Let’s get topical: General knowledge and trivia quiz subjects for CX and EX

To make an effective trivia or general knowledge quiz that you can use to actually achieve business goals, you really need to dive into the weeds on what makes people want to participate and excel in them.

A massive part of that comes down to choosing the right topics, and then building your questions around them in an appropriate way. The right topics for your audience, and just as importantly, the right topics for your business or campaign.

For example, if you’re manufacturing cutting-edge noise-cancelling headphones, and you create a Buzzfeed-style trivia quiz for social media titled: “The ultimate Friends fan quiz,” it’s fair to say you’ve deviated “off-topic.”

By contrast, a music quiz, utilising audio or video files, where you ask your customers to identify songs and artists, could be just the ticket to appeal to your target audience and connect them to your new product.

You could even tie it back to your product on the end screen – “Now imagine listening to them in Hi-Fi quality in the gym, on the bus, or just safe in the knowledge that you’re disturbing nobody else.” – and include a call to action button (CTA) to direct them to your strategic web page.

That’s what this article is all about – finding the right subjects and topics for your trivia and general knowledge quizzes, so they can work for your business, for customer experience (CX) communications projects, and employee experience (EX) projects.

Why is general knowledge and trivia so engaging?

It really is a bit of an unanswerable question in itself. Thinking about sitting an important chemistry exam or algebra test is enough to generate a spate of emergency doctor’s appointments, but make it a Harry Potter quiz among friends to try and win some jelly beans? Form an orderly queue…

A key definition to consider here is “trivia.” It’s defined as information that’s of little importance, and for some reason, people can’t get enough of it.

It’s a chance to carve out a little area of knowledge and be an expert in your field. An opportunity to be a specialist and a hero for 10 minutes when your extensive knowledge of some subculture will pay dividends to win a pub quiz.

The line between trivia and general knowledge

General knowledge is typically a more laudable thing to pursue, more a higher pleasure than having an amusing (but useless) encyclopaedic knowledge of The Twilight Zone. Knowing great literature and classic movies rather than pop culture.

However, every generation bemoans the one that follows them’s lack of general knowledge, because the “general” part of general knowledge isn’t necessarily fixed.

When you can – and this is true – study courses about vampires in cinema, invented languages like Klingon, and even daytime TV shows at universities, the lines really start to blur. (Because your gut reaction was, “No, but really?”)

Fundamentally, knowledge is knowledge, and when the stakes are low, and you can’t feel another of your future children’s opportunities slipping through your fingers with every wrong answer, people LOVE to test themselves and show what they know.

How businesses can use general knowledge and trivia quizzes

Consider the pub quiz for one moment. What is it, if not a quiz, created for the purpose of attracting foot traffic?

Popularised in the UK in the 1970s to attract customers on quieter weeknights, and subsequently spreading across the globe, there’s perhaps no better proof of concept for the effectiveness of the quiz format to engage audiences. Some pub quiz trivia nights can prove to be an establishment’s busiest day of the week.

People come in for the quiz, get super engaged in it, in the competition, in the banter, and while they’re there they buy a few drinks, and maybe some fries for the table or some nachos.

Digital interactive quizzes open new doors for businesses

Powerful mobile internet and modern devices have allowed the quiz to don its business suit, walk out of the pub, and into the marketing department, onto shop floors, and even into the HR office.

They can now educate target customers about products and services, direct traffic to strategic pages, or for EX and other HR initiatives.

It’s now really easy to use a powerful online quiz builder like Drimify to build robust quizzes to act as digital tools for audience engagement without any experience. The power to create and deploy professional looking quizzes in a morning’s work is now in the hands of startups and SMEs, whereas in the early 2000s, they were the reserve of huge multinationals. And even then they would take considerable development and expense.

Key categories for your general knowledge quiz

So you’ve got the keys to the car, so to speak, now you just need to know where to drive to. Essentially, you’ve got the following categories you can play with when constructing the questions and answers to a general knowledge or trivia quiz:

• Music
• Film and television
• Literature
• History
• Politics
• Geography
• Sports
• Lightning/ Bonus/ Random/ Specialty
• General knowledge

Topics for CX quiz questions

Customer or external audience-based quiz content is extremely broad, as the goals are so varied, but whatever end goal you’re angling towards, it all comes down to capturing their interest and attention.

Are you marketing for a cinema chain’s loyalty programme? Create a film quiz themed about the latest releases, or a director’s back catalogue where you’re running a revival season. Promoting a new streaming platform? Film AND television.

Do you sell replica classic sports jerseys? Tailor sports quizzes around different sports, teams, and even players and include relevant CTA buttons to your strategic web pages. Are you a sports news and betting site? Same approach.

