Quizzes are one of the hottest trends in content marketing, and today Josh Haynam, co-founder of Interact Quiz Builder, stops by the podcast by to share the secrets of spinning a simple quiz into lead-generation gold.

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Welcome to Episode 229 of the Content Marketing Podcast!

If you joined us for last week’s podcast, you’ll recall we shared some key insights from Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. (Need to get caught up?)

Today Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder stops by to show us why quizzes deserve a prominent place in our content marketing strategies.

 

Give today’s episode a listen to hear:

• How to grab your copy of our complimentary e-book “Ninja Secrets of B2B Blogging“
• Our latest News Feed segment:
  • Instagram introduces Location and Hashtag Stories
  • Snapchat introduces Custom Stories
  • Why I will die a happy woman if I never have to hear the word “stories” again
  • Content Hit of the Week: “16 of the Dumbest Content Marketing Mistakes We’re Making,” by David Spark on the Forbes website
• The real reason people find quizzes so doggone irresistible
• Why, fun and games aside, quizzes are serious business for organizations looking to generate leads
• How more “serious minded” businesses like technology and healthcare can tap into the fun of an engaging quiz
• Tips on cadence and timing for publishing and promoting your quizzes
• How Red Lobster nearly broke the Internet with a quiz about … shrimp
• Tip of the Week: The one thing too many organizations miss when it comes to their lead-gen campaigns

Please remember that this podcast is about you — your questions, your frustrations, your hopes and dreams for your content marketing program. So please take a moment to send me your feedback, questions, or comments via email, on our Facebook Page, or via Twitter.

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Today’s Podcast Transcript

Content Marketing Podcast 229: Why Quizzes Belong in Your Content Marketing Mix

June 1st, 2017

This is the Content Marketing Podcast, episode number 229: Why Quizzes Belong in Your Content Marketing Mix, an interview with Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder.

Hello, and welcome to the Content Marketing Podcast. This is the show where we help you grow your tribe and your bottom line through insanely good content. I am your host, Rachel Parker of Resonance Content Marketing, and today is June 1st, 2017.

Hello, hello, or as we say in Texas, “howdy,” and thank you for joining us for today’s episode of the Content Marketing Podcast.

Just a Reminder: This podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Google Play Music, so if you like what you hear, please feel free to click on over and subscribe. I also, invite you to download our complimentary E- Book, Ninja Secrets of B2B Blogging. Download today to learn the secrets that every B2B Blogging Ninja knows, and see how 3 B2B rock stars can inspire your own blogging efforts. To snag your free copy, go to contentmarketinggift.com.

Last week we looked at insights from the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry report, just released by Social Media Examiner. If you happened to miss that episode, feel free to check it out on iTunes or via the RSS feed.

Today we have a special guest here on the Podcast: Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder will stop by to chat about why quizzes deserve a prominent place in your content marketing strategy.

But first, it’s time to check in with our News Feed for this week’s rundown of News You Can Use.

News You Can Use

I have decided that if I never hear or see the word “Stories” again I will die a happy woman. Okay? Snapchat stories, Instagram Stories, Facebook stories — can we not come up with a different word for all this. All the stories are mashing together, but I digress.

Speaking of stories, Instagram has announced two new ways to discover what’s happening via the “Explore” feature on the mobile app. According to the post on the Instagram Blog, you will see a new story ring at the top of the Explore screen, that’s the little bar with the little circles that show the individual stories going on, and that will be filled with stories that are happening near you. These stories come from people who have used location stickers on their stories.

Instagram is also introducing Hashtag Stories, also on the Explore screen, to help you find stories related to your interests. When you search for a hashtag that happens to be popular you may see a story ring at the top of the page featuring stories using that hashtag.

The Stories story continues with Snapchat. Snapchat is introducing a new feature called Custom Stories. (Oh, good heavens!) This new feature will let you create a collection of images and videos and control who sees it. According to EnGadget the way this works is after taking a snap you can select the Create Story option and then you can pick who gets to view and contribute to the story, and you can also choose to geofence the story, and make it specific to a particular location.

So, lots of Story stories this week.

