People like to know themselves and improve themselves. In fact, it’s estimated that the self-improvement industry will be worth $13.2 billion dollars by 2022. That’s a lot of money. It’s also why personality assessments and personality questions are so popular. Whether you’re a fan of Meyers-Briggs, DISC, enneagram, or another type of personality assessment all together, you recognize the appeal. You can also probably rattle off your letters or numbers, and you know exactly what they mean.
At Interact, we’re fans of personality quizzes, too! Our customers create amazing personality quizzes that grow their businesses and help the quiz-takers learn more about themselves. When the quiz asks the right questions and reaches the business’ target audience, impressive things happen.
Sometimes that’s the hard part. You don’t know the right questions. You want to do the very best for your customers and potential customers, but you’re stumped.
You’re not the only one.
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered! Today we’re answering the question that’s often on people’s minds as they’re creating a quiz, “What do I ask?”
To help our our favorite people (that’s you!) at the point where they’re stuck, we’re discussing everything related to personality questions:
- What personality questions are;
- How businesses use personality questions;
- 20 of the most effective personality questions you can use in your quiz – interview questions, branding questions, marketing questions, customer profile questions, communication questions;
- Best practices for using your personality questions in an Interact quiz.
By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to use the personality questions your audience will love.
What personality questions are
Personality questions are questions that are used in assessments to find out more about a person’s personality. Your personality is made up of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make you who you are. While each personality is different because people’s thoughts, emotions, and actions are never exactly the same, personality assessments categorize common themes among people into personality types.
There are many types of personality assessments, some of which we will not dive into here. There are formal personality tests that are used by psychologists to diagnose personality disorders. We’re not talking about those types of personality assessments in this post. As well, human resources departments in businesses use personality tests, inventories and/or questionnaires to identify job candidates who would be the best fit for their companies. We’re not talking about those assessments either.
What we’re focusing on are personality questions that you can use in your online quizzes for your business. These questions are helpful for grouping people into their potential audience types by their answers. Then you’re using those personality types to effectively grow your business.
But how do people use personality questions to grow their businesses?
I’m so glad you asked.
How businesses use personality questions
There are multiple ways business owners can use personality questions effectively in their businesses. They can use them for understanding new employees, their business branding, market research and ideal customer persona definition, and as a tool to refine business communication.
Using personality questions in any or all of these areas can help you develop a deeper understanding of your audience, your products, or your business.
Personality questions can provide insight into your employees. Knowing characteristics of your employees’ personalities is helpful because you can identify ways to get the best out of them. Some people work most effectively in groups, while others prefer to work alone. When you recognize these differences and allow employees opportunities to collaborate or work independently, you’re valuing who they are and your results will show it.
Another place where personality questions can be helpful is when branding your business. It can be incredibly powerful to flush out elements of your brand by defining its personality. Business owners who want to add depth to their brand can do so by answering personality questions as if their brand is a person. Since we want our customers to connect with our brand, it’s a great idea to define as many parts of your branding as possible. Personality questions can help you do that.
Understanding your ideal customer or buyer persona is essential in order to effectively solve their problem with your products. In copywriting, one of the key ideas is to write for one person. Your marketing should address one problem for that one person and how your product solves it.You can’t write to one person if you don’t know them, and you can’t get to know them if you don’t talk to them and ask questions. Personality questions are an excellent way to get to know your people. They can help you find out your ideal customer’s needs and what type of marketing will reach them.
Finally, personality questions can be helpful in your business communication. This ties in with the previous two areas discussed. Effective business communication requires that perfect blend of your business’ personality AND your ideal customer persona.
You want your brand’s personality to come through in your communications, but it needs to complement the communication style of your ideal customer. If they don’t have complementary styles, your brand won’t reach your ideal customer. You want to make sure they match up!
To help you use the personality questions effectively, be sure to check out our best practices.