It really comes down to tapping into what your audience is interested in. Why do they buy your products or use your services, or why might they? Enabling the leaderboard is then a great way to foster competition, and bring some of that pub quiz atmosphere – within reason – to what is typically a digital experience.

If your service or product to promote is more of a need than a want, this is where trivia, general knowledge, and more specialist topics come into play. Maybe it’s asking more specific questions that tap into pain points, or areas of concern, and adding intermediate screens at strategic points to pepper in your branded, promotional messaging.

It’s more about discovery than competition, and connecting your goods or services to that discovery. The question: “Do you know how many houses Mothra destroys each year?” could be followed by an intermediate screen saying: “Our customers with Mothra coverage made up 90% of payouts for kaiju-related disasters last year.”

Topics for EX quiz questions

Employee experience isn’t entirely dissimilar. It’s thinking about finding that part of the Venn diagram of topics that are important to your employees, and important to your business.

These can be where replicating the pub quiz style of having multiple rounds (music, film, literature, history, politics, sports, general knowledge, etc.) can go a long way, as you can slot intermediate screens that subtly connect to the business’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, or other messages the business wants to reinforce with its teams.

In fact, a solid EX gamification campaign could follow this eight-week format:

• Multiple quizzes on the different topics, released on a Friday after lunch: This is the core of the gamification experience. A regular opportunity to compete and blow off steam with colleagues.
• A global leaderboard with its own landing page on the company intranet: So employees can follow their performance week by week, quiz topic by quiz topic, creating investment and repeated engagement. The top 20 at the end will be entered into a prize draw.
• Every second week, an instant win game like a Spin the Wheel: By distributing prizes throughout to reward continued participation, you’re minimising the risk of employees being discouraged if they fall far from the top 20.

Because this works digitally, it’s as suitable for WFH as it is for in-office or on-site employees. It can also form an interactive component of your work Christmas party or Christmas celebrations.

The interactive quiz format also offers extensive opportunities around corporate training, but this is where it moves out of trivia and general knowledge, and into very job-specific content.

Make sure your “general knowledge” quiz questions are general to your audience

Remember earlier when we talked about the line between general knowledge and trivia? General knowledge is essentially general to different age groups and cultures, so make sure your general knowledge questions track for your targets.

Pick up a game of Trivial Pursuit from the 1980s and prepare to get very little right. Pick up the most recent edition and your smartest uncle will start to seem a lot less learned.

You want your general knowledge quiz to have a level of achievability – even if it is supposed to be challenging. Don’t make it impossible else participants will get discouraged, and will be less likely to complete all the questions – no matter what the topic.

Why interactive quizzes are ideal for trivia topics

The interactive quiz – as in the online quiz template you can customise on a platform like Drimify – can replicate anything a live pub quiz can, but also utilise its mobile technology format to go beyond this.

Varied question and answer formats

If you want to use music in your questions for a music or audio quiz, you can upload audio files. If you want to use video in your questions for a “What happens next?” style quiz, you can upload video files or even just a video’s URL.

You can also have single choice answers, multiple choice answers, true or false answers, or even open answers, and every participant’s answer is recorded and in your dashboard. Mishearing the quizmaster isn’t even a possibility, and the honours system is rendered entirely obsolete.

Personalisation of the quiz participant’s user experience

You’re also delivering immediate feedback to the user. They can know if they got a question right as soon as they’ve answered it. They can – if you choose to allow them – also get an impression of how many other people got a question right or wrong by showing percentages of answers after they’ve submitted their own.

Perhaps the biggest differentiator for online digital quizzes over traditional quizmasters, is their ability to deliver extensive personalisation in the following ways.

• Results profiles: You can create profiles based on participant performance. For example, participants scoring 100% in a quiz or a quiz round will see a different GIF to participants scoring 90%, or less than 50%. You can deliver different messaging on the end screen and different CTA buttons based on these profiles.
• Data collection forms: If there’s a grand prize to be won at the end of your quiz, whether by merit, participation, or a combination of both, you can potentially use your data collection form to personalise the prize. For example, you could innocuously ask on your form: “What’s your favourite colour?” or “What’s your favourite song?” then incorporate their answers into their prize.
• Random question order or question pools: Have you ever “won” a pub quiz because you answered the exact same set of questions in a different pub a few nights previously? Plenty have… With the Drimify quiz maker, you can create a pool of questions, and randomly set your quiz to draw a set number from them, delivering a more individual experience for each user, and minimising the risks of potential cheating.

Your quiz topic is the foundation of your campaign’s success

A quiz is fundamentally a question and answer game. It’s the closest gamification experience to a direct conversation. Whether you’re talking to your customers, or you’re talking to your employees, the topic, or topics, you choose are the subject(s) of your conversation.

Choose wisely!

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