Try a Quiz to Generate Leads

Every week, I love to take the BBC news quiz even though I fail miserably each time. If you’ve ever taken a quiz in a magazine, social post, or website, you know they can be irresistible. Why not use them in your business?

The alluring part of a quiz from a magazine is that you can’t really fail. Plus, many of them can give some insight into our personalities or traits, even if it’s made up.  How can you use quizzes in your business to attract clients?  Here are some ideas to do just that.

Content Ideas

Think about the types of clients you have and a varying characteristic of each one. Many of these ideas can make good quizzes.  For example:

  • Tax clients have varying risk levels. You can make up a quiz to determine how much risk your client is willing to take. A sample question might be “I would rather go through an audit than give up $1 in taxes to the IRS.” Answers would be “definitely agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, definitely disagree.”
  • Accounting clients come in varying levels of messiness. You could create a quiz to determine how organized your client is.
  • Financial planners can have a heyday with quizzes, asking all sort of questions about the types of investments client might be comfortable with as well as savings goals.

The Quiz Framework

The first step to creating a quiz is to decide what you want it to measure.  Continuing with our tax example, let’s say we are measuring client risk level when it comes to taxes.  Your quiz outcomes might be:

  • Very risky – not afraid of an audit every year as well as court cases
  • Somewhat risky – I want every deduction including gray areas
  • Somewhat safe – I want every deduction but don’t go in any gray area
  • Very safe – I want every deduction but don’t go in any gray area and no red flags

The next step is to write the questions and answers. All of your questions and answers need to be ones that evaluate risk tolerance. Each answer set should have four choices that correspond with the outcomes above.

Next, assign weights so that the scores fall into the correct ranges for the outcomes. For example, each answer could be scored 1, 2, 3, or 4.  The weight of 4 should be assigned to the “very risky” answers. With 10 questions and a range of scores from 10-40, a score of 34-40 would place the participant in the “very risky” outcome, 26-33 in somewhat risky, 17-25 in somewhat safe, and 10-16 in very safe.

Now you have your quiz, the questions, the answers, the weights of each answer for your scoring key, and the outcomes for the participants.

It’s time to automate.

Automating Your Quiz

Many apps and WordPress plug-ins can provide a way to automate your quiz.  We’ve used Class Marker and Progress Ally to develop our quizzes, but you can use something as easy as SurveyMonkey.

It’s a good idea to ask people to opt-in to your quiz, so you can send them a series of follow-up emails for marketing purposes.

The Best Quizzes

The best quizzes connect the prospect with pain points related to how much they need your services. Or they can help to educate the prospect about what you do. In that way, it can become a natural lead in to talking about your services.

In the case of tax risk tolerance, it can help to show the client that it’s their decision and they have some flexibility when it comes to how you can serve them in a customized fashion to meet their specific needs.

Try quizzes to attract new prospects as well as to have a bit of fun with your marketing.