Best practices for using these personality questions
It’s always a good idea to review quiz best practices. Following these suggestions will create a more insightful quiz and lead to a better user experience for the people who take your quiz.
1. Don’t include all of these questions in your quiz
Interact recommends 6-10 questions in quizzes. That keeps it from overwhelming the quiz-taker, but it also provides information to clearly identify which personality is the best fit. Making your quiz too long will cause people to lose interest and quit before the end of the quiz. When your quiz is too short, the results might not be as accurate for your quiz-takers.
Including all of the questions would also be confusing for your quiz-takers because the questions don’t all fit together. They’re designed for different audiences and for various purposes. Plus, they don’t all lead to the same personality types.
Make sure you only include the number of questions you need to get a clear match to the personality type.
2. Be very clear on who your audience is
You want the people who take the quiz to feel confident that the quiz is created for them. Your quiz title and quiz description can help you do this. You might choose a title like “What kind of employee are you?” or “What’s your brand saying about itself?” For the customer questions, you might want the title to be something like “What kind of ___________ shopper are you?” You can fill in the blank with whatever matches with your business — clothes, food, gift, etc.
3. Be sure your answer choices align with your quiz results
When you’re writing your answer choices, it should be easy for your quiz-takers to recognize why the answer choice led to the quiz result. Use answer choices that are logical matches for the quiz results you include.
The answer choices included above are ideas to get you thinking about what answers you might need for your quiz. Use what you want, add what you want, and make the quiz that works best for your people.
Let’s talk about the different personality questions that you can use for your business.
Personality questions you can use
While there are many personality questions out there that can fit into several areas of business, we’re focusing on four areas of business. Those areas are:
Personality questions for understanding how to get the best out of your employees
Personality questions are incredibly popular in the hiring process because they let you, the interviewer, know the person being interviewed on a deeper level. They help you see them as a person, instead of simply viewing them as the list of facts on a resume. Personality questions provide depth.
While personality questions are usually open-ended questions where people have the freedom to answer the questions in their own words, there are personality questions that can be asked online in a multiple-choice format. Since the Interact quiz-builder offers multiple-choice questions, I’ll be sharing questions and answers you can use.
If you prefer to use these in a different format for your personality questions, you can always skip the answer choices!
1. How do you prefer to work?
This question can reveal a great deal about how the person interacts with others in the office. The answer choices can include: independently, in a team with a designated leader, in a collaborative team, and I don’t have a preference. Since you know the structure of your business, you can figure out which one is the best fit for your needs.
2. Which of the following would frustrate you the most at work?
Office dynamics can be a positive contributor to office productivity or a significant distraction. Including some of the more common office personalities can offer insight into your interviewee’s personality. Answer choices can include:
- Office incompetence;
- Know-it-all;
- Office tattletale;
- Prankster or clown.
A fun thing about this question is that you can use GIFs or images to ask the question. And the TV show, The Office, provides perfect examples of each. Since not every person is familiar with The Office, be sure to include the descriptors for each GIF or image.
Allowing individuals to pick more than one can provide more insight. For example, someone choosing incompetence and prankster is probably more professional at work. Someone choosing know-it-all or tattletale might be a little more casual in their work personality.
3. Who inspires you the most?
With this question, you can learn a lot about the priorities of the person you’re interviewing. Sharing who inspires them can reveal where their primary interest lies. Answer choices can be: A) Industry thought leader; B) Family or Friend; C) Inspirational historical figure; D) Celebrity or sports figure. Choosing between these different people can help you identify whether the interviewee is someone who is most looking to advance their career, impact their family, change the world, or grow their reputation and wealth.
While all of these can benefit your business, the difference can come in what methods they’ll use to succeed and how committed they are to your business. The nice thing about personality questions is there isn’t a correct or incorrect answer, there are just different answers.
You know exactly what your business needs!
