Imagine yourself as an artist, social media as your canvas, and your quizzes your paintbrush.
Your job is to create an impactful work of art on that blank canvas known as social media.
Let’s face it, social media has become the most effective way of advertising digitally.
With Facebook at the forefront, businesses today allocate at least 28% of their spending towards social media advertising. It’s an investment, no doubt, but it’s an investment worth making.
This kind of investment will help boost the activity of your quizzes which in turn will generate traffic to your website.
With over 25,000 quizzes under our belt at Interact, we’ve come up with a comprehensive three-step plan for promoting your quiz and using it to bring in targeted leads using Facebook advertising.
1. Select your target audience
The initial step you have to take in effectively promoting your quiz through Facebook would be to select the kind of audience that you want to target based on your company’s marketing goals and values.
Ask yourself these questions:
What kind of audience do I want to attract?
What is my audience interested in?
Who are my lookalike audiences? (more about this later)
What are my audience’s thoughts on similar companies?
These are the important questions that you have to keep in mind. This will give you a better understanding on the kind of audience you want to attract.
Here are some ways to select your audience:
Location
Targeting your audience based on location allows you to reach customers in key locations by country, state/province, city and zip code. Pretty convenient isn’t it?
This information is based on the location of an individual’s Facebook Timeline. You can even exclude certain cities or zip codes you’ve already reached.
Demographics
Targeting an audience based on demographics allows you to refine ad’s based on the information your audience has shared about themselves. This includes their Facebook profile, their age, their gender, their relationship status, their level of education and their type of employment.
Interests
Using things like hobbies and the pages they’ve liked on Facebook allows you to target an audience based on their interests. All of this content is collected from an individual’s timeline.
The same information is also taken from keywords associated with the pages they’ve liked and the apps they’ve used. It also takes ads and similar sources that they’ve clicked on into consideration.
Behaviors
Maybe you want to target your audience based on their Facebook activity. If that’s the case, targeting your audience based on behavior might be up your alley.
Behavior also takes into account purchase history or intentions (like wishlists) along with travel preferences. This information is retrieved from someone’s activity, both online and offline.
Connections
If you’re interested in targeting your audience based on connections, you’re looking to attract the people based on who they are already friends with. This information is based on mutual family or friends and the similar interests they share.
Advanced targeting
Advanced targeting refers to custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences from your website.
Custom audiences target existing customers based on information you already have.
Lookalike audiences are people that are similar to the customers you already have, so they share the same interests and ideas.
Custom audiences from your website are simply people on Facebook that have visited your page already.
Let’s take a closer look at how to create a lookalike audience.
Creating a lookalike audience
Go to your “Audiences” tab in your Ads Manager.
Select “Create Audience,” then choose “Lookalike Audience.”
From there, you can select a Facebook page, Custom Audience or conversion pixel.
Once you’ve chosen your customer group, select your audience size. You can start off by optimizing your Lookalike Audience for Similarity, which will show your ads to a smaller, more precise audience. You can then experiment with optimizing your audience size for Reach, which will show your ads to a larger audience.
After selecting your audience size, your Lookalike Audience will be ready for use in ad targeting within 6-24 hours.
Once it’s been processed, go back to the Ads Manager and click the Audiences tab.
From there, you’ll find your Lookalike Audience. Click “Create Ad.” Select your ad objective in the ads create tool and set up your ad. It’ll now be targeted to your Lookalike Audience.
It’s a good rule of thumb to look up what your Lookalike Audience “Likes” on Facebook. This will give you an idea of whether they’ve selected the right audience or not.
Through trial and error, you’ll be able to find out what works and what doesn’t.
2. Setting up your quiz ad for Facebook
Visuals
Presentation is everything in an advertisement-fueled social media platform. Facebook is all about visuals; from people’s profile images to their cover photos.
How well you want your quiz to perform on Facebook will depend heavily on how you promote it visually.
Make sure the images you use are the correct proportions; that includes desktop and mobile device viewing. Incorrect image proportions can compromise the look and feel of your page.
If one of your images on your page is displayed improperly, just imagine what a potential customer would think. We don’t want to drive people away, so avoid this at all costs.
Make sure to play around with the dimensions of your images so that they all display correctly on desktops and mobile devices.
Make your ads as effective as possible
There are a few distinct tips for promoting quizzes based on how interactive they are.
Let’s take a look.
Be informal; approach your audience as if you would anyone else on social media. Make your company’s personality stand out. You want to make the ad feel as genuine as possible while also being concise. You only have a couple of seconds to grab the attention of your customers. Make sure you include a call-to-action and make it clear what you want your customers to do.
Imagery is also important; make a visual impact to boost your visibility. Include an image pertaining to your quiz and ask questions that will potentially urge your customers to take the quiz. Don’t be afraid to ride on the popularity of a well-talked about topic, but make sure you use credible sources. The last thing we want is to divert attention away from the original subject matter.
Be controversial. Be bold. Don’t shy away from controversy, encourage it, but be smart about it. Pick subjects everyone can relate to, specifically targeting behavior, belonging and beliefs. This will draw people to either confirm or disapprove. Controversy spurs quiz popularity and splits its takers down the middle.
Go for the emotional angle. Approach your audience from different emotional angles. Playing on emotional states will deliver a myriad of results, and these results will enable us to provide for the customer based on their emotional needs. Happiness makes people want to share. Sadness enables others to connect and empathize with one another. Fear and surprise makes people desperate, urging them to find something to cling onto. Anger and disgust makes people stubborn. These emotions are what drive customers. Take these emotions into consideration and apply them to your quiz. The emotional state of a customer will play a significant role on the kind of quiz you’re giving them. The easier it is for your audience to relate to your quiz, the more engaging it will be.
Writing a good headline
The image to your quiz won’t be the only factor in grabbing your audience’s attention. You want a headline that will encourage people to take your quiz. Give your audience an idea of what they’re about to get themselves into.
Formulate titles that will target your audience, for example “Which (blank) are you?” Where (blank) is character from a movie. Another good example would be “How much do you know about (blank)?” Where (blank) could be a subject of your choosing. Sell yourself through your quiz, but keep it simple. The purpose of your quiz is to attract prospective customers, while the content you provide is meant to keep then.
3. Tracking conversions and ROI
One important aspect of promoting your quiz on Facebook is adding a snippet of code from your company’s website in the section that will measure your conversions. After setting up your pixel conversion, Facebook allows you to optimize it for checkouts, registrations, leads, key page views, adds to cart, and other website conversions.
Wrapping things up
Facebook is the quintessential source for social media. As a marketer, it is an essential tool for promoting your quiz to generate more leads.
Advertising on social media lets your company touch base with an audience and the social circle they are a part of. Not only are you engaging your customers through this platform, you’re converting them into prospective leads. It’s a win-win situation, and Facebook is there to help you do it.
Guest Author: JP Misenas is the content marketing director and audio/visual technician/engineer of Interact, a place for creating entertaining and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. He writes about innovative ways to connect with customers and to build professional long-lasting relationships with them.