Content Hit of the Week

Our Content Hit of The Week has nothing to do with Stories. Fancy that! Well it does kind of, but not “capital-S stories” at least.

It’s called “16 of the Dumbest Content Marketing Mistakes We’re Making,” by David Sparks on the Forbes website.

Of course it’s important that we share best practices, what we should be doing, but it’s equally important that we know about the common missteps and what those are when it comes to our content marketing. I know that the listeners of this Podcast represent the best and brightest of the industry, and that you would never make any of these mistakes that David talks about. But in case you hear some of these comments from the higher-ups, things like “No Content without Product” etc. David gives you some good ammunition for your counter argument. It is an excellent read, and I will of course provide a link in the blog post for this episode at resonancecontent.com/podcast.

That is it for this week’s update, or this week’s newsfeed rather. If you stumble across something that you think might be of interest to your fellow content marketers please tweet it to me at @rachparker, so that we can share.

Now it’s time for this week’s spotlight segment: Why Quizzes Belong in Your Content Marketing Mix, an interview with Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder.

Spotlight

In case you haven’t gotten the memo, quizzes are hot, hotty, hot right now on the content marketing scene, and today we have an expert joining us to talk about the lead generation gold that a good quiz has to offer just about any brand.

Josh Haynam is the co-founder of Interact Quiz Builder a tool used by more than 30,000 businesses. Those include The American Red Cross, Tony Robbins and Forbes. He’s probably seen more quizzes than any other human on earth now, and we’re going to chat with him about some of his favorites. So without further ado here is my interview with Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder.

Rachel: Hey Josh, welcome to the Podcast.

Josh: Thanks for having me.

Rachel: Absolutely, I just read your formal bio, but can you give us a little bit more of a personal introduction to yourself, and your company?

Josh: Yeah definitely, in terms of myself I’m definitely a lifelong entrepreneur. I started in high school mowing lawns and things like that on my own, and then just kind of kept with it through college, and after college I started this company and it’s been a journey with lots of ups and downs within that, lots of stories to be told, lots of hard times, lots of great times, all sorts of things like that. My company currently is called “Interact,” and Interact is a SaaS application, so a platform for creating quizzes, and giveaways, and polls, and all sorts of interactive content with the purpose of building up an email list, because we all know just how important that is. To have people on your list, so that is what I’m currently doing.

Rachel: Wonderful! So, Josh, how did you get into the quiz app business?

Josh: We actually started as a small agency, building websites for other folks, so myself and my co-founder who started the company together. We were in college, we were both trying to look for some side income, we both had an entrepreneurial spirit, so we were just looking for ways to get out, kind of see what was out there, see what we could do. So we took on some clients to build websites for because this was back 4 or 5-6 years ago, so you know this was before it was super easy to use way extra square space to build your own site, so we’d take on these clients who wanted sites built, you know they wanted entire multipage websites, with all sorts of forms and things like that.

But it was really interesting because the one thing they all wanted was to get more email subscribers.

So they would pay us a ton of money over months to build a website, but at the end of the day all they wanted was email subscribers. So one of the things that we tried to do on some of these sites was incorporate quizzes. It was an idea that kind of was floating around at the time, nobody was really doing it, there were zero applications for doing it, and we’d build these things just with like pure code, in a data base like put it all together. It would take days, and then we would put it on a website, and it was the one thing that actually worked across all the industries we were serving, because you know as an agency, you just kind of work with whoever. So we were working with all sorts of random people, and the quizzes would always work well to generate email subscribers.

So that was really, really interesting, and then it was actually through a graduate level class we were taking as under grads that we kind of got the idea to take that quiz portion and turn it into a web app, because you know as students you don’t really even know if that’s a thing you can do. But I think it was the dean of the business school at UCLA we were going to at the time, who mentioned that we should try it, and that’s actually how it came about, you know a combination of having a thing that we knew worked, and then just that little push to say, “Hey, why don’t you try that and see what happens?” And that’s kind of where it was born out of.

Rachel: Wonderful, great. You know, Josh, I was just over on your website, and one of the things that I like is that you are very, very focused on those business objectives. It’s not about how “people love quizzes, and they are so engaging, and la, la, la.” You’re about “Okay this is about building your lists, and this is about getting leads,” so walk us through how quizzes can help us build those email lists?