4. How would your previous colleagues most frequently describe you?
This question can reveal a great deal about the person you’re interviewing. It’s a little less intimidating than the question about how your previous boss would describe you, and it shows a completely different side of the personality.
You also want to make sure that you present positive answer choices, because people are more likely to answer questions honestly if they’re saying something good about themselves! Possible answer choices could include:
- Personable and easy to get along with;
- Diligent and reliable;
- Independent;
- Collaborative;
- Helpful;
You can word the question to only let them choose one answer, like in “Which of these descriptions are your previous colleagues most likely to use to describe you?” Or you can give them the freedom to choose as many answer choices as they want.
When allowing individuals to self-select descriptors like this, you do need to take what they say with a grain of salt, but it can hopefully be a starting point in getting to know the interviewee’s personality.
5. What type of hobby do you most enjoy outside of work?
People can devote their time to a wide range of hobbies outside of work, so this question might seem like it would be more difficult to ask in multiple-choice format. That’s not the case, what you can do to ask this question is group activities into categories that make sense together. Answer choice could include A) creative hobbies like painting, cooking, or woodworking; B) travel, extreme sports, or other adventurous activities; C) sports, working out, or other health and fitness hobbies; D) reading, museums, or other intellectual pursuits; E) concerts, movies, or entertainment.
While people are likely to have more than one hobby, asking them for the one that they most enjoy can reveal elements of their personality that might not otherwise be identified in an interview setting.
6. What is your go-to strategy when working on a major project for work?
There are as many different strategies to handle projects as there are personality types. Some people like to break a project into smaller tasks that they can complete individually. Others prefer a more laid-back approach where they work as inspiration strikes. Still others are likely to work closely with a team of coworkers to get the project finished. And some people prefer to do a lot of research and mental preparation before they get to work on the deliverables for the project.
None of these approaches are wrong; they’re just different. They also can reveal a great deal about the personality of the person who uses the strategy, so it’s an excellent question to ask potential employees.
Personality questions for branding
I love the idea of using personality questions for branding your business. In a post on understanding your brand’s personality, the writer at 99designs discusses how it’s important to think of your brand as a person to help make branding decisions. After you know your brand’s personality, you can decide colors, fonts, and other stylistic elements.
7. Which friend from high school would your brand be?
This question is not an exclusive question for branding, but it can show a lot about how the business owner views their brand. If you think of a circle of friends, you often find an assortment of personalities. Some common ones you might run across include the smart one, the creative one, the funny one, and the trendy one. If you need other choices, you can include the sporty one, the odd one out, or the popular one.
While stereotypes aren’t necessarily a good thing, these are ones that people can understand and relate to. They know what they’re going for with their brand, so they can choose the descriptor that matches best.
8. It’s Friday night. What’s your brand up to?
The idea of your brand doing something on a Friday night really helps develop the idea of a brand personality. There are many elements that go into a personality, and they often come out as actions or interests. With this question, you can be as creative as you want with your answer choices. Possible answers include:
- Having a blast at the hottest night club;
- Curled up in bed with a good book;
- Having a high-class night out at the theater;
- Office happy hour to connect with coworkers;
9. Which social media platform does your brand prefer?
Just like people and brands, social media has some personality characteristics. Twitter is a popular news source. LinkedIn is where the professionals hang out. People spend time on Facebook to connect with friends and others. The artsy crowd is on Instagram. Having a person choose where their brand spends time online can show a lot about their priorities for their business and the personality of their brand.
10. What is your brand’s greatest strength?
Many people do an excellent job of seeing the weaknesses of their branding or the challenges that they face with regards to branding their business, but they sometimes forget to think about the positive. It’s essential to recognize what you’re good at and what your brand does well.
Some possible strengths can include:
- Explaining things in a way that people understand;
- Connecting with your people;
- Recognizing the latest trends;
- Being a thought leader in your field.
Giving people the opportunity to brag on their business is always welcome!
