Josh Haynam
The digital frontier has become home to millions of entrepreneurial pioneers.
Marketing has gone from reaching out to customers via cold-calling to nurturing warm leads into new customers inbound via email. Make no mistake, the marketing playing field has changed drastically over the years.
As marketers continue to develop newer and more innovative software for the masses, they also need to cultivate the most inventive ways to reach out to their audience, and then some.
Quizzes have stormed the internet years ago, and after seeing its effects, marketers have utilized them as a means of generating leads. However, it isn’t enough to just rely on marketing automation to convert quiz leads into customers anymore. There’s more than one use for a quiz when it comes to software companies.
Today we’ll be looking at how software companies like Cloud Sherpas, Ipsos, Velocity and EMC have utilized quizzes to the best of their ability, deploying a different marketing strategy for each example and highlighting their successes that followed. Let’s take a look shall we?
Generating Qualified Leads; Quality Over Quantity
Before we take a look at the other ways software companies can use quizzes, let’s take a look at why most companies use quizzes in the first place: to generate leads.
Cloud Sherpas provides cloud advisory and technology services for the world’s leading brands. As a software company that prides itself in offering advice for successful cloud program execution and other services, they created a quiz called “How mature is your ServiceNow instance?”
Cloud Sherpas’ quiz not only generates leads, but qualifies them as well. Their quiz is an assessment that gauges an individual’s understanding of service management. By the end of their quiz, a participant is informed on his/her level of maturity as a follow-up with helpful links to nurture that lead.
Because this quiz is an assessment, Cloud Sherpas is able to determine the more knowledgeable individuals that take the quiz. While their quizzes may be boring to the general public, it’s more important to their target audience.
Cloud Sherpas consistently promotes their blog on Facebook with the attached quiz, bringing in 3-4 qualified leads a day. Even though their lead generation isn’t through the roof, these are 3-4 solidly qualified leads.
Cloud Sherpas is a well-established enterprise software company, so every qualified lead they retrieve is as valuable as the next. The takeaway from this example is that even if you don’t generate a large amount of leads as a marketer, your main concern is obtaining quality leads that will turn out to be paying customers in the end rather than false leads seemingly waste your time. Quality over quantity can still go a long way.
Personalizing Customer Correspondence With A Quiz
At the end of any form of interaction or transaction, have you ever received a keepsake to take home with you? It could be anything. A receipt after paying for some groceries, a magnet from your favorite amusement park, maybe even a lollipop after a doctor’s visit.
Ipsos is a software company that provides innovative, entrepreneurial, client-focused organizational research services to clients all over the world. Ipsos works closely with their clients, so they came up with a quiz titled “Is Your Approach Hot or Cold?”
Ipsos is one of the few companies that uses their quiz in an incredibly ingenious way. They add a link to their quiz to the email footer. Whenever an employee is corresponding with a potential customer, the quiz will be right there in the email. It’s a unique way to distribute the quiz to anyone Ipsos comes in contact with.
The quiz itself consists of the same eight questions about which word best describes you, equipped with relevant images to each possible answer. Before reaching your results, the quiz is gated with a lead capture form that asks for your first and last name, email address, company’s name and phone number.
After displaying your results, you’re given the option of sharing them over Facebook and Twitter. It’s a fun and interactive piece of shareable content that greets every potential customer at the end of their email. Ipsos gets about 1-2 leads per week with this method of execution. Give it a try yourself. Place your quiz at the footer of an email, or find a way to embed it in a message to your customers.
Using Quizzes As A Permanent Resource
Before we sat ourselves in corporate offices, we took our seats in classrooms. Quizzes not only served as a medium to test our knowledge, but to help us retain information as well. Now, take this resource and place it on a shelf for others to see.
Having access to information like our quiz results can be helpful in the future. The same applies to knowledge tests that gauge our maturity level on a given subject.
Velocity is a software company that provides leading edge services along with innovative solutions that allow their customers to accelerate performance, reduce costs and increase efficiencies. Velocity came up with the quiz titled “The HFM Maturity Assessment.”
Just like our first example, Velocity’s quiz gauges the maturity of an individual’s knowledge; this time around, it focuses on the Hyperion Financial Management application model; talk about a mouthful. This quiz is longer in length, but it truly serves as a resource.
By the end of the quiz, your results determines your level of maturity with a short bullet-point description of the characteristics exhibited by your HFM proficiency level. It doesn’t discourage you by any means, but it lets you know exactly where you stand.
Surprisingly, the quiz generates 4-6 leads per day. Probably because it’s featured on the resource page as a permanent fixture of the site. Placement is a key factor when it comes to visibility, so placing your quiz in the appropriate directory will generate leads based on its location.
Using Quizzes To Keep Tabs On Your Employees
As we stated earlier, there’s more than one way to use quizzes. While the main reason to use quizzes is to generate leads through interactive content, software companies have found other uses for them within their companies.
EMC is a global leader that enables businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service. EMC works with organizations all over the world and in every industry. They created a quiz titled “The Human Model: Leading Transformation.”
Rather than using their leads, software giant EMC created their quiz for the sole purpose of internal testing. This content is utilized to make sure their employees are up-to-date on the happenings within the company and the industry as a whole.
As one of the leading companies in operations transformations, EMC has to make sure that their own employees are advancing in knowledge along with the rest of the world, a good business practice when it comes to keeping up in a fast-paced environment. Try creating a quiz to test your employees to see how much they know about marketing, or your company itself.
Let’s Review What We’ve Learned Today
In this article, we placed a focus on the various uses software companies have for quizzes.
It wouldn’t be very informative if we didn’t mention the basic use of a quiz as a means of generating leads, so that was the first thing we highlighted. With the example we’ve chosen however, we placed a higher priority on quality leads over a mass acquisition of it.
The next example we looked at used quizzes by placing them at the footer of an email, it was the last thing correspondents saw. Our third example talked about how a quiz can be used as a resource based on where you permanently place it.
Our last example highlighted a method for using quizzes that didn’t focus on using the leads it generated. Instead, a quiz was used to keep a company’s employees in check; an interesting way to keep the company’s staff on their toes.
Software companies these days are finding more and more ways to utilizes quizzes for their own purposes. If you’re a part of a software company, or if you run one for that matter, maybe it’s time you considered using quizzes for your company.
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