Josh: Yeah, the reason that we’ve been that way as soon as we started was that before when we started, nobody cared about quizzes, there was zero interest in this idea of “you know you should make one of those fun quizzes,” like nobody knew what those fun quizzes were. This was like pre-BuzzFeed kind of stuff, so that’s why we’ve always been about business objectives.

But basically the way a quiz works is, you create a fun quiz that’s your Buzzfeed ask, where it has your fun questions, and your fun pictures and stuff like that, but after somebody answers all the questions they present you with an email capture form that’s going to say “Enter your email address, see your results, and we’ll send you personalized follow-ups based on your quiz outcome,” and then you capture that email, and you actually can send personalized follow-ups based on which outcome they get from their quiz.

Rachel: Wow.

Josh: And you can even filter by how they answer particular questions of your quiz, so if one of the questions of your quiz is like “What’s your favorite food?” and you’re a bakery, you can send an email to people that like baguettes versus people who like dinner rolls. Or “What’s your favorite bread?” or whatever, you can filter people out, so that’s extremely powerful, because those transactional emails, those ones where somebody tells you something and then you send an email in response, get twice the openings, twice the clickthroughs, twice the sales. So you’re actually just doubling all your value, and you’re also actually capturing their emails in the first place, which is valuable in itself, so that’s really the magic of why quizzes are so incredibly valuable to brands.

Rachel: Yep absolutely, so on the consumer side what is it about quizzes that people are just — that makes them so irresistible?

Josh: It’s a really interesting question and one that comes up a lot. Basically the answer is that people love to talk about themselves.

Rachel: [laughs]

Josh: There is a study from Time, Inc — you know the parent company of Time magazine — that found that 40% of the words that we say in our life are about ourselves, and if you take that back and you think about marketing in general.

Let’s take a wide angle view, you have videos, you have infographics, you have blog posts, you have even podcasts, things like that. Those are all broadcasts, where we’re sending out content, it’s valuable for sure, like you can learn a ton from it, but none of those types of content let people express themselves, let them talk about themselves. So quizzes let you talk about yourself, which is 40% of our lives, and another study was done by Harvard that also found that when we talk about ourselves, it releases like good feelings basically, so there is this scientific term where there are different chemicals that get released in your brain when you talk about yourself, you actually feel happy, you feel better, and so quizzes actually in some sense are addictive, and you talk to a lot of people, they’ll tell you they’re addicted to quizzes, because they let you talk about yourself.

It’s scripted, it’s not actually a conversation, but it’s really the only type of marketing content that lets people answer questions that are particular to themselves, which we absolutely love doing as humans.                                         

Rachel: Yep absolutely, Josh that reminds me, I think it’s a chapter in How to Win Friends and Influence People that says if you want to be a great conversationalist, ask people about themselves, and that’s kind of what we’re doing here, right?

Josh: Exactly, exactly, yeah, and that’s one of my favorite books too, so it’s right in there.

Rachel: Aha, great, now we all know quizzes are fun, you just talked about why, why people love them. But I could see, and I would love to hear your take on this, I could see maybe some more serious-minded businesses, like say healthcare, or maybe enterprise technology, saying things like “Oh that’s frivolous, that’s like you know ‘which Golden Girl are you?’ And we’re a serious brand; people aren’t going to take us seriously if we put stuff like that out.”

How would you counsel those brands in terms of how they can, with their more elevated brands, how they can leverage the power of quizzes?

Josh: Yeah definitely, definitely, and I have had to coach some of the world’s largest technology and software companies through this, because they always come in wanting to be on brand, wanting to be very serious, and that doesn’t work. It fails miserably; we’ve seen people spend relatively massive budgets promoting quizzes that are very straight forward like “Does your business need a CRM?” and it’s like who cares

Rachel: [laughs] “And guess what — we sell a CRM!”

Josh: Yeah it’s like “Oh surprise, that’s our company.” It’s like you’re getting just a dismal conversion rates with those.

Rachel: Yeah.

