This episode features Interact’s CEO, Josh Haynam, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, and Social Content Manager, Jesy Nelson.
In this episode we will cover part 3 of Tackling the 3 Quiz Marketing Barriers: promoting your quiz!
- Why is promoting your quiz a barrier?
- How much do you need to budget for quiz promotion? (trick question – you can promote it organically or through paid ads, but it’s always recommended to try organically first)
- Where should you put your quiz for the highest conversion rates?
- How else can you get your quiz seen?
Ready to put our AI-powered quiz maker to the test? Learn more here!
Hi guys and welcome back to Interact’s Grow podcast. I’m your host Jessmyn Solana, and today we have all four of us, CEO, Josh Haynam, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, and Social Content Manager Jesy Nelson, the big four J’s of Interact. I think I’m gonna say that on every episode now. So be ready. Sounds good. Don’t you love it?!
Maybe we should rebrand. Just kidding.
Not against, JJJJ with no explanation of what it means. Yeah, no explanation. So this week we are talking about the third part, part three, which is the last part of sort of tackling your quiz barriers, which is promoting your quiz. If you guys are who are listening did not catch last week’s episode, we did talk about connecting your email platform, and then there are resources there to kind of show you how to actually connect it if you’re in that stage of your quiz or thinking about it or still in the research phase of how does this all work.
So for today, promoting your quiz, I guess we’re gonna start with our favorite question: why is promoting your quiz a barrier? Who wants to start? I would say from coaching, the biggest barrier, not pushback, barrier, was you put your quiz out there and you don’t get results back fast enough, and so you immediately think it’s the quiz’s fault, like it’s the quiz that’s not working.
But it’s nine and a half out of 10 times when someone would reach out to me and say, Hey, my quiz isn’t working. You know, it’s, it’s, you know, how do I make this better? The first thing I would always ask is, where have you shared it and are sharing it. And they would say, oh, I put it on my, you know, my link in bio or I posted about it once, sharing your quiz one time ever.
Probably won’t do the trick. Right? And so that was the big thing. It was like you spent all of this time creating the quiz, but now it was like you had to spend just as much effort in marketing it, and I don’t know if people just were too burnt out or too tired at that point, but the fact that they weren’t seeing results fast enough stopped them from continuing to try to promote it in different ways.
It sounds like, oh, go ahead, Josh. I was just gonna, I was just gonna add on top of that, that I think. I was thinking about this yesterday before we were recorded today, and I think the way that a quiz works really well from what I’ve seen since whenever we started this 2012, 13, like, so 10 years of data I think what works really well is when you put the quiz in an existing flow of like customer engagement slash buying that you already have.
So, you know, you have like your top of the funnel stuff where it’s like your socials and your blog content or, and that’s not usually where the quizzes do really well. Most customers who just do ads end up churning out after, I don’t know, six to 12 months. Ads are just so unstable that like the quiz might work for three months and then it stops working because there’s some update on Facebook or whatever.
But where it works really well is when it’s like at the point where people are browsing your stuff. Kind of interested. They’ve moved past the point of just like, oh, I saw, you know, I see your post. They look cool. It’s more like, oh, I’m browsing your site. I’m actually interested. And then the quiz pops in at that point.
So sometimes that looks like, you know, it’s featured as an announcement bar or there’s a link on your website or a button. Usually it’s all on the website. Honestly, I think that’s where it’s the best of like, when somebody is already kind of browsing around like, what’s this business about? Then the quiz pops in and it’s the entry point to the rest of your business.
Then those are the customers that are on year 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 now with us where it’s delivering value for them over and over again. And the way we can measure that, right, is like, do you want to keep paying us? And if you do, then it’s valuable. So that’s my 2 cents on adding on to what Jackie said.
Getting it in front of people. Yeah, I was gonna say that it sounds like you need to sort of set the expectations ahead of time when you’re thinking about any marketing campaign, right? Is thinking about, okay, what, what is all the work that’s gonna go into this? How much time do I have? How much effort do I have?
