.

Part II: Distributing Your Quiz

Now that you have your lead capture all set up, it’s time to get your quiz out there. Social media’s your best bet for getting the most out of traffic, so here are some ways you can go about distributing your quiz:

Share Your Results On Facebook And Twitter

1. Use a captivating image to represent your quiz visually.

2. Create an attention-grabbing headline to catch the interest of people.

3. Share both the image and the caption with a shortened link to track results.

Use Paid Advertising To Promote Your Quizzes

We can walk you through the process of promoting your quiz on Facebook, but that would more than double what you’re already reading, so here’s a condensed version for your convenience:

• Selecting Your Target Audience – Your audience can be narrowed down to location, demographics, behaviors and connections. From there, you can even break them down even further, like taking location and and targeting audiences based on country, state/province, city and zip code, like what Aaron Brothers did.

• Creating A Custom Audience – Creating a custom audience isn’t as tricky as it sounds. It essentially lets you use a pre-existing list that you’ve already uploaded. From there, Facebook generates an audience based on a list of your current customers. Convenient, no?

Part III: Using Marketing Automation To Follow Up

After creating your quiz and putting it out there on social media, you should be collected some leads by now. Before we convert those leads into paying customers, are is a 4-step sequence that you MUST follow if you want to be successful at convincing your audience to buy into your brand:

1. Thank Your Audience For Taking Your Quiz – This is the most important first step ever. Right after opting in, you want to send an email immediately thanking your audience for taking your quiz. It not only reminds them that they’ve opted in, but it also lets your audience know that it’ll be you contacting them soon.

2. Encourage Quiz Retakes As A Transition – After a couple of days, this is where you transition from your “thank you” to other content. Begin by revealing the other possible results your audience could have gotten. This encourages them to retake (and maybe even reshare) your quiz.

3. Build Trust With Customer Case Studies Or Testimonials – After about a week, send your audience another email. This time around, you’ll want to highlight customer case studies or testimonials as a way of building trust with your audience. This will help convince them to buy into your brand when they learn about your company’s success stories.

4. Convert Your Leads Into Customers – At last, after two weeks, it’s time to close the sale. Do everything you can to convert your leads into customers. It’s been two weeks, and you don’t want all of that work to be for naught. Just like your lead capture, incentivization will go a long way. Offer anything from coupons/discounts to even a webinar signup. People like free things.

And That’s It!

You’ve just successfully created your own quiz. If you kept in mind all of the little nuances that you should’ve included, your quiz will be nice, healthy, and ready to face the world. Don’t forget to distribute your quiz through the proper mediums, and once it’s live, make sure to follow up with marketing automation! Give your quiz some time and make sure you nurture your leads. If you do all of this, prepare to reap the rewards for integrating social media quizzes into your content strategy.

JP Misenas is the content marketing director and audio/visual technician/engineer of Interact, a place for creating entertaining and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. He writes about innovative ways to connect with customers and to build professional long-lasting relationships with them.