Josh: So what you have to do is avoid two major pitfalls, and the two major pitfalls are this:

1. Being too serious – So, “Does your business need a CRM?” if you’re selling CRMs, that’s way too serious and no one cares.
2. Being too frivolous – So if you are a CRM company and you make a quiz like “What color are you?” That’s obviously way too far away from what you’re actually doing to, you know make a difference.

Now on the other hand, if you’re a CRM company and you make a quiz like “What’s your IT personality?” and you find a way to cleverly tie that back to let’s say the different trainings that you have to offer based on your IT personality, whether you’re like the creative type or the managerial type, or the just get it done type and then you have nice email courses setup for those three types that help people improve their usage of the CRM or help them improve their organization, things like that.

Now what you’ve done is you’ve actually mixed the fun aspect of just really entertaining quizzes which are like the “Which (blank) are you? What type of this are you? What type of that are you?” With the practicality of a quiz, that actually ties back into your business nicely. So “What’s your IT personality?” you know, can be applied to a CRM company, it could be applied to a database management company, anything like that, cloud storage, all that kind of stuff that’s relatively boring in general, but because you’ve mixed it with this entertaining side, that’s where you really succeed.

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely, and as you mentioned for brands the magic is in the follow up.

Josh: Yeah exactly, exactly, follow up and getting people into a bucket if you will, that you can address their needs based on how they answer the questions of the quiz.

Rachel: Yep absolutely. So Josh, when you’re out there talking to brands, what are some of the resistance points that you’ve found? Why aren’t more brands embracing the lead generation opportunities in quizzes? What’s holding them back?

Josh: Yeah, so we’ve actually seen an interesting story arc around this, because our company has been around for three-plus years now, so I’ve seen this change, you know three years ago, it was just a complete lack of awareness, and not even realizing that this is something you could do. Then it kind of switched to an apprehensiveness about whether this is going to work, but that’s been answered over the last year or so by a lot of success stories, across a lot of industries.

So now the main sticking point is the content itself, where brands are no longer worried about “Is this going to work?” They recognize that this is probably something they should be doing, but coming up with a quiz is something they’ve never done before, so it’s a challenge, it’s not like writing a blog post, because obviously you’ve done that tons of times as a brand, it’s not like putting out a white paper or an e-book, you’ve done all those things before, this is something nobody has ever done. So what we’re doing to try to bridge that gap, until that issue gets resolved, by just more people doing quizzes. We have created a bunch of pre-optimized templates that you can use, that are across pretty much every industry, you can select your industry and see high-converting quizzes for your particular industry and just use one of those and then modify the elements, you want to modify questions, results, things like that. So that is easily the biggest sticking point at this point of time.

Rachel: Yeah and I’m on your website right now, you have a lot of great resources, tutorials about creating Buzzfeed quizzes, or personality quizzes, to help you ease into the process.

Josh: Yeah, so we’ve always been about education, you know helping people along, understanding what are the best practices. “How do you write questions? How do you write results? What’s the best type of quiz to do?” Now we’re taking this a step further with these pre-made templates you can use, and so we’re really just trying to ease people into it, and we recognize that this is a new strategy, even though we’ve been doing it for a long time, and we feel that we’ve got a really good grip on it. But obviously people coming to us are coming for the first time, and so we want to make sure that the initial experience is very, very easy to understand, and easy to kind of grasp what’s going on, and get everything setup.

Rachel: Yep, absolutely, and another thing I notice on your site Josh, you have a ton of examples that you’ve done for other clients in the past.

Josh: Yeah, so again I mean that’s kind of along the same vein where we want to make sure that people get a good sense of how this is going to work for them, because it’s great to see quizzes that we’ve done well, but unless it’s relative to what you’re doing, unless it’s really closely related, it really doesn’t matter, it’s like “Who cares if a coffee quiz did well? I sell marketing courses, it’s like nothing to do with me.” So we want to make sure that people can recognize something that is similar to what they’d like to do, and get an idea of how that actually looks in real life, so they can do something similar.