Or what do I have? How much effort do I wanna put into it? And Josh, you briefly mentioned ads right there, and that was gonna be my next question, which, , how much do you need to budget for the quiz promotion part? So, I mean, I know this is probably not what a lot of people want to hear, especially if you’re just starting out, because I’m basically gonna say like, don’t use quizzes yet, because there’s a point at which quizzes become really valuable and it’s the point at which you do have more traffic than you’re able to handle.
Connecting with every visitor one-on-one. So in the beginning days, right, like you, you have like 50 visitors a month. If you can, you would like to talk with every single one of them because you wanna convert them as much as possible. And the highest converting is literally just gonna be you talking to your customers.
It’s just always how it’s gonna go. Like you can’t make technology to replace you. . As much as people think AI will do that, I just don’t think it’s going to. So you, that’s your first phase, and if that’s the phase you’re in where it’s like, oh, I have 10 people a month visit my site, I would actually not recommend using a quiz because you don’t want to automate yet, cuz you’re gonna lose the opportunity to understand what your customers are going through.
So I think with ads, right? If you don’t already have an ad budget, I would not make one for quizzes, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t start running ads because you’re now doing a quiz. If you’re running ads and you already have a pretty great flow for that. Perfect. Like pop in the quiz. Maybe it’ll convert better.
Maybe it won’t. Honestly, like sometimes it doesn’t work better as an ad. I think where it almost always works better is, like I was saying on the site where it’s like it’s the entry point to your business. It’s directing people to the right products and services. That almost always wins. I rarely see that lose. Against any other sort of lead magnet you’d use on your site ads? It’s, I would say 50-50. Like 50% of the time it’ll do better. 50% it won’t. So if you’re spinning up a budget and running it and it’s only a 50% success rate, I would not recommend that. I think it’s too risky.
That makes so much sense.
Jesy, you are on social media all the time. In terms of sort of seeing what ads come through, what’s your take on. I think I agree with Josh that there’s a time and place for ads, but it’s not where you would jump to right away. I feel like the main part is to get it up on your website, and if you can take it to that next level where you almost incorporate your quiz into your businesses and your services. Like I’m thinking of Ashley Boudin, her quiz, what type of self sabotager are you? That is the entry point into her website and taking that quiz is how it leads you to figuring out what services you need from her or what, how you can work with her. So I think that’s always the top way is if you can get your quiz fully kind of integrated into what you’re offering and everything like that, then that makes a huge difference.
Jackie, anything to add? Running the relationship with Ashley for so long on Facebook ads. That’s exactly, yeah, that’s exactly what I was gonna say. I totally agree with what both of you are saying here. I don’t think that ads are necessarily required. Right. You don’t need to do them. Josh, I really liked your answer of if you already have an ad budget, use that.
If you don’t have one, then don’t try ads. Right, right, right. Now but I think, ugh, don’t quote me. I wanna say if Ashley were here, she would. Say at a minimum you would want like $30 a day to get started, and you could run that for a week to maybe a month just to see how it goes. And then that’s sort of like your window to optimize the ad, to get it to where you need it to be.
Or maybe decide like, Hey, this isn’t working. It’s not worth the money that I’m spending for it. Let me try something else. So if you are looking for a number out there, it’s probably around $30 a day, which, right. Oh, I’m not the best at ads, but it won’t necessarily be spent in one day. That’s just what you’re budgeting, so you won’t spend more than that in a.
Right, and I think the reason why it’s really important to already be running ads before you try is that $30 a day is a lot of money. Like $210 a week is not a small amount of money. And so unless you have a baseline to compare against, like your previous ad was converting at X percent, now you can try the quiz ad and compare it to see whether it works better.
Then it’s, that’s there’s just a lot of money to put against something that’s completely unproven. And you know, we’re saying this from our perspective, having seen this stuff run for the last decade, like it’s too variable and that, I don’t think that’s a good bet with, with your money. That makes a lot of sense.
I guess the other thing, and the other thing to consider with that, right, is what is your quiz doing? Are you selling something from your quiz or are you just paying to have these leads on your email list? Is it worth it just to have people on the email list or are there other things that you could be doing that are more beneficial right now for you on the other end of this?
