We’re not talking about general knowledge or trivia questions here. In fact, anyone who’s spent a lot of time with family over the holidays will probably have had enough of that sort of thing!
We’re focusing on the questions that make up your Specialised Marketing Assessment (SMA) quiz. These questions have many functions, including:
- Making your audience think by shining a light on the areas where they need help
- Setting you up as the trusted advisor, the person who gets them and can help them
- Telling you what you need to know to qualify the quiz taker as a viable lead and segment them into relevant categories
What types of questions are there?
An SMA quiz can be made up of a variety of question types such as fill in the blank, multiple choice and yes/no questions. All these question types work well in any assessment quiz and can give insightful results.
If you want to know which types of questions will work best for you specifically, our answer is always going to be all of them. Mix it up, some people might respond better to different types of questions than others. Also, the variety will keep your prospects engaged and more likely to finish the quiz.
It may be that some types of questions aren’t appropriate or useful in your line of work. For example, an accountant wishing to use a quiz to highlight what services their clients might be missing out on may only need simple yes/no questions to ascertain what services the client is currently using.
Things to consider when developing quiz questions
Good quiz questions should:
- Assess what you intend for your prospects to learn about themselves
- Allow your prospects to demonstrate what their strengths and weaknesses are
- Elicit answers that reveal where your prospects are currently at
- Motivate prospects and help them structure their next steps
- Separate out prospects who are potential ideal clients from those who aren’t
How do I write my questions?
Before you set pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard as it were, you need to know your audience’s pain points. What are their biggest challenges that you can help them overcome?
You should determine what you want your prospects to know and what action you want them to take. Revisit the aims and outcomes you may have set out for your quiz at the beginning of the quiz creation process.
Topics
Once you’ve got the framework for your quiz down, i.e. you’ve identified your prospect’s pain points, what you want them to know and do next, it’s still not quite question writing time.
First you need to decide on the topics that you will ask questions about and ultimately provide specific feedback on.
Your topics should relate to your prospect’s main areas where they are struggling and need to develop to be successful. Alternatively, your topics could be the areas where they are strongest and need to leverage to take things to the next level. The topics should highlight the barriers that you can help them get over to move forward.
Topics are usually based on your existing methodology. For example, if you’re a marketing consultant, you might use the five P’s as your topics i.e. Product, Price, Promotion, Place and People.
Other examples of topics are:
- Focus
- Goal Setting
- Sleep Quality
You can start by brainstorming a list of topics and gradually narrow it down. You might find that you continue to edit your topics further once you begin writing the questions to go with them.
Questions
Once you’ve done the groundwork and established what your topics are, you’re ready to draft your questions. This can seem like an overwhelming task, and it can be difficult to know where to begin. Follow these four simple steps to get started:
- Brainstorm questions for each of your topics
- Review and assess what you have brainstormed
- Delete any questions that aren’t aligned with your aims for the quiz or the challenges your target audience face
- Keep in mind that a quiz should take less than three minutes to complete
Answers
Open-text format answers are not advisable for SMA quizzes as they cannot be scored automatically. Therefore, you will need to come up with a set of possible answers for each question.
Likert Scale answers can work well, that is where respondents specify their level of agreement or disagreement with a statement you have presented to them. For example:
I can confidently delegate tasks to my team
- Strongly disagree
- Disagree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Agree
- Strongly agree
For multiple choice questions, we like to take the Likert Scale principle and make it more personal and relatable. We do this by using emotive phrases that describe a familiar scenario. We come up with a selection of possible answers that cover a spectrum of emotions.
The first answer should be at the negative end of the spectrum, such as the answer a frustrated person would give. The last answer should be from someone at the positive end of the spectrum, who is achieving an amazing result or feeling. For example:
How do you feel about your ability to delegate?
- I can’t do it; I struggle to give up control (lowest score)
- I get frustrated when it’s not done the way I want
- OK, but I’d like to get better
- I’m confident my team can handle the tasks I give them (highest score)
You can take this concept even further and really have fun with ‘fill in the blank’ questions, whereby you begin a statement and then offer a selection of alternative endings. This is a great way to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and show them how much you understand them. It also gives you a deeper insight into their persona and behaviours. An example question could be:
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is…
- Pull the duvet back over my head
- Reluctantly drag myself into the shower
- Have a stretch and check my calendar
- Sun salutations, smoothie, and set my goals for the day
What are segmentation questions?
Once you’ve written your questions for each of your topics, you still have a bit more work to do. Segmentation questions are a useful add on to any assessment quiz. These types of questions let you find out more about your prospects.
Your CRM and other tracking software can tell you a lot about who is taking your quiz, such as where they clicked through to it from, whether they have visited your website previously and how they scored in your quiz, plus much more. This information is crucial to your marketing efforts and helps you optimise and tweak your quiz promotion tactics and the quiz itself to improve performance.
You can add to this valuable data and get a more complete view of your audience by asking some simple segmentation questions as part of your quiz. This will help you get more insights and enable you filter your quiz takers so you can target the ideal prospects with tailored messaging.
When crafting these questions, think about what you need to know to turn the prospect into a successful sale. For example, you might want to know if the prospect can afford your services, so you could ask:
Is your business currently turning over more than £50K per year?
- Yes
- No
Perhaps you want to know what experience they have so you can point them to the appropriate offering for their level, so you could ask:
How long have you been in business for?
- 0-3 years
- 3-6 years
- 6-9 years
- 10+ years
Segmentation questions appear at the end of your quiz and don’t count towards the final score, so you can include as many as you wish. However, we suggest treading carefully and limiting yourself to three, maximum. The next stage of the quiz is the all-important lead form, so it’s imperative that you don’t turn your prospects off at this stage.
To sum up
The diversity and interactivity of quizzes make them an engaging and effective way to generate top quality leads. The different types of questions can meet many aims and objectives for a quiz and help your prospects on their path to taking the next step with you. Get the questions right and make your quiz truly powerful.