Rachel: Great, absolutely, so Josh once people get over the hump and they start getting into the quiz function, how do you — what kind of cadence do you recommend? Do you recommend people create like two or three core quizzes and then just promote them continuously, or is it better to come up with a new quiz, maybe once a month, or once a quarter? What kind of cadence have you seen succeed?

Josh: Yeah so really I think there are two distinct ways to use quizzes.

1. If you are a person that sells a product that’s similar over time, so let’s say you have a marketing course for example and you’re selling the same marketing course, or a similar marketing course, over a long period of time, like several years you are selling a very similar course, you’ve really got it nailed down, it’s working really well, things like that. If you are that type of person, then you actually create only one quiz, and your quiz is going to be very core to your product.

So if you’re selling a marketing course maybe your quiz is “What type of digital marketer are you?” you’re going to link that quiz on your website, you’re going to share it out on social media, you’re going to create Facebook ads for it, that are consistently flowing into it. And you’re going to use it as an acquisition tool for your marketing course, and you’re actually going to use the same exact quiz for potentially years. Here we have customers that have been using the same quiz for three years now. So you can use the same exact one, it ties perfectly into what you’re doing, and you don’t need to modify it, you don’t need to work on creating all sorts of different quizzes. So that’s one example.

2. On the other hand, if you don’t have a product like that, that’s consistent, let’s say you’re a content site, and your main product is your content itself, or your news blog things like that, and your main product is the news and you’re selling advertising around that, things like that, so you’re constantly pushing out your content. Then your cadence changes and you’re going to work quizzes into your content calendar, so whether that is a monthly quiz, a bi-weekly quiz, weekly quiz, we’ve even seen daily, although that’s pretty extreme. We do have brands that are doing them every single day, but those are also brands that are pushing 4 to 6 new pieces of content every single day as well, so it really fits into your cadence if you are pushing are out a ton of content and your content is also your product, then you would do that more consistently.

But if your product is something else and it’s consistent, then you have one main product that your sell. Then you really need only one quiz.

Rachel: Yeah exactly, and you know, Josh — I’m looking at your examples page — you have worked with those content companies before, you’ve got The Telegraph, AdWeek, Forbes that you’ve worked with them on, and they do a more consistent flow of quizzes.

Josh: Yeah exactly, exactly so somebody like that is going to do a lot more quizzes because they’re, you know, their product is the content.

Rachel: Right, absolutely, so Josh in your official bio I told people that you see more quizzes than any human being on the planet. What are some of the most creative uses of the quiz you’ve ever seen? What’s in your top ten of memorable quizzes?

Josh: I think probably my favorite one, just because it’s hilarious, is Red Lobster, they did a “What kind of shrimp are you?” quiz [laughs]. And it was absurd — this thing blew up, it was viral to the extreme. It is still, and it, for all time; it’s their most liked Facebook post. It then got 1,92,000 likes. I’ve never seen anything like that before; on the brand page it did millions of takes, millions of quiz takers. That thing was just crazy, the amount of comments on that, was like 15,000 comments, you’ve got full-on arguments going on about which kind of shrimp is the best and what that means about your personality. These were professionals on here, arguing here about shrimp, and it is just the greatest thing. It just cracks me up, so that’s probably my favorite goofy one.

On the serious side, we work with several divisions of the United Nations, and the refugee agency did one, that was really just heart-wrenching to the max. It was “Would you survive as a refugee?” and how these questions, and they were real world scenarios, and it’s like “If somebody offered you a ride across the Mediterranean, like half off, would you take it?” and then based on how you answer these questions, it basically told you your chance of survival, and then it had a chance to subscribe and support UNHCR efforts and that was also their most engaged-with post of last year.

So they got a ton of play on that, I think that’s awesome, because crises like that are so easy to brush over when you just see an article about it, but once you’re personally invested and you’re again answering those personal questions, you really start to perk up and start to pay attention. So I just love that you can utilize it to just make people aware of things, and get them to actually connect, on a more serious and personal level.

Rachel: Wow that’s great, great example. So, Josh, as you mentioned, when you guys started about three years ago, quizzes were not — you know, it was not mainstream marketing quite yet, which is the opposite of what we see today, and what I wanted to ask you is, there are several other apps out there that people can use to create quizzes, to create promotions. So what is it about Interact that makes you unique, and what is it that attracts these big brands to you? And what keeps the coming back to Interact?