There is sort of the organic way to promote your quiz and have people find you organically. But I think the time that it takes to build up your SEO strategy can take a lot of time. It can be overwhelming. And there’s a lot of moving parts to it. I just worked on this case study, it’s not out yet.
It might be on our YouTube, but her name is Nina Clapperton and her website is Nina Out and About. It was really interesting sort of going through her case study and she had said that she had focused on her SEO strategy for so long that promoting her quiz was kind of a breeze because she just popped it into where it made sense on her blog post, which were already organically ranking on Google.
Anytime I got this question from customers of, okay, we wanna, you know, we, we created a quiz, whether it was for themselves or for a client, and they asked, what should we do? Like, where should we get started with ads? I would always say, try organically first if you can. Before you put a budget into ads. Kind of like Josh was saying, don’t make the budget for it.
I had talked to, I don’t know, honestly, in my time here, so many people that had unfortunately spent thousands of dollars on ads thinking that was where they needed to go with their quiz, and they ended up not getting ROI from it. They ended up just kind of spending that money and not sort of getting the return that they wanted, so, go ahead, I was gonna lead to my next question, but jump in.
I was gonna say the natural parabolic arc of all ad platforms is that once they reach scale, they are not profitable for anybody who runs ads. So think about most of the ads you see. They’re not profitable, like you see car commercials all off all the time.
They’re not making ROI on those ads. They’re negative roi. . It’s literally just because they cannot afford to lose their brand presence, and so they’re willing to lose money being everywhere all the time, and that is actually just losing money. Like for every dollar they spend, they might get 80 cents back.
So I think that’s really important to keep in mind with ads as most ads you see are losing money. They’re not making money. And it’s the same for us. Like we don’t run ads usually. We have them every once in a while. Whenever we do, they’re loss making and they’re only because you don’t wanna lose brand presence.
They’re not to actually acquire customers. So I think, I think that’s like a really, really important starting place. And then on the SEO front, like building up organic traffic I think the analogy that comes to mind, right, is like you’re wanting to remove roadblocks. You’re not trying to push a boulder up a hill, like running ads to try to grow.
Your business is pushing a boulder up a hill. It’s nearly impossible, and your business can be wiped out. in an instant, and I’ve actually seen this. I was in a group with a founder whose business just disappeared overnight cuz it was completely run on ads. The ad system changed and it’s like, cool, we’re not here anymore.
Which is, like, that sucks. Like if you spent years building a company based on ads and then the platform changes, now your business is gone. Like that is terrible. But yeah, I mean, I think there’s no shortcut to getting to where you want to go. And if you’re thinking that the quiz is gonna be a shortcut, just don’t do it.
It’s gonna be, it’s gonna waste your time. Because even if you do get a great system, I mean, one particular anecdote, I worked with a client back in 2014, 15, something like that. They were getting like 10,000 leads a month with a quiz ad, and then the algorithm changed and it dropped to like, literally overnight.
And so then it’s like, well, great. I just spent like a hundred hours setting up this funnel. One thing changes and it stops working. That will never happen with organic traffic. Yeah. That might happen over like two or three years if you stop, you know, producing content and you stop your engine going, but ads can disappear literally in an instant.
I was gonna say on the topic of how you’re saying, how people think that quizzes are just gonna be some quick fix magic solution, I feel like people feel that way as soon as they make their quiz. And like Jackie said, they put in their link bio and they’re like, I’m not getting any leads. And in my head I’m thinking, what if you had a PDF lead magnet, then you shared it on Facebook once, or put it in your link bio once or you tweeted about it once.
That would probably get you the same results as the quiz. And that goes the same for your services and your offerings. You can’t just share about it and talk about it once, cause no one’s gonna know. You know? It’s something that you have to continuously do, continuously share it, and have it in multiple places on your website, otherwise it’s not gonna make a difference.
