Gaining your customers undivided attention in today’s busy digital space can be difficult. There is an abundance of companies out there vying for your prospective customers’ attention. People are bombarded online with downloadable e-books every day – how many can one read? Podcasts and webinars – how many can you listen to or attend?
An interactive assessment is a successful way to get customers to come to you and engage with your product and to make you stand out. The best part is that it takes less time to make than e-books and webinars.
What is an assessment?
An interactive assessment is an interactive questionnaire personalised to match peoples’ specific personality or identities, based on their response. They are usually longer and more skill-related than quizzes and provide a score and a personalised feedback. It can be in the form of a personality test or a skill assessment. See an example of an interactive assessment here.
Why should you create an assessment?
Everyone loves a good challenge and you can create an assessment to engage with your audience, test your audience’s knowledge, skills or buyer-readiness and score their results.
People see value in the real-time feedback of a score and personalised outcome and by gating your assessment with an opt-in form you can grow your e-mail list.
By asking the right questions you encourage your audience to reflect on their needs and pains. As a result you capture data that helps to qualify leads with greater precision
You can use an assessment to empower sales. The insight captured in the assessment can be used to pitch the right products to every user and send more targeted emails and help sales deliver sharper pitches.
Flip the equation around and improve your lead generation
What if you tried to flip the equation around and instead of drowning in the digital abyss, while trying to inform your audience about how great your product is, you change your approach. Use an interactive assessment to offer your clients to evaluate themselves. The assessment uncovers their needs and you can offer your product as a solution to their problems.
Like a great salesman, an assessment asks questions, listens carefully to every response and suggests solutions that cater to the client’s individual needs.
Tools like Hubspot’s Website Grader show us how effective an evaluation or assessment tool can be. That tool was how I first learned about Hubspot years ago– and thereafter, I’d keep referring to their content, because that tool succeeded in creating a trustworthy relationship with me, by offering a service I needed.
While Hubspot has numerous resources at their disposal, it’s possible to create your own Assessment with online platforms like ours – without breaking the bank and dealing with coding/IT.
Read more about boosting lead-gen with quizzes and assessments.
Worth the investment?
People love to be the star of their own story. Assessments tap into this need and help visitors figure out how they stack up against peers, industry standards or best practices.
The investment in an interactive assessment is worth it, it takes less time and money to make than webinars or e-books and they produce a higher conversation rate. You can even save time by reusing content. With an assessment, you offer your potential clients a fun experience that creates a foundation and possibility for a strong long-term relationship.
Not to mention, you learn more about your audience because you gather more profile data from the responses than from a regular standard opt-in paper.
You also get to know the personalities of your potential customers, their likes and dislikes, their concerns, or goals. That’s where you can introduce your product as a solution to their problems.
Improve your inbound marketing and uncover gaps and needs
At the end of the day, marketing is all about relationships. You are selling to a business, but the decision-maker(s) are still regular folks like you and me, who have KPIs, targets and challenges. These people need to figure out whether they are on the right track, making the right decisions and investments. So, make it easy for them to do that.
While the lead gen from your downloadable e-books provides you basic information such as name, e-mail, company, position, etc., gated assessments provide you more than that and reveal information about what areas the prospect needs help with.
Depending on the outcome of the assessment you can follow up with a personalised approach and change a potential customer into a customer who trusts your product.
Provide sales with more qualified leads
Today’s audience is selective; thus, it is increasingly difficult to get people fill out lead-gen forms and the expectations for content value in exchange for contact details keep on growing. In contrast to the run-of-the-mill passive content formats, an interactive assessment offers personalized feedback and advice – making it worth the opt-in/permission. The best part is the extra bit of information you gain about what the client needs help with.
That kind of insight is gold for your sales team, who can take over with confidence, and deliver more precise pitches.
Engagement, education and conversion aside – there’s another really neat thing about assessments. They take a fraction of the time and money required to produce e-books, white papers or webinars. All you need is a questionnaire and feedback variations based on score brackets. They also have great potential for repurposing. So, when you’re done with one successful run of an assessment, you just duplicate it, swap out the questions and feedback for new ones and publish it.
See how C2iT set up an interactive assessment to help their clients to evaluate if they needed to outsource their IT. It only takes 5 minutes to take the test and it gives personalised feedback on each question, offering the client an insight into the future and what changes to do to improve their work, based on the problem they revealed taking the test.
How to do it?
Pick a topic that you reckon is a focus area for your audience and one that your company excels at. If you’re having trouble coming up with questions, start with a set of best practices, data or benchmarks you already have. Turn those into a questionnaire that gets your audience to reflect on their current situation, getting them to acknowledge areas that they struggle with or need help with. On completion, they will be presented with a score and custom feedback – that’s your perfect opportunity to explain how your offering can help with their situation.
In terms of the technical setup of your assessment, it’s pretty easy for any marketer with platforms like ours (Dot.vu). Just pick from one of our many templates and customize, brand and launch your assessments in a flash. Get started here!
Make your own assessment in only a couple of minutes.
Start generating more qualified leads with this
Online Assessment.
– Grow your email list
-Capture & qualify leads
-Give customers advice
-Uncover customer needs