Josh: It’s a great question, so it’s really two things.

1. Our list building focus. So since we started before quizzes were a real thing that people did just like on their own, we started out to build your email list through the medium of using quizzes, so our list-building components are deeply integrated into what we do, like I say you can filter email contacts based on which quiz outcome they get, how they answer a particular question, which quiz they took, all that kind of stuff, you know we also ran our integrations with Facebook ad pixels, so that you can re-target based on which outcome somebody gets, so we have really, really strong ties into all of the email marketing programs, and we are having integrations with all of them, literally any one you use, we have an integration. That’s our number one kind of thing that we’ve always focused on.
2. The other thing is, since we’ve been around and we’ve had time to really connect with our customers, like I said I have probably seen more quizzes than probably anybody else on earth, and I would stick by that and I’d probably also talk to more people about quizzes than anybody else on earth, and what that has allowed us to do, and now our team is having more conversations with people than really anybody else. What that has left us to do is understand what it is that is holding people back, like we were talking about building quizzes. What is it that is difficult? What is it that is challenging? And our app now is really — it’s got like a self-guided tour that is also helping you to build the quiz, but in a non-intrusive way. So it’s not like we just have these resources you can read and then try to figure it out. It’s like those resources are built into the process of creating a quiz.

So we walk you through it, but while we’re walking you through it, you’re actually building your own quiz. So not only are you learning how to create one, but you’re also learning all the best practices, you’re learning what you should be doing in particular, all that kind of stuff. And so that’s one of the really big reasons that a lot of the big brands end up using us, because they are coming through, they are checking out different apps, they are trying to decide which one to use, and they come across ours and it’s not just a bunch of form fields you can fill out and make a quiz out of.

It’s the process, it’s a guiding force that really shows you what you should be doing and it we take care of all the difficult bits, like we have integrations to find images that you can just search within our app. We tell you exactly how to write the questions, where everything is, how to change the styles. And so when I talk with content teams at really large companies, literally the largest companies in the world, they’re just so happy that they don’t have to learn another tool.

We set everything up to where you don’t need to learn another tool, and I’d say that’s also a huge difference, because a lot of the quiz apps that have come online, in the last year maybe year and a half, and they’re copying what’s already out there, which can get you by, but it doesn’t have the essence of what really makes an app useful, which is that it shouldn’t take you too much time to use. Because when you look at it, our pricing is not too expensive; it’s like $29 a month up to a couple hundred dollars if they are going full-featured. When you’re looking at that price and you’re comparing that to the time that you’re going to have to spend, if you have to spend an extra hour every single time you make a quiz, or after making one, it takes you an extra three hours because you’re using a cheaper, newer app or whatever then that time is obviously way more expensive than the cost of the subscription itself. So that’s where we’ve really won over a lot of the big brands, they can understand it which is incredibly important.

Rachel: And then if they’re not one of these brands that create quizzes every day, they don’t have to re-learn every time they go to make a new quiz, which I run into a lot, it’s like “I knew how to do this two months ago, but here I am again, starting all over.”

Josh: Exactly, yeah so that’s where, our onboarding process not only walks you through making a quiz, but it teaches you as you’re going.

Rachel: Great, well Josh if people would like to know more about Interact tell us where to find you on the web?

Josh: Yeah so Interact is at https://www.tryinteract.com/ we actually have trials on all our accounts, you can jump in check those out, get something built, like I said try out that process, where it helps you build a quiz, but also teaches you at the same time. So that’s what I would say.

Rachel: Okay, and I understand you have a special offer just for listeners of the Content Marketing Podcast, so tell us about that?

Josh: Yeah we do, we do, so we have plans like I said that range from $29 up to $199 a month and usually you can get by on the $29 it’s got most of our features and all the important bits and for listeners today, we do have a code you can use on our checkout page. If you put it in, the code is “CONTENT,” so just the word content and that actually gets you 25% off for as long as you subscribe, which is a significant discount.

