Online Assessments are a type of interactive content that asks your customers a set of questions and gives them a score and custom advice on completion of the questionnaire. They are typically longer than a quiz and gives them customized feedback in the end.

In the following infographic, you can find 9 types of online assessments for your B2B content marketing strategy. If you want to dig into this concept, continue reading the blog post below.

How does it work for B2B Content Marketers?

There’s a world of opportunities for the B2B content marketer. You can use an online assessment to evaluate your customers’ knowledge on a particular subject, their skills or personality type. There’s are loads of formats you can use – even if you want to gauge your customers’ department effectiveness, compliance with industry best practices, risk exposure and more.

What’s in it for your customers? 

• They get to evaluate themselves and see how they stack up against their peers.
• The personalized advice you give them is based on their online assessment results – which helps them make better decisions for their needs and pains
• It takes a few minutes to complete and gives them the instant gratification of a score.

What’s in it for you as a B2B content marketer?

• Establish your authority in your field of expertise or industry and as a go-to source for valuable insights.
• Generate new leads by gating assessment results 
• Learn more about customers through their answers to your questions
• Promote other content assets like e-books or white papers at the end of the online assessments
• Pitch your offerings at the end of the assessment as the solution to their problems
• Save money, because it’s way cheaper than writing a 100-page e-book.

4 online assessment types to evaluate your customers on a personal level

1. Knowledge Assessment

As the name suggests, a knowledge assessment evaluates an individual’s knowledge on a specific topic. Topics can be things like industry news, trends, technology, or even lighter topics like industry buzzwords. Check out our Digital Marketing Quiz 2016 here and see how it works!

2. Skill Assessment

Skills online assessments are used to analyze individuals’ weaknesses and strengths. Use it to highlight areas where your company can help its potential clients with feedback and by offering its product.

Topics could be related to an individual’s professional skills, reactions to different scenarios, or management of certain tasks. For example, if your company sells leadership courses, you could do something like this Emotional IQ test.

If your business specializes in SEO, you can test your customers on how well they manage SEO on their blog. It reveals to them where they fall short, what they need to improve, and provides them with a perspective on where to put their focus. In results, you can offer them your expertise, product, or help in the areas they needed the extra assistant.

3. Educational assessment

The purpose here is to educate your audience about a certain topic by giving the user feedback after each answer. 

It is ideal for informing people about complicated issues or teach them about changes in the industry. If you consult on tax regulations and recent complicated changes came around, you can create an online assessment to help your clients learn about the changes. For every question answered, you can provide an explanation.

This kind of online assessments is great for industries where technologies, laws, and standards change quickly. For example, in digital marketing, to keep clients on top of Google’s search engine updates or Facebook’s algorithm updates.

4. Personality Assessment

A personality test is a lighter interactive experience that puts the user into a personality category based on their answers. So, to answer the questions, participants need to reflect on themselves and their behavior. There are lots of examples of personality tests, some more serious than others. For example, you can use a personality test to determine which of your consultants would fit best with a specific client.

Do you know the NERIS Type Explorer personality test? It is often used in HR when hiring new employees to see if a candidate would be a good fit in a team.

One of our clients used it to help their customers find out what role they play in business meetings.

5 online assessment types for gauging your customers’ department and company performance

1. Industry benchmark test

This test helps your customers discover how they stack up against their peers in the industry. A great way to make this kind of assessment is by turning any of your existing research studies or industry reports into a questionnaire.

For example, you can analyze how many resources a company should allocate to a project or how much budget they spend on solving a definite issue. The results will show the company what other companies do and provide advice on how to improve. This helps companies to compare how they use resources or budgets in comparison to others.

2. Technology readiness test

Despite the unsexy name, the technology readiness test is very effective. Topics could be things like “how up-to-date is your xyz infrastructure“, “which xyz technology should you use?” or “should you outsource your xyz tech services?”. Check out an example here (in Danish).

Give people helpful advice on their technology needs, and there’s nothing wrong with sliding your product in as a possible solution.

3. Best practice assessment

As the name suggests, this kind of online assessments will gauge the extent to which the user follows industry or function best practices. To do this really well, you should accompany your score with useful feedback and advice for the user.

For example, if I used you, the B2B content marketer, as my target customer, I might create an assessment entitled, “is your blog SEO-optimized? Test yourself against the best practices.” For example, In a test like this, I might ask you questions about whether your blog title is SEO-friendly, whether you’re conducting keyword research, using keywords in the right places, etc.

In the end, I’d give you a score and feedback on the right way to do it and what you can improve. This can apply to any industry. If you are in the Banking industry and your target audience is business loan applicants, you can ask them about application best practices.

This test is also great for internal communication to update and educate your staff about job-related best practices. Say your firm has just updated its best practice guide, and no one wants to read it. Instead, you can include the best practice test in an email and encourage people to test their knowledge about the recent changes. Turn boring topics like safety regulations, customer service rules, documentation guidelines into fun tests.

4. Compliance assessment

A compliance assessment is meant to help your clients stay on top of law, practices, or industry standards. The test helps companies figure out if they comply with regulations within an industry.

Let’s say you were in the Healthcare industry, and your target audience needs to stay on top of HIPPAA laws, then you might want to use a test like this:

5. Risk assessment

This assessment is helpful in telling your audience what their current risk exposure is, based on their current business practices or documentation. This kind of assessment is popular in the IT security systems industry but can be used in many other situations. People need to evaluate their risk in terms of insuring themselves and making any kind of investment.

Use this test to help your clients and pitch the right solution for their needs.

Online Assessments are great for B2B companies because they help them understand their audience better. Plus, by doing online assessments, you position yourself as a trustworthy source.

This type of interactive content can be very useful at a later step in your content marketing funnel. Mainly, it would be best if you used it to distinguish yourself from your competitors when consumers are looking for different solutions.

Try making your own assessment on Dot.vu. We have a ready-to-use and edit template right here for you.

---