Josh Haynam on How to Use Quizzes as a Lead Capture Tool

Pop quiz: What is a one tool that can simultaneously increase conversions, give your prospective customers a positive impression of your brand, extend the reach of your advertising for free, and help you sell your services or products without coming off as salesy?

Answer: It’s a quiz!  In Episode 216 of my podcast, I talk to Josh Haynam, the founder of Interact Quiz Builder, a tool that allows you to easily build quizzes to put on your website.

We discuss how local businesses can use quizzes in their marketing and how to drive traffic to them once they’re created.  You’ll walk away from this episode with concrete ideas about how to use a quiz to get valuable information from your prospective customers in a way that is so entertaining for them that they’ll want to share it with other people, thus promoting you for free!

After you listen to the episode using the player below (or read the transcript that follows), visit www.tryinteract.com/blog to take Josh’s quiz about–what else–quizzes!

Interview Transcript

Kevin Jordan: Josh, welcome to the podcast.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Jordan:                     So let’s just dive right into our topic today of quizzes and assessments and how local businesses can use those in their marketing. So why don’t you explain why this is such a hot topic right now and why should businesses consider using this as part of their marketing.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, yeah. We’ve gotten to the point now where most of the conversations I’ve had people have seen quizzes and when I say quizzes I mean those ones that you see on Facebook all the time. So the what kind of coffee drink are you quiz, the what kind of shrimp are you quiz. All these silly things. Even like BuzzFeed’s what state should you actually live in quiz.

And there’s a draw to these things because people love to find out something about themselves, whether it’s the coffee or the shrimp or the state, it’s really, really intriguing to find out something new about yourself and we like to answer the questions that are in the quiz to figure out the outcome. All these things come together to make a really, really viral type of marketing. And so, that’s the basis of what we do is we provide a platform where anybody, any small business anywhere can make a quiz just like those ones that you see popping up on your Facebook feed all the time but then use it to promote your business.

And the way that works is you set up a quiz and we’ve got built in options where you can have it become a pop up on your website or an announcement bar or even a Facebook ad or a Facebook post and then people take your quiz, they can opt into your list inside of the quiz and then you can also use the quiz to recommend products or services.

So if we jump into a quick example to make this actually relevant, one of our clients that I really enjoy working with is a cleaning service and they’ve got this quiz what’s your cleaning personality which is kind of funny and they put it out on Facebook both as an organic post and as a sponsored. People take the quiz, they answer some questions about their habits and ask them for their email address and then after they put in their email address they see their cleaning personality and then there’s also an ad in those results for cleaning services. It says, hey, your cleaning personality is the procrastinator for example, why don’t you check out our services and see how you can get your house cleaned for a low weekly cost instead of having to procrastinate all the time.

So, that’s how it works and how you would actually use it in real life.

Kevin Jordan:                     All right, so that’s an excellent example and I think that would be a good example of how a quiz can be used maybe at the top of the funnel, the sales funnel as something that someone is on social media not looking for cleaning services just see something fun that looks entertaining and they do it just to kill time because it looks fun or because their friends forwarded it to them or something.

What about further down the funnel like maybe someone who has determined they need a cleaning service and they’re out there looking maybe comparing services or something, how can quizzes and assessments and things like that be used further down the funnel?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, definitely. So, you can use a quiz to filter people in a really robust fashion. So, you can create conditional or branching logic inside of a quiz meaning that if somebody answers a certain question a certain way, they’re shown different questions depending on their first answer. So, you can actually get them in a very specific bucket.

So let’s say for example you have a quiz, which cleaning service is right for you, and you ask people questions about how big their house is, how often they want it cleaned all sorts of stuff like that. And you can actually use it to give them an estimate right on the spot using that branching logic. So, depending on how big their house is you put them into a different set of questions then the next question would be how often do you want it cleaned, that puts them in a different set of questions and it puts them in a very specific package that you can create custom on your side and then there’s a number to call to actually enroll in that service or maybe you can just have a link if you’ve got that set up already online, you just go ahead and sign up for it on the spot.

So, you’re giving people a much more accurate recommendation based on the answers that they give you.

Kevin Jordan:                     Excellent. So in that case, it’s not so much a quiz, it’s more like a self assessment or guess you can call it a quoting tool that businesses can have on their website.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, exactly. So you can use it to give an accurate quote just like you would if you were actually talking to that person. You’d asked them those same questions and since you can use the conditional logic you can turn it into a conversation where obviously if somebody tells you their house is really large you’re not going to then ask them how many rooms do you have and the only answer is like one or two right. If it’s a large house, you’re going to ask them five, six, seven, something like that.

