Marketing Funnel Part 2: Lessons Learned Building a Quiz Funnel

Editor’s Note: This is part 2 of my marketing funnel series. You can read part 1 here.

Last year, my husband and I launched our online course, Complete Podcasting Course. We’d been podcasting for nearly 7 years and in 2021 it became both our full-time jobs, so we wanted to share what we’d learned and help people who are just getting started.

I’d built online courses before, so we knew what to do when it came to creating content. The biggest learning curve was in the marketing. We basically needed to reach a new audience of podcasters and aspiring podcasters, and I wanted to start by building our email list.

This meant coming up with an offer to get people interested, and we ended up building a quiz funnel. The result was we got over 280 people on our mailing list within just a few weeks.

What’s a quiz funnel?

The gist of a quiz funnel is you create a quiz, and then tell people the results of their quiz if they sign up for your email list. Usually, you want a self-discovery type of quiz.

For Complete Podcasting Course, we came up with a quiz to let people know which stage of podcasting they were in. Depending on their answers, they would be categorized into one of eight stages. And once they were in our mailing list, we sent out personalized content to them with additional information and resources pertaining to one of those eight podcasting stages. (I’ll get into how we built those automated email sequences in a later post.)

This approach works well for non-fiction authors, where you can easily expand on your topic. If you’re a fiction author, you could also try creating a quiz around how well people know your characters, or which character from your book or series they are most like.

Coming up with quiz questions

There are a few things to keep in mind in order to create a quiz people want to take. First, you want to think about the end of your quiz. What will you offer, or what will your hook be to attract people? In our case, we wanted to tell people which podcasting stage they were in, which corresponded to the modules in our Complete Podcasting Course.

Next, you want to figure out your keywords. You’ll want a specific keyword or phrase in mind that you know there’s demand and enough people are searching for or asking about. A few ways to do this is to search on Google, check for related products on Amazon (and the related search terms), or going to relative Facebook or LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing and asking about.

Some words or phrases you can search for in these groups include “tired of”, “frustrated”, or “embarrassed.” Or search for things like “biggest challenge.” This will give you an idea of what people are curious about, or what’s trending now. Look for posts with in-depth responses. That means people are invested, and it’ll also give you some ideas of the language to use when writing your quiz questions.

The gist is you want to serve a “starving crowd,” where there is a lot of demand and a good-sized market, and some, but not a lot, of competition.

Once you have your keywords, remember to also include them on your quiz page for SEO purposes, so people can more easily find your quiz.

As for the questions themselves, here are some tips:

Write between 5 and 7 questions (your last question will be where you ask for their email)
For each question, offer three to six potential answers

Start your quiz with an easy to answer question. For example, we started with “Have you launched your podcast?” (yes or no)
Ask questions that help pinpoint a pain point, and help you customize your answers. For example, one of our questions is “What are you struggling with the most in podcasting right now?”
Also ask questions to better understand your audience. These could be demographic questions or something else, as long as it’s relevant to your audience and offer

Make your quiz feel conversational, and have a story arc
Try not to use the word “survey”
Avoid “yes” or “no” questions (except for maybe your first question) and avoid open ended questions

The tech bits

Here’s everything we used to build our quiz funnel:

WordPress
WordPress Quiz Maker Plugin (with the ability to send someone an email, so they could get their quiz results)

ConvertKit (though we’ve since switched to MailerLite)

Spreading the word

I’ll cover this more in-depth in a later post, but the biggest thing we did to spread the word was set up paid ads on Facebook, Google, and Reddit. Two of them worked really well, and they all required some additional training. Fortunately, you can easily set up calls with Facebook and Google to get help with your ads.