The Million Dollar Quiz [Case Study]

Zenni Optical had a problem. They wanted to improve brand awareness, increase organic traffic to their site and most importantly, increase online sales. IMI had the solution: an interactive quiz that introduced a new audience to the brand, drove people to the site and the best part: helped them find the perfect sunglass frames that fit their budget, look and lifestyle.

What makes for a successful content piece? In this post, I will be answering this question by using an applicable case study – a quiz that has generated over $1 million in revenue, 29,410 lead conversions and 9,655% ROI in 6 months. For my visual/audio learners, I partnered with the Qzzr team last Friday for a really fun webinar.

This post will help equip your business for a Content Marketing campaign as we highlight the following:

Goals – Why we chose to create a quiz
Strategy – What was the strategy behind the piece
Distribution / Promotion – How did we distribute the content
Results – Tools we used to measure & define success
Conclusion – Summary and takeaways

But first, the quiz:

So how did that 9-question quiz generate over $1 million

Goals

The high-level goal and foundation of our partnership with Zenni Optical was to increase revenue via online sales. To reach this overarching goal, IMI developed a series of objectives that served as a roadmap to success. These included:

Build quality links back to Zenni’s website
Increase organic traffic to the website
Improve brand awareness
Increase search ranking

To support the goals for this specific campaign, Zenni created a targeted landing page highlighting the “Hottest Trends” in the optical industry. Driving traffic to this page became one of the main KPI’s (key performance indicators) for this project.

With 8 trendy glasses in mind, I decided to create a strategy that would navigate the user through a process to answer the question, “What Frames Are Perfect For Me?”

Strategy

At IMI, it is vital to build a strong foundation of data and insights prior to content creation – this is rooted in the understanding of specific digital audiences. We took the following steps to ensure this quiz both reached and resonated with our target audience:

Research

Technical: What keywords did we want to target based on quantifiable data such as keyword volume? Prior to creation, we completed keyword research (using Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner), a site-wide technical audit and provided SEO recommendations to ensure the content was crawlable by Google.

Conversational: Taking the data analysis one step further, we inputted target keywords into a social listening tool such as Netbase to gather actionable audience insights. This helped educate us on how people talked about these keywords and the sentiment surrounding the topic. Here we pinpointed solutions for which the audience was yearning.

Comparative: After keywords and audience research, understanding where opportunity lies was crucial. Our Landscape & Competitor Analysis highlighted where our audience was getting their information and where there were potential opportunities.

Define target audience & create personas

With audience insights, demographic data and from what we knew of the Zenni Optical brand in mind, we then evaluated the research and developed eight individual personas.

Match personas to the quiz output (i.e. product)

Demonstrating your understanding of your audience by matching their quiz output to one of the created personas is crucial.

Through this process, I have realized that there is this magical, self-identifying nature of an interactive piece of content, like a quiz, that increases brand affinity and organically drives conversion unlike any other medium. This is due to the fact that the consumer plays an active role in the output – creating his or her own personalized solution.

The CTA (Call To Action)

You’ve got your user right where you want them and have created a mutually beneficial experience. Now where do you guide them from here?

With this quiz, we revisited the initial goal of driving people to the “Hottest Trends” landing page. To accomplish this, we used the quiz output to prompt users to view additional frames of the recommended style chosen for them, which directed them to the target landing page.

Users could easily assume that this landing page was a part of the quiz and/or was made special for them. (Note: The quiz outputs and the category landing page mirrored each other’s design and messaging to continue seamless engagement and maintain connection with consumer).

Distribution

Buzzwords like “Content” and “Content Marketing” are more prevalent on the web than ever as more businesses recognize they should be making it a practice. However, what good is the creation of content if it doesn’t reach anyone? The IMI promotion strategy for this quiz consisted of a three-pronged approach: Owned, earned and paid.

Although there is no flawless solution to content promotion, a definitive way to guarantee content effectiveness is an investment in distribution. To help navigate priorities, many propose that your promotion budget be 3x that of the creation budget. That said, this was our strategy for this piece:

Owned

We drove traffic to the quiz through multiple email blasts via Zenni’s newsletter, a banner on the site’s homepage and posting on Zenni’s social channels. (Note: the visibility from the homepage banner alone has continued to drive significant, qualified traffic to the quiz to date.)

