How to create a Graded Quiz on Outgrow?

Remember the days when a surprise test (graded quiz) was enough to ruin a day at school? Thankfully, those days are behind us. As adults, we can now use graded tests to gauge knowledge, learn and improve.

Why graded quizzes, you might ask. Well, taking a graded quiz taps into the primal urge to compete and succeed. Any piece of content that goes viral taps into rudimentary human emotions. Any person will be game to take a graded quiz in an area of his/her strength. This is because it provides an opportunity to prove your competence and get positive affirmation.

With Outgrow, you can refashion a graded quiz into a fun visual journey with gifs and images for the background, questions, and options. And as marketers, it is a sure-shot, fun way to get your prospects to know your brand better.

Now that you know why having a graded quiz can up your marketing game, it’s time learn how to create one.

Graded Quiz 101 Using Outgrow - The Pre-requisites

Your graded quiz must be a fun reflection of your brand rather than a dry and instructive test of knowledge. You can do this by using a catchy title, quirky gifs, and witty outcomes. However, make sure you understand where to draw the line. Going overboard will make the quiz unnatural and unappealing. This won't attract more takers. The quiz also needs to have an element of challenge and getting a high score should instill a sense of worthiness in the user. A pushover of a quiz is not brag-worthy.

As you can see, creating a good graded quiz is very similar to impressing the judges on Masterchef. Get the right mix of elements, colors and flavors. Also, bear in mind the presentation. Now that we’re all warmed up, let’s get started!

First things first

Think of a wicked title. But it’s easier said than done. List down the titles that come to mind after brainstorming and choose the best. Here are a few sample titles we came up with for the above quiz, "Who said it?", "Yeezus or Monkey Boy?", "Battle of the crazies Kanye and Ballmer" and "Battle of crazy quotes", before deciding on "Who said it? Kanye or Steve Ballmer?".

Why this title? Because it is easily relatable to everybody. A title should convey the essence of the quiz and connect instantly with a wide audience.

Ask the Right Questions

Next, we start off with the questions. Our experience at taking and creating a boatload of quizzes, in general, has helped us to conclude that the sweet spot is between six to ten. Anything beyond that will have your users whizzing through the options to finish the damn thing. True story.

It’s best to curate a list of questions first, like the one we’ve put together below -

1.You have distracted my creative process

2.I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me

3.Sometimes I get emotional over fonts…

And so on. Next, put these questions in the Outgrow editor. As you can see, you can type in the questions on the right panel and they appear on the builder section in the center.

Once you’re done with the questions, you need to figure out the corresponding options. In this case,  we decided to make this a fairly simple ‘this or that’ quiz, so we went with two options.

The sweet spot for the number of options is four.  Anything beyond that will not permit your users to get brag-worthy scores and will evoke terrible memories from school.

Once done with the barebones structure of the quiz, it’s time to have some more fun.  Set up the background for the quiz. We recommend going with gifs or images that capture the essence of the quiz.

Next, start marking the correct answers for each question whilst carefully enabling “Single Select” for each question.

Note: In case you’ve more than one correct answer to a question, you can enable multi-select.

Once you’re done with this, go ahead and add images for each of the answer options after enabling the “Image” button for options. You can also add gifs over here.

Remember the part about Masterchef? Well, this is the part where we provide the finishing touch.

The Results

Once you are done creating the quiz, it’s time to publish it and find out how many users will take it. The number of correct answers the user gives will be his/her final score i.e. absolute score. Ranks are similar to those you had in school. Need I remind you of those?

As you know, all scores are not treated equally in a graded quiz. In this case, we’ve kept things simple by displaying two different messages/outcomes for two different score groups. We do this by using a nifty feature known as “conditional messaging”

Here are the two results we created -

There are three components of a result page - score absolute, outcome message, and outcome media (images, gifs, tables, charts etc.). In the image above, we’ve pointed to places in the editor from where you can include these elements in your graded quiz. You can find it in the Settings section of the Results tab.  

Remember, use catchy phrasing and wacky pictures on the results page to finish off the quiz on a fun note. A great results page leaves the user feeling warm and fuzzy, so use terms and sentences that boost ego in conjunction with a catchy gif or an image. Even if a user has obtained a bad score, use encouraging messages to egg them on for one more try.

On the results page, don’t forget to include a CTA button to redirect users to your next landing page (eg. we've used the Outgrow website as the next landing page for this quiz). How else are you going to push your prospects further down the marketing funnel? You can also use social buttons or give your prospects the choice to share the results in their network. This will ultimately depend on your goal of creating this quiz.

Taming the Ultimate Goal - Getting Leads Using a Graded Quiz

Now let us show you how to use Outgrow graded quizzes to generate leads. Start by adding a lead generation form. We generally prefer putting it before the results page. Again, this is something we’ve discovered through our extensive quiz-creating experience. While you can also place a lead form on the welcome screen and after the results, adding it before the results leads to more conversions. A lead generation form should be small and shouldn't have more than three fields of absolutely essential info. Now you can also avail the option of asking your prospects to log in via Facebook. Read more about it here.

Once you’re done creating the quiz it’s time to optimize it. First off, the focus should be on getting it indexed by search engines. You can find the SEO options under the  “Configure” tab on top of the Outgrow quiz builder.

In this tab, you can do the following things -

1.Create the URL - don’t forget to include your target keywords in here to boost your SEO score

2.Set up the Google preview - this is how your quiz will look when listed in SERP results

3.Set up the SEO title and meta descriptions - Again, include your target keyword in here and your quiz can go up on the search engines

4.And finally, enable the option to send the quiz results via email

Now that you’re done, you have your graded quiz ready, which would look something like this - “Who Said It? Kanye or Ballmer?

Sign up here for a free 7-day trial and build your first graded quiz.

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