But a quiz versus your PDF lead magnet, once you do get that lead, you’re gonna get so much more information about them and they’ll be more warmed up. But it’s not just like, post it once, and since it’s a quiz, I’m gonna get 10 times more leads than a, like A PDF. So love that. So we’re talking all about ads, right?
And you know, we have our pros and cons of organic ads, and I’m sure people are wondering, all right, fine. Well my quiz is done. I created it. So where should I put it for the highest conversion rates? Jackie, do you wanna take this one? Wherever the most traffic is coming from already. Right. So like if you’re getting good traffic to your website, put your quiz on your website.
If people are finding you through social media, then talk about your quiz on social media as a way to like direct them to wherever it is that you want them to go, a sales page, an offer, whatever. So yeah, that’s my answer. I don’t, I, sorry, everybody. It depends, right? Like wherever you’re getting traffic already is where I would start promoting.
Josh, you briefly mentioned this a little bit when we first started talking about why promoting your quiz was a barrier, and you talked a little bit about putting it on your website. Can you go a little bit deeper into that? Yeah, I mean, Jackie’s answer was perfect, honestly, like however people are currently finding your offers.
So if you, if your website right now looks like, you know, let’s say you’re, you’re doing, you have coaching services and you have a button to learn more about my offerings, replace that button with a quiz that says, , you know, and we’ll help you with the quiz. Like, that’s what we do now because it just, it works better when we can kind of collaborate on it.
So you can go sign up for that and we’ll, we’ll help you build that quiz. But basically replace it with a quiz that’s enticing to your audience, but actually is just leading them to the right products and services. So it’s doing exactly the same thing. It’s just to the customer. . It’s matching what the customer is trying to do and what they need with what you’re trying to do and what you need.
So those are different things. Usually you need to sell your services. They don’t necessarily need to buy your services, they need to solve a problem. So we’re just connecting their problem to your services. And then wherever you currently have a link to, like go check out your services or your products or your offerings or whatever, replace that link with the quiz, and that is where it usually.
I would say 90% of the time immediately boosts your conversions. Like I said, removing roadblocks, remove that roadblock conversion, go up 20, 50, a hundred, 500% sometimes, depending on how you know what the conversions were like before in your traffic levels. That’s where it works.
That makes sense. It’s funny when you said that, Josh, I started thinking that in these three episodes, every time this has come up where the barrier has to do with the level of thinking, right? So like you have this quiz idea, but then you go to put it into the builder and you’re like, how does this all connect?
You know what you want the tech to do, but then you try to build the tech and you’re like, how does this work and what you just said, Josh, Business owners as entrepreneurs, as people selling things, right? We are experts in what it is that we’re offering, and so the way that we say things aren’t necessarily right.
It’s like a different level. It’s a different way of. What the customer actually needs to hear. They need to solve a problem. They don’t know that they need your service yet. And that’s really, I mean, I’m not totally not answering your question, Jessmyn, sorry. But I just thought it was funny that it’s like it’s always the level of thinking because you, that’s what the quiz does.
It tells you where this person is at so that you can send them the right message so that they realize, oh, that’s my problem, and this offering is going to solve it. Mm-hmm. , but. Times when you don’t have a quiz. Someone lands on your sales page, or they land on your website and they try to read about what it is that you do, but maybe you’re using jargon terms or just the way that you’re saying it, or where they’re at right now.
They just can’t comprehend how that thing can help them. So, I dunno. Sorry from a tangent, but I, that’s funny. That is beautiful. That’s, that’s the beauty of the AI that we’ve built, that we, that all four of us and other people on our team implement for our clients. Is it, it’s literally transforming what you say.
that you’re offering into what your customer wants to hear, which right now there’s like this divide. It’s like, here’s what I’m trying to say. This is what I’m trying to sell you. And your customer is like, no, but this is what I need. And there’s this gap. And our AI quite literally transforms what you say into that using GPT, which is a transformer.