Earned

Our promotion team distributed the quiz via outreach to niche industry influencers in categories such as fashion, lifestyle, and optometry. Another form of earned media that proved to be very valuable was the engagement rate and sentiment from the social posts – which generated comments such as “The quiz answer was truly me. I love their glasses, have several pairs and have ordered numerous pairs for my granddaughter and older sister. The lenses are always right on for our sight.” This type of authentic brand advocacy is what assisted in making this quiz go viral.

Paid

In support of the owned and earned promotion, there was a combination of paid social execution including promoted Facebook posts and content amplification strategies. (Note: By content amplification, I am referencing platforms such as StumbleUpon, Outbrain, Taboola & Izea that assist in monetizing and distributing content to a targeted audience.)

Results: Measuring & Defining Success

To evaluate the success of any content campaign, it is essential to tell a story. The digital narrative should highlight how you led consumers down the conversion funnel. Using this technique, we will look at how we increased visibility, defined engagement, broke down traffic and lead quality, and finally, reached over $1M in revenue and a high return on investment.

Visibility

Thanks to the Qzzr team, they helped us reach a brand new audience by featuring the quiz multiple times in their newsletter and on their homepage. The Qzzr homepage sees upwards of 30,000 unique visitors per month and has a subscription-based audience of 13,581. We had similar results during our influencer / earned outreach phase and our paid targeted promotion – which helped spread the content to hundreds of thousands of viewers that we would have never otherwise been able to touch.

On-Page Engagement

Engagement is my favorite metric – as there are a few intriguing performance indicators. There is on-page engagement (triggers that tell us that people are interacting with items on the page – many of which have been tracked prior to launch) and off-page engagement (interactions happening prior to reaching the content).

On-page metrics for this quiz are highlighted in the visual below. (Note: 82% of users who started the quiz, completed it – telling me that it was high quality, engaging and relatable.) There was a total of 29,410 lead conversions via the optional form fill upon quiz completion. These are quality leads and are now part of a subscription-based audience, which is a very powerful instrument for businesses.

Off-page Engagement

As highlighted in the following graphic, “Shares” outweighed “Likes” on Facebook. “Likes” are a great indication of interaction, but “Shares” are representative of liking content enough to spread the word – which reflects brand affinity. Quizzes are the perfect medium to encourage sharing and commentary, as they are self-identifying and social in nature.

We organically secured the number one spot on Google for the keyword “Glasses Quiz.” Check out the “Revenue and ROI” section below for a visual representation and description of our multi-attribution technology to help tell the story of which channels were responsible for driving the most traffic.

Traffic // Lead Quality

There were 240,649 unique website sessions over the course of 6 months from the quiz alone. To look at quality of leads, we can use the 29,410 lead conversions as an argument for visitor quality. Further, we can look at the behavior funnel in Google Analytics. This illustrates the customer journey and speaks to the quality of the actual content itself.

The behavior funnel below illustrates initial quiz interaction, followed by completing the CTA via going to the category landing page on the second interaction and then, by the third interaction, viewers were already moving to “buy,” completing the conversion phase. This explains how content is an authentic touch point in a conversion.

Revenue & ROI

Over the course of 6 months, we observed the following definitive metrics:

573,338 unique visitors – Total traffic to the quiz landing page
$1,167,746.21 – Total revenue

IMI used a multi-attribution technology to help identify which channels were the most revenue generating.

Top 3 Revenue Generating Sources for the quiz:

Organic search: $143,691.65
Paid search: $126,673.55
Email: $103,544.75

I would like to note that over the last 6 months, Organic Search has being playing catch up to Paid Search, and has now surpassed it by over $17,081 as the lead revenue-generating source. This showcases the importance of Content Marketing as a long-term strategy and supports the concept that quality, evergreen content will continue to exceed its value far past the initial promotion phase.

And finally: Return on Investment: 9,655%

Conclusion

We have learned in the grand scheme of things that the short-term investment of quality content creation paired with long-term digital strategy reaps timeless gain. In addition, we understand how beneficial it is to build a relationship between brand and consumer. This relationship is organically built through on and off page engagement – which is reached through awesome interactive mediums like a quiz, which helps solve a problem. Lastly, we have learned that two of the greatest things you can offer in Content Marketing are personalization and a solution. And what better way than giving your customer a personalized solution they want to talk about!