Interactive quizzes for audience engagement: a guide

Have you ever wondered what distinguishes a quiz from a test? Have you put any time into considering why they’re so effective when it comes to engaging users, audiences, and customers? Sure, it’s a bunch of questions, but why is the human brain hardwired in a way that delights in providing answers when asked?

More specifically, why are quizzes such solid go-to engagement tools when it comes to helping businesses like yours achieve numerous goals across business functions?

That’s fundamentally what this article’s all about. From marketing, to recruitment, to corporate training, and even education – this is our deep dive into how interactive quizzes have become one of the most versatile and effective digital communications tools available.

The cognitive appeal of interactive quizzes for users

Let’s start with your lived experience. Does anything feel quite as bad as being asked a question and not knowing the answer? At school in front of class? Rough. In a job interview? Demoralising. In a work meeting with a ton of your superiors asking you about an important project? A case of the Mondays on a Thursday? No thank you.

Fumbling for a viable answer in a live situation with actual stakes will almost universally put ice in the pit of anyone’s stomach, but everything has its opposite…

How good does it feel to remember the name of the obscure actor who played minor character X in cult classic movie Y without resorting to Google? How good does it feel to be the hero who steamrolls the music round at your pub quiz to get your team the gift vouchers?

The answer in both cases is: exhilarating.

The idea of the quiz is ingrained in our DNA

Human beings are natural problem solvers. That’s how our ancestors developed better and better tools, cultivated crops, planted a flag on the moon, and eradicated smallpox and rinderpest. And afterall, what is a question if not a problem, and what is an answer if not a solution?

Unfortunately, from a fulfilment standpoint, a lot of humanity’s problems still requiring solutions are really, really difficult, and will take generational genius to solve. Global food security, climate change, and colonising other planets are miles out of reach from even top-level human brains and even a lot of high functioning graduate students, so short of clever DIY hacks or successfully fixing the toaster, we have an unfulfilled need to solve problems and find answers.

If not at work, this might be found in games and in sports, but the universal format everyone can get on board with and understand is questions and answers, and with digital interactive quizzes, the stakes can be low, and the results can be as private or as public as the user likes. (This is in contrast to a test or an exam, which is a formal question and answer format, with potentially high and unavoidable stakes.)

With a quiz, there’s no danger of embarrassment, and less fear of failure (and you can’t let anyone down if you don’t prove string theory). Just the positive part is left. It’s essentially taking the elements of a test or an exam, but making it into a fun trivia game.

Quiz formats have evolved with society

We’re also incredibly conditioned to not just the most basic concept of a quiz, but various twists on the quiz format.

From quiz shows broadcast on the radio through the 1930s, to a boom of TV quiz shows in the 1950s, to perennial and recurrently revived and reformatted classics like Jeopardy! in the US, and Mastermind in the UK – it’s proved an enduringly popular basic format.

Consider also the success of board games like Trivial Pursuit, and even the number of social media influencers whose bread and butter is spontaneously quizzing sports fans on team history, or random people on the street on general knowledge or the political system.

Fun fact: Perhaps nothing is a greater testament to how fun quizzes are than learning that Mastermind’s creator, Bill Wright, based his quiz show on his experiences of being interrogated by the Gestapo in World War II. The lines between examination, interrogation, and good old-fashioned quiz-based fun can be paper thin.

For businesses: more data, more sign-ups, more engagement

From a business standpoint, interactive digital quizzes offer limitless possibilities. Consider the following objectives:

Learn more about target customer segments
Educate target customers on products, ranges, and services
Collect data and get more email opt-ins for your marketing
Engage your employees around CSR initiatives and other business developments
Add more interactive learning elements to employee training programmes
Create compelling external comms on particular relevant niches to keep audiences on your website

Modern technology and modern gamification platforms with online quiz-making functionality mean businesses can now make a professional-level interactive quiz in a morning’s work, and deploy it on a landing page, through a QR code, across social media, or through its direct link in an email.

And through a good interactive quiz maker platform, they’ll be able to get a data point for every participant action within their quiz. If the quiz has been thoughtfully designed, this could offer up all sorts of actionable data.

Key elements to making an effective online quiz

Of course, you can’t just open up your online quiz maker or games creation platform, fire up the quiz template, and start rattling off questions.

Like anything, a good idea or a positive notion is not enough. Good quizzes require good execution.

Know the aim of your quiz before you do anything

This should be obvious, but it’s not always followed. Just like any communications project, you should have know the following things:

Who is your target audience?
What do you want to achieve with this project?

It can be easy to start with one of these pieces of information and forget the other, but it’s a mistake.

For example, let’s say you’re running a sporting goods chain with an eCommerce site. You could create a quiz designed to promote and educate around a product range. This could be useful for a number of reasons, but is it for instore and live chat colleagues, or is it for customers? Depending on which, you might ask completely different questions, go into completely different levels of detail, and use completely different intermediate content.

Ask the right questions for your online quiz

This ties into the previous element, but builds on it. What do you want to know? What do you want to test?

If it’s for marketing, and you want to promote brand or product awareness, ask questions that can seamlessly link to intermediate content screens where you can build on their existing knowledge with benefits or points of difference.

If you’re a publisher, and you’re creating a fun quiz on a topic within your niche (let’s say you’re an online sports site), ask questions that challenge your audience, but won’t be impossible for people to know. For example, with a football quiz, nobody’s likely to know the name of the linesman from a famous cup final 50 years ago, but they might know who scored the goals that decided the match.

Whether it’s CX, EX, or even education, every question needs to add to the overall user experience, and be tailored to the broad persona you’re targeting.

Test the end product with the target user experience in mind

Finally, you want to consider your target persona, and play your quiz through with them in mind. Get your whole team to play through your quiz, as everyone will have different input.

If you can use someone from your company in a different department, it could be worth even setting fresh eyes from someone who isn’t directly involved with the project. Whether it’s for on the job training, skills assessments for recruitment, marketing, or an event, it needs to be tested with the target audience in mind.

Why quizzes are so effective for communications campaigns

Fundamentally, interactive quizzes are exactly that: interactive. This isn’t a doom scroll through social media, or trying to learn something by reading a textbook or a dry technical manual, it’s participation. They can be constructive, provide continuous feedback, and snap people into an interactive user journey that gives businesses more time to get across their messaging.

Participants work through the quiz, paying more attention than they would to a passive comms format (like short form mobile video or a long bit of text), and can absorb more because they’re engaging and taking actions based upon the content.

Interactive quizzes are also extremely shareable on social media, particularly when a quiz score results in achieving a specific profile, and unofficially certifies you as especially knowledgeable in a recreational field. If you look at how social media has expanded to include work, physical fitness, and even dating, something that can cut through more passive content across different social platforms is a smart play, and it’s only going to become more valuable over time.

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