So, you can have it be very accurate in terms of what you would do in person but replicated online as an assessment to figure out the right package or the right service.

Kevin Jordan:                     Excellent. Another example from a business I’ve worked with comes to mind. One of the things you were talking about in your last answer, giving people like scores after they take a quiz based on their responses. I worked with a home security company and we created a quiz that was sort of like a test, like how good is your home security and based on their responses it was given a grade at the end of the score. Things like, do you always lock your door. Do you have any sort of lighting on the outside of your home, things like that.

So there’s just kind of a way that people could qualify themselves to determine whether they would have a need for a security system or how much of a need and things.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, that’s a great example and we’ve seen other stuff done along those lines. Is your home ready for, how fire safe is your home is one that we’ve seen from insurance and also fire safety companies. We’ve seen the security one done, how secure is your identity. So things like that where we’re actually testing people on something that they care about and then you can use that as a way to then parlay it into whatever it is that you can help with as a product or a service.

Kevin Jordan:                     So let me ask you Josh, what’s the most unique or outrageous or unusual quiz that your company has ever created for a client.

Josh Haynam:                    So, I get asked this question all the time and then one popped up a few weeks ago that I decided was my example from that point onwards. It was an author who wrote a book, it’s a picture book of every single vice president of the United States and it’s a portrait of them with an octopus on their head. I saw it and I was like what in the world is this. And then you take the quiz and it’s which vice president are you. But your result is a picture of the vice president with an octopus on their head. I do not understand but it is absolutely hysterical. So that is the weirdest one I have ever seen.

Kevin Jordan:                     That’s pretty strange. I’m trying to figure out what the tie in is with an octopus and vice president of the United States.

Josh Haynam:                    I have no idea.

Kevin Jordan:                     They’ve got their tentacles in everything maybe, I don’t know. We’re not going to go there.

Josh Haynam:                    I don’t know, I don’t know, I didn’t ask questions but I decided that was my weirdest quiz from that point onwards.

Kevin Jordan:                     Yeah, that’s a pretty strange one. So, once you create these quizzes, how do you get people to take them? It’s just sitting on a website somewhere, people aren’t interacting with it, you’re not going to get anything from it just like anything else. So, how do you drive traffic to these quizzes and get people to take them?

Josh Haynam:                    Right, right, so you got to put the quiz in front of people and the quizzes work really well but not if they’re never seen. So, there’s three main ways that you promote quizzes. Number one is use our technology to turn it on as a pop-up on your website if you have website.

Number two is use our technology to turn it into an announcement bar. So, a bar that just hangs at the very top your website kind of like a little banner there that has a link to take the quiz.

And then number three is as a Facebook post or Ad. So, we will give you a button and you can just click it and it creates a Facebook post out of your quiz and you can turn that into an ad by sponsoring it or you can follow our template that we give you to create your own custom ad and we walk you through all the steps and we can track your results and your cost per conversion and all that kind of stuff using our software.

So, those are the three main methods is a pop-up, announcement bar and then Facebook Ad or post.

Kevin Jordan:                     I think you brought up an I’m important idea there using quizzes in conjunction with advertising. I think from everything that I’ve heard and my own personal experience as a marketer, I think that combining those two things is almost always going to increase your conversion rate from an ad versus just having something out there that’s saying, hey, come buy my stuff or hey, we’re a great company. Even other more powerful specific messages because you’re giving something, you’re giving people something that they can interact with. You’ve seen that results in your clients in terms of combining quizzes with ads and helping to increase conversion rate?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, definitely. So, another service based business that we work with that’s larger but this applies to any smaller version of this was with Jiffy Lube and they made a quiz about what kind of classic car you are and then tied it into a coupon for their actual oil change services. So this could be applied to any sort of oil change location.

And they ran it as an ad and then the ad actually got a ton of interaction and comments and people sharing the ad which they told us they had never seen that happen before because it’s a quiz and so a quiz is a much more shareable conversational piece than just posting let’s say a coupon directly, which the quiz had a coupon in it, so it’s still a coupon offer but you’re getting all that interaction, that social engagement. You’re getting free views on that quiz because people are sharing it and obviously you don’t pay for somebody sharing it you only pay for the initial person taking it.

Kevin Jordan:                     I was just going to bring up that point. People listening are not familiar with how Facebook advertising works. Like Josh just pointed out, you only pay for clicks on the ad directly but if someone takes that ad and they share it on their personal Facebook feed, you don’t pay for that so that’s free extra exposure.

