Survey marketing has proven a very popular and effective brand building tool online for decades. Systems like Survey Monkey and Google Forms provide very polished and easy-to-use platforms by which anyone can create surveys to capture information. Typically, survey marketing focuses on data trends, gathering large numbers of responses for macro analysis and determining “big data” points of interest that occur when viewing large numbers of responses all in comparison with one another. This can be a very effective approach for brands to review these big data trends based on the questions they ask and then direct their operations, marketing, sales and other brand development efforts accordingly. Sure, a brand using survey marketing potentially captures some way to continue re-marketing to their survey takers, but there tends to be a massive, missed opportunity to assess and respond accordingly and immediately to every person who takes a survey. So, enter assessment marketing.

The Value Exchange

Every day more people are being more selective about how they spend their time online and what value they receive by not only giving their contact information but also their responses to specific questions. Assessment marketing, also referred to as quiz marketing, maintains the survey marketing element but takes things a step further by creating targeted responses to people on how they took the survey. Providing these targeted responses can be achieved by treating surveys more like quizzes, where every answer has a score and those scores then dictate the best response to send to the end user, all based on their participation.

In order for an assessment to provide something of value tailored to the end user, the end user has to provide an accurate input of information. For example, they answer a series of questions about their communication preferences and in return, the assessment provides them a response page gauging what kind of communicator they are. Both sides of the exchange are getting something from this engagement. The brand gets valuable information from an engaged end user along with their valid contact information (since that is the only way the end user gets their results.) The end user finds out something about themselves that they were not necessarily able to gauge readily or accurately on their own.

The Call to Action

You have heard us talk about calls to action before on this blog. Some calls to action are necessarily plain and simple (like “Call Us”). But that may not be the best approach when building brand awareness or vetting possible leads. An assessment, although a call to action in and of itself, can drive incredibly focused and appropriately targeted calls to action to those who participate in taking it. For example, a satisfaction assessment can determine whether someone is happy or not with a brand’s service—driving happy customers to Yelp or Google and unhappy customers to continuing the conversation until the brand makes things right. An assessment may also drive a budding author to consider a webinar series created by a particular writing coach based on their focuses and interests. All the while, the brand is being provided valuable demographic and feedback information about current customer satisfaction, potential leads, market segments, etc.

Furthermore, as a call to action, an assessment can also become a magnet for others to visit a brand’s website. People who take the assessment will likely share their results with their spheres of influence if the information is tailored enough to describe them and/or help them. A great example is the Narcissism Test by Dr. Craig Malkin. The assessment does more than tell you whether or not you are a narcissist. It determines how much of a narcissist you are and whether your narcissism is the healthy type or the extreme type or if you are not enough of a narcissist for your own health. This assessment has been taken hundreds of thousands of times because people share the test and it has built a very powerful brand for Dr. Malkin.

The System To Get It Done

Historically, creating assessment or quiz systems like this have always been expensive, temperamental and cumbersome. Most brands can’t afford to spend $30K or more (plus monthly management costs) for a system that cannot be easily manipulated on the fly. So, to build these assessments quickly, efficiently and cheaply, the principal over here at Alter Endeavors, Nick Alter, designed and developed a platform called Catch Engine.

Catch Engine allows for brands to effectively build out assessments (or quizzes, whatever you want to call them) with an intuitive system to build out the questions, answers, response pages, logic system and additional actions (like alerts and MailChimp or Infusionsoft integration). By creating assessments with Catch Engine, building brand power becomes a much more focused and tailored experience for both the brand and the end user. The end user benefits while the brand’s power builds exponentially.