11. Your brand is at a happy hour with colleagues. What’s your brand drinking?
Like the other questions, certain personalities are more likely to choose specific drinks. Some of the answer choices might include: A) Shots of tequila, my brand’s here to party!; B) A glass of wine, my brand’s keeping it classy; C) A club soda, the brand doesn’t drink in front of colleagues; D) A beer, my brand is pretty low-key.
The idea for this question is completely inspired by the quiz of Tonic Site Shop. If you aren’t familiar with this quiz, you absolutely need to go take it. It’s an exceptional quiz, and Interact has a case study of the results they’ve gotten with their quiz.
12. What is your brand’s biggest dream?
While it’s funny to think of a brand having a dream, the reality is this can reveal lots about the business owner’s goals for their business. This provides insight into what kind of personality the owner is creating for their brand.
Answer choices for this question could include:
- My brand wants to be the industry standard against which all other businesses are measured;
- My brand wants to be the educational leader in our field;
- My brand wants to be the friend that everyone wants to hear from;
- My brand wants to be known as the premium business within our field.
Answering these personality questions about their brand will challenge a business owner to more clearly define their brand and help them identify stylistic elements that match with that brand.
Customer profile questions
As we discussed earlier, it’s essential for business owners to understand their audience. When they know their audience, they can reach their audience.
Personality questions are an excellent way to learn about your audience and get to know them. You can also use these questions to help you create your ideal customer avatar or customer persona. They give a business owner more insight into their audience’s thoughts and feelings than demographic questions.
Your audience’s thoughts, interests, likes, and dislikes fall under psychographics instead of demographics. When you have a better grasp of the psychographics of your audience, you’re more likely to create products that effectively solve their problems. You’re also more able to reach them in ways where they feel a connection to you and your business.
13. Which of these areas interest you the most?
This question can look very different, depending on your business. This question for a SAAS company could include the different areas of technology that they focus on in their business. For a lifestyle blogger, the answer choices could relate to blog categories that the blogger focuses on in their blog.
General answers for this question might include:
- Health and wellness;
- Career and technology;
- Travel and adventure;
- Home, garden, and DIY;
- Creativity and entertainment;
- Food.
This personality question is especially helpful in creating segments for your email list. You can’t get any better than someone telling you exactly what they’re interested in!
14. How would you describe yourself?
This question can be asked in many different ways from various viewpoints. Sometimes people view themselves differently from how others view them. Sometimes, they see themselves the same. There can also be multiple types of answer choices that fit in here. And asking this as an open-ended question would get an even different answer.
In asking this, I’m focusing on how the quiz-taker relates to other people. The answer choices that fit with that context are: A) Introvert; B) Extrovert; C) Ambivert. Knowing this about your customers can be helpful in creating a brand and messaging to which they can feel a connection.
If you want to make sure you and your customers have the same understanding of the introvert/extrovert personality types, you could give examples of what those words mean instead. Examples of this include A) I get energy from being with other people; B) Being around large groups of people is great, but it’s often tiring; C) Sometimes I love being around people, but it depends on the situation and my mood.
15. About which of the following are you the most concerned?
Identifying what your people are passionate about is very useful for business owners. When you know this, you can make sure that your company mission and practices are aligned with these values. You can also recognize where your business can make improvements in their practices and work to be a positive influence on the world.
Some possible answer choices could be:
- Sustainability and environmental issues;
- Poverty and income disparity;
- Illiteracy and educational inequality;
- Racial and social injustices.
Obviously, there are many other global concerns, but these are a few that you can use to get started. As you get to know your audience, you’ll recognize what is important to them and can focus on those.
It is important to note that you should not focus on an area of concern solely because your audience is concerned with it. It’s a good idea to first consider what is important to you and the mission of your business, then think about your customers’ concerns and interests as you develop new business practices and initiatives. For example, if the majority of your customers are concerned about environmental issues, you might want to make changes to your packaging that could lessen your company’s environmental impact.