So it’s beautiful. Like that’s how it works. And that’s like the problem that exists is like you are saying you need this and your customer’s like, no, I need this. Connect them up using the quiz. That’s how, that’s how it works. That reminds me of sort of this idea that I don’t know how to put this into words where.
you know, you know what you do as a service, but you have to kind of, I, I guess like it’s relating a lot to like keyword research, right? Like you need to look for the intent. Like what’s the intent of what my customer wants or needs, or like what do they intend to look for, what do they intend to buy?
Or anything like that. And you have to. Sort of look at it in that way, kind of Jackie adding to like changing your level of thinking or it’s a different level of thinking and I think that is what creates a lot of the, the barriers when you’re doing your quiz or any of your other marketing campaigns is you have to think outside of the box and think less about like how you wanna do it or how you see some of your colleagues doing it, or you know, coaches that you follow online, or mentors that you follow online following how they do it. You have to kind of figure out like, well, what does the customer need?
What is the customer looking for? And how do I build this in a way that they’re going to find? Get engaged in curiosity enough to take the quiz and then I can lead them down the funnel where they’ll finally like to get onto my email list and then eventually buy and become a customer. Yeah, real quick, Jess, cuz that really does, yeah, that really does answer your question of where you should put your quiz first.
It’s like, think once you realize or figure out or think through what it is that this person who problem is looking for. If you were that person, where would you go to get the answer? That’s where you wanna put your quiz. Would somebody find your website right away and know to get? They would be able to get an answer there.
Then sometimes, okay, maybe your website isn’t the best place to put it. Maybe it’s in a Reddit right, or a community group or something like that. Because all of these people who are searching for answers to these problems are looking for this specific thing, and so that’s where you wanna put your quiz, where people are going to be looking for it because it’s gonna help.
Similar to the ads, I would say is if you don’t have a website yet, don’t feel like you have to build one in order to have a quiz. We’ve had, we have had a lot of people who had success putting it in their link bio, putting it like you said, Jackie, and like Reddit threads or like in their communities and whatnot.
It’s all about figuring out what stage you’re at, what budget you have, and literally just what, what resources do you have available to you in your business right now based off of, you know, how much money you’re currently making? Are you ready to kind of make that next step to scale or are you still at a place where, you know, a quiz sounds really nice, but I dunno if it’s actually going to perform the duties that I needed to, I don’t know if it’s gonna get me the clients that I need.
You know, maybe sort of searching on the internet and looking for people through different communities is the right thing for you right now, before you get into sort of creating a quiz. My next question for you guys, I guess we kind of answered it a little bit, but you know, Maybe Jackie, you could go into this cuz you were kind of talking about a little bit about like, putting into Reddit into different communities, like besides ads, besides organic SEO, besides, you know, putting it up on your website.
How else can your quiz get seen? One of the most unique ways that I heard in coaching that people were, I like think, what am I trying to say? They were playing around with was they would go to events or they would speak at con like conferences, right? And so they would put their quiz behind a QR code and then either put that QR code at the conference or on their business card.
And that way when people get in touch with you, essentially your quiz is the way to get in touch, right? So, Scan the QR code, it makes it super easy for them. The quiz pops up on the phone right away, no matter where they are. One gal, her name was Heather Landes. There was tech glitch at the conference that she was at, and so in order to save time for the attendees, keep them entertained, she was able to pull her QR code up for her quiz onto the main screens and everybody was able.
Scan them and take the quiz. She got like 400 leads from that just because tech broke and some, the, the conference needed people to do something. So I thought that was a really, really neat way. And if you have a, like a brick and mortar business, right? Hang a QR code up on like, I dunno, local coffee shops or gyms or again, wherever your ideal customers might be hanging out in your town, because that way you’re attracting local people that are out and about that would use your service depending on what.
Similarly to that I’ve seen people that do a lot of podcast interviews use the quiz as they’re like, usually they ask you where that people can go to learn more about you. And instead of just going like, oh, well here’s my website and say, well actually I have this really cool quiz that tells you X, Y, Z go take it here.
And I’ve seen that work really well for conversions.