Now I’ve covered why people should use quizzes, how they you know drive traffic to them, a couple examples and case studies. Why don’t tell us a little bit more about your company Interact Quiz Builder and how you can help businesses with this whole process.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, so, Interact Quiz Builder is created for people who’ve never built a quiz before which is almost everyone at this point. Most people have seen them now and it’s an interesting idea but there’s a big difference between that and actually making one. So, the way our process works once you sign up, you’re immediately presented with a question of what kind of industry are you in. And you could select cleaning industry, you could select oil change, you could select cars, you could select business. Any of these industries, we’ve got a bunch.

Once you select your industry, then you’re presented with a series of templates which are pre-made quizzes that you can use. And you can search through them, you can preview them and look at what they entail and once you find one that you think might fit your audience, you can select it. Once you select it, then our guided system will walk you through that template and it will say here’s the title of your quiz, do you like this title, yes or no. And if you say yes, it just moves you on. If you say no, then you get a chance to edit that title.

Same thing through the entire quiz. Every question and results, you get a chance to approve it or change it. So that’s how you build the actual quiz. It’s a series of approvals rather than having to start from nothing. Once you do that, you’ll connect the quiz up to your email list so that it will collect emails for you and once you do that then it will present you with the promotion options, so pop-up announcement bar, social media post, or social media ad and you can simply walk through the steps to set that up.

So, most of it is approving what’s already been done rather than having to come up with unique content from the beginning which is a big challenge.

Kevin Jordan:                     I understand you also have some ways of built-in to your service of helping people drive traffic to the quiz, is that correct?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, exactly. You can use our internal tools to set it up to run as a pop-up, to set it up to run as a Facebook ad and it will automatically populate those things for you so that you’ll get traffic from day one.

Kevin Jordan:                     Now for people who have WordPress sites which is obviously a lot of people, do you have like a plug-in or anything that helps them embed this on their site or is it fairly easy to get the code on WordPress sites?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, so we’ve got a WordPress plug-in and then you would just simply connect the WordPress plug-in to your interact account and then you can continue working inside of interact and every time you make a change it will automatically show up on your website.

Kevin Jordan:                     Excellent. Happy to hear that. Last but not least if you could just give our listeners your one piece of advice about using quizzes and assessments and surveys, one takeaway that you want to get from this interview, what would it be?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah. The one takeaway is a more broad takeaway which is that when you are doing marketing you should be asking as many questions as possible. People are naturally wired to answer questions and not only that but when they start answering questions they stop thinking of you as a company and they start thinking of you as a person, as somebody that’s providing a service or a solution.

And so it really changes the game in terms of how you come across to those potential customers. So, as much as possible, ask questions and give people feedback about themselves and then use that as a way to sell your products or services.

Kevin Jordan:                     I love it. I think, not only do people start thinking about you differently but they start thinking critically about themselves especially if you’re asking questions designed to steer the conversation in a way that’s more advantageous to you and the unique selling proposition that you have versus your competitors, you can really do some very effective selling without people even realizing that they’re being sold something.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, exactly. I mean, as soon as people’s triggers go off in terms of feeling like they’re being sold to, the walls go up and that’s no good. So, you definitely want to avoid that by asking them questions.

Kevin Jordan:                     Do you have a quiz on your website that our listeners can go take that helps in your sales process?

Josh Haynam:                    We do. So if you go to tryinteract.com/blog, there is a quiz that pops up as a pop-up after a 30-second delay because we don’t want to bother anybody that’s just browsing really quickly and it’ll ask you a series of questions to gauge your interest in using quizzes and depending on your interest level it will recommend either a course or a free trial or nothing and it’ll just say, we don’t have a good fit for you right now, you don’t need to use us. Doesn’t seem like you’re quite ready yet.

So, depending on what stage are at we will recommend a product or a service.

Kevin Jordan:                     All right, we’ll make sure to put that link to the blog in the show notes for the episode and encourage people to go and take that quiz. I was expecting based on your previous examples, I was expecting you to have a quiz asking people to find out what kind of quiz they are. Something more off the wall like that.

Josh Haynam:                    Right, yeah.

Kevin Jordan:                     That one’s coming, right?

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah. It’ll be there, it will be there.

Kevin Jordan:                     Okay. Josh, thank you very much for coming on the show today and telling us some ideas about how to use quizzes and assessments and surveys and things like that in your marketing and like I said, I’d encourage our listeners to go check out Josh and Interactive Quiz Builder, see if they can help in that process.

Josh Haynam:                    Yeah, thank you for having me on.