16. What is most important to you when deciding to purchase a product?
This question might not seem like a personality question, but it is. You can tell a great deal about a person’s personality by their decision-making processes. If they’re focused on price, you can tell they’re frugal. If reviews are the deciding factor, they are most likely an extrovert and someone who’s a “people person.” When features or technology play the most important role, the person could be into technology or a studious personality.
There will also be those people who decide to purchase a product due to the company mission. This shows that they have a benevolent or philanthropic personality. People who buy Toms shoes specifically for their impact demonstrate this personality trait.
For this question, the answers could be:
- Price;
- Reviews or reputation;
- Features or innovation;
- Company mission.
17. Which of these compliments are you most likely to receive?
This question reveals a lot about how others view your customer. Knowing this can help you understand more about the psychographics of your customer. You can use this information in your marketing to effectively connect with your people. When your customers can see themselves reflected in your message, they’re more likely to buy.
Possible answer choices could be: A) You’re so smart; B) You’re so adventurous; C) You’re so helpful; D) You’re so friendly; E) You’re so athletic. All of these are compliments people would feel very positive receiving and would be more than happy to admit that people often say that about them.
18. What are you most likely to buy next?
How people spend their money reveals a great deal about their personality. When you know what’s a priority for them, you can use the information to create products and services that they need, and use advertising campaigns that work.
With this question, you can include a range of purchases that reflect what people value. Some choices might include:
- a dinner with friends;
- a plane ticket to a faraway destination;
- the newest technology innovation;
- a surprise gift for a friend;
- a course on a topic that interests them.
If they spend money on a night out with friends, they’re more likely to be an extrovert. If they buy a plane ticket, they’re adventurous. When new tech is a priority, they’re interested in innovation. If they choose a surprise gift, they’re thoughtful, and choosing a course means that they love learning. Each of these reveals a distinct personality type.
If you want even more personality questions to ask your customers, check out this post with 9 more customer profile questions from Interact.
Messaging
While company messaging does tie in with the company brand, it’s not completely determined by the brand. As discussed earlier, it needs to have a thoughtful balance between the brand’s personality and elements of the customer profile. When these two line up, your messaging is where it needs to be. If you’re only focusing on the voice of your company, you won’t necessarily connect with your people. If you’re solely focused on the customer with no thought to the brand, your messaging will be inconsistent and/or feel fake.
Here are a few questions to get you started thinking about your company messaging.
19. Which of these is your brand most likely to write?
This question can reveal a lot about what the business owner’s purpose is for their brand. Each style is completely different and fits with a very distinct personality type. Considering this can impact the content that a brand produces and the messaging that the company uses to reach their customers.
Answers for this question could include:
- A well-researched article that’s published in a respected professional journal;
- A compilation of poetry and photography;
- A book of anecdotes and humorous short stories;
- A series of letters to a close friend;
- An article on inc.com;
- A Medium blog post;
- Something highlighted in Vogue.
20. What tone fits best with your company image?
Sometimes asking directly is the best way to find out what people are trying to do with their messaging. If they’ve thought about it, they’re already using that information for their business. If they haven’t considered the tone of their messaging, they can probably figure out which one matches best. And if they can’t identify what tone they’re using, they’ll know they should probably figure that out!
Possible answer choices:
- Educational or informative;
- Bright and positive;
- Funny or comical;
- Serious or professional;
These answer choices align closely with personality types, so it can be simple to include them in a personality quiz. Plus, the question helps the quiz-taker out because, when they know what tone they’re going for, they can make sure that their communications align with that. Your customers will appreciate that your quiz assists them in finding the right messaging for their business.
Congratulations! You’re now ready to create a fabulous quiz with personality questions that your people will love.
We’ve discussed:
- What personality questions are;
- How businesses use them;
- Best practices for creating an Interact quiz with your personality questions;
- Personality questions that you can use for your business.
Be sure to let us know how you use these questions!