I was just gonna add that you should put it anywhere that you would share anything else. You can share and promote your quiz. YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, anywhere. Give it a shot. See where it works. See where your audience is. But don’t limit yourself thinking that, oh, this is a quiz, so maybe I shouldn’t, you know. What was that one app that kind of took off. That was people talking. Was it like Clubhouse? Yeah, clubhouse. People were even doing it on Clubhouse and like, I think that kind of died down now, but anytime something like that comes up, give it a shot, it’s worth it.
Yeah. Love that. I think at the end of the day really think about the customer journey that you want people to have and all your other marketing campaigns like Josh had said, like podcasts, if you’re going to conferences, like Jackie mentioned. Anything that you are on, I would, if this is your main lead magnet, and it’s a way to engage in a conversation with your audience who could become potential customers. It really doesn’t hurt to just think about your quiz first, like, hey, here’s my call to action.
Take this really fun quiz. I’m gonna give you a freebie at the end of there, like you’re going to get more information on, you know, my weight loss packages, or my favorite ways to build a website. I don’t know. I’m coming up with things out of nowhere. Let people know what they’re gonna get out of it and think about that customer journey of, okay, well I’m gonna go do this marketing thing anyway, so why not share the quiz there.
Guys, any last minute thoughts before we wrap up on our last quiz barrier? And until next week, we start again on another topic. I like kind of a broad theme. Do you wanna go or should I go? Go for it. I’ll go. I’ll go. I’ll go. I like the broad theme that we’ve kind of pulled out of this, which is like, if, if you’re struggling to get leads, like maybe ask the question of where are my customers and what are the questions that they have?
And start there. I think that that kicks off a really good like discovery journey rather than just like, oh, should I share my quiz four times a week or two? I think that’s, I think that would be my takeaway from this conversation. Yeah, I was just gonna say, don’t get discouraged with the first time that you post your quiz.
Don’t expect 10,000 leads. Also, remember your goal. Maybe you only want five leads. So there’s, there’s amazing case studies out there about what a quiz can do, but that’s not necessarily what you want to happen in your own business. And don’t dis don’t get discouraged if you don’t see the leads right away.
There’s definitely different things. I mean, try different marketing techniques. Try updating your quiz title. There’s lots of things that you can play around with. Jesy, any last minute thoughts before I close?
I was just thinking of what Jackie said, like even if you only get five leads, maybe make it a challenge or make a point that you’re gonna reach out to each of those five leads personally.
See how many of those first couple leads you can convert into customers. Love it. That’s beautiful. And these are actually all things that we talked about in the last two weeks in our other episodes. So if you guys are just jumping in with us now, make sure you do check out part one and two. In addition to this, they all kind of blend together a little bit, but the themes are exactly the same.
The ideas are the same. The expectations that you need to set are the same before you jump in to creating your quiz. And if you have any questions on this, feel free to reach out. We will link our Josh, is it a form for the Interact AI? Can you make sure that I’m saying the right thing. . Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It just asks you if you have any ideas for a quiz, and if not, you just pop in your URL and then your email and then submit that. And we will work with you to transform, like I said, you know what you, what you know really well, which is your services and your offerings. We’ll transform that into a great quiz for you so you don’t have to worry about that part.
So it’s AI dot tryinteract dot com. Beautiful, and this is something new that we’re doing. So we are all personally reaching out to get this set up and, and set up for you guys. Go ahead Jackie. No, I was just gonna say I was making some quizzes today and you can definitely pop your website in there and we will come up with suggestions for you.
But, and Josh, we were talking about this earlier, the more you give us, like even if it’s just a couple sentences or a paragraph and we use that in the prompts that we’re using in in chat GPT, the quiz is going to come out so much better because it’s going to sound like you. So yes, it’s. To just pop your website in and we will make you a quiz that happens quite a bit in the submissions that we’re seeing.
But take a couple minutes and really think about what it is that you’re wanting to do with this quiz, because if you give us just a little bit of detail, the quiz is really gonna come out so much better for your business. Awesome. Well guys, thank you so much and for those who are listening, thank you for joining us today.
We will see you next week on our Grow Podcast. Bye bye guys.