Rachel: Absolutely, and I will tell you right now Josh I will be the first one to take you up on that [laughs], so I’m really excited.

Josh: That’s awesome.

Rachel: Well, Josh, thank you so much for coming on board and telling us a little bit about quizzes and I would love to have you back sometime soon.

Josh: Awesome, thank you so much.

Rachel: Thanks Josh, take care.

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Find out why Joe Pulizzi calls The Content Marketing Coach “a simple yet effective guide to an approach that most businesses get flat out wrong.” Download your free chapter today. hr color=”#adadad” style=”line” size=”3px”]

Many thanks again to Josh Haynam for enlightening us on why quizzes deserve a prominent place in our content marketing strategies. Once again, that website is https://www.tryinteract.com/, and Josh’s special offer is a 25% discount if you use the code CONTENT, and yes I will be one of the first ones to take him up, because that is a terrific offer.

If you have any questions, or want to add to the conversation feel free to tweet me at @rachparker, I would love to hear from you. Now it’s time for our Content Marketing Tip of the Week.

Tip of the Week:

One thing that Josh mentioned in our interview and that has really stayed with me is that “The fortune is in the follow up,” and that is so true. I talk to a lot of organizations and all they say is “we want to generate leads, we want to just kill lead generation, we want to kick it out of the park,” but all too often what happens is they launch these great campaigns and they spend thousands of dollars on these elaborate campaigns and then those leads come in … and then what do they do with them?

Sometimes they have no idea, sometimes they’ll just send them kind of a flimsy sales pitch and hope that they come on board and they really miss out on a lot of opportunities.

So what we need to remember is getting that lead, getting that email address is really the first step. It’s the first step in what needs to be a very strategically put-together process.

So before you create that quiz or whatever you’re going to do, to generate leads, have a plan in place for how are you going to follow up with those folks. As Josh mentioned, sometimes people will automatically send people a little mini-course, like six lessons on whatever it is their quiz results conveyed. So we want to follow up with those folks, but not in a salesy way.

Remember, we are content marketers, and these folks are still at the top of the funnel. We want to engage them in a way that makes them want to continue engaging with you, and yes, when they get to the right point, we do want to see about getting them into a sales conversation and turn that lead into a customer.

Outro:

OK, campers, that’s it for me today — I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of The Content Marketing Podcast. And I wanted to say thanks again to our special guest Josh Haynam.

If you like what you’ve heard today, please feel free to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play Music or via our RSS feed. And if you REALLY like what you’ve heard, please leave us a quick review on iTunes. And I want to say thank you so much to everyone who has left us wonderful reviews so far — we really, really appreciate it.

Also, if you want to learn more about content marketing, you’ll want to grab a copy of my book, The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and Win, which is available in book and Kindle format on Amazon. To learn more about the book and to download a free chapter of your very own, and to see what thought leaders like Joe Pulizzi and Jay Baer had to say about the book, visit contentmarketingcoachbook.com.

As you know, I always like to leave you with a quote, and today’s comes from Norman Vincent Peale. He once said, “The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”

Again, this is Rachel Parker with Resonance Content Marketing. Thank you again for listening and we will see you again next week. Take care!

 

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Remember to snag your copy of The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and WIN! — now available on Amazon!

• Find out how to connect and convert with content marketing.
• Learn to cut through the clutter with intelligent content that resonates with your specific target audience.
• Get the secrets for turning followers into customers … and customers into evangelists.

ORDER NOW

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About the Author

A self-described geek who can recite entire episodes of South Park by heart, Rachel Parker has had a passion for content ever since she was old enough to hold a crayon (purple, please).

As Founder and CEO of Resonance, Rachel helps businesses publish content that connects with their audience … and converts those followers into customers. She’s also the host of the Content Marketing Podcast and author of the book The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and WIN!

1 Comment

1. How to Increase Facebook Likes and Shares – Tips from the Thought Leaders - says:

   June 15, 2017 at 2:46 pm

   […] If you want to learn more, check out this podcast from Resonance Content Marketing, “Why Quizzes Belong in Your Content Marketing Mix: Interview with Josh Haynam of Interact” […]