How to Market on Facebook with a Quiz

Free advertising with a quiz

quizWhen you market with a quiz or personality test, you are using the most shared content on social media. You will be paying for promoting your quiz on Facebook. However, every time someone shares your quiz, that will be FREE advertising.

Two types of quizzes that can get you lots of social shares are

  • quizzes that make people laugh and
  • quizzes that make people realize how good or smart you are.

Facebook advertising to show how smart you are

The sample quiz and Facebook ad on this page represents a campaign to sell an e-book to restaurant managers. It is designed to help them train staff how to serve customers with disabilities.

The image above displays the first two of six questions of a quiz aimed at people who are general managers of restaurants. (Over 25,000 Facebook users in Canada list that as their occupation.)

quizSo, once the quiz has been created, you would go to the bottom of the left-hand column in your Facebook account. You would click on Create > Ad. When you get to the Detailed Targeting section, you would type “restaurant” in the Include box. Then you would click on Restaurant General Manager.

The preamble in your advertising says that 13.7% of Canadians have a disability that interferes with their daily life. This often includes going to restaurants that do not cater to people with disabilities very well.

So, the quiz users would show how smart they are by answering a number of questions that teach people a bit about how to cater to restaurant customers with disabilities. It they ace the quiz, they could very likely share the quiz with other restaurant managers they know.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

Technical help 

There a number of different companies that have the software available for creating a quiz. After lots of study, I decided to use Riddle. They have a excellent PDF file telling you just about everything you have to know about how to create online quizzes.

Important tips

quizThink about the points below. I suspect they will help to make your quiz more effective.

  • Before making your promotion public, time a friend while he/she is taking the quiz.
    • It must take under 3 minutes.
    • If any of the questions are confusing to your friend, change or eliminate them.
  • Have a maximum of 10 questions.
  • After someone answers each question,
    • Set things up that immediately tells whether the answer is right or wrong.
    • At the same time, give the right answer.
  • Immediately after the last question & answer, tell them they can see a PDF file with much more background information about each question.
    • In order to get that PDF file, they will have to fill in a very short form giving their name & email address.  (See more below.)
  • Have a short, punchy title.
    • I used How to Increase Your Customer Base.
    • The headline analyzer page will show you how to create headlines that get more views.
  • Make sure you use an SSL certificate so that people can buy securely from your website.
  • Make sure you track your various answers with Facebook pixels.

To get them to fill in a form and give their email addresses, you can write something like To read a detailed explanation of why each answer is the correct one, enter your first name & email address. We will immediately email you those explanations. You may want to use AWeber to email out those emails. That’s a better alternative than having someone hang around your email box 24 hours a day.

There is good statistical wisdom behind the above points. If you decide to deviate from any of those points, make sure you read over the Quizmaster PDF file before doing so.

Before using Riddle

Before using Riddle or whatever quiz-creation program you are using, create

  • a quiz using Word or Pages
  • a website used to promote the product you want to sell
    • To see an example of such a website, go to bit.ly/disabledpatron.
      • That website is built around an e-book it is selling.
    • On that website, have a PDF file that people go to in order to read the rationale behind the quiz answers. (See next paragraph.)
      • This is part of the email address collecting process.

PDF into web page — I want to have the PDF file in a web page where I’m featuring the product that the quiz is promoting. The PDF file gives more data elaborating on each of the questions.

I use Apple Pages. If you use Word, you will have to adjust the points below a bit. 

Write the information for your quiz user in a Pages or Word File. Create the new PDF file using something like the Pages File > Export.

Then go to PDF2Go to compress the PDF file. Save it using only letter and numbers with NO spaces.

Start by saving it in your Finder as a file with no spaces.  Then drag that re-named file onto the PDF2GO page. Click the Save button at the bottom. Then click green Download button.

Go to the appropriate WPmadesimple.org page for the rest of the instructions.

View the page that has the new PDF link. Click on the link. The target page is the page URL that AWeber will send to the people who filled out the form.  E.g., you would use WPmadesimple to add the PDF file link to this page. Then you would click that link to get to the final PDF page. Quiz users would be willing to give their email addresses so that they could see that final PDF page.

Technical part of creating the quiz

  • Create quiz questions and answers and also the PDF page before starting technical part
  • Go to riddle.com.
  • If you have already signed up, click on the Dashboard link in the horizontal menu.
    • To begin creating a brand new quiz, click Create in the horizontal menu.
  • If you have not signed up yet, click the green button below “free for 14 days”.
  • Click the Create link in the horizontal menu.
  • Click the turquois Quiz icon.
  • Give your quiz a short catchy title.
  • Click on the letter “i” beside image to get the sizes of image from which to choose.
    • Ideally each quiz question will have a picture beside it. Each picture in the quiz must be the same shape. (Landscape, portrait or square.)
    • Choose a picture that relates to your title.
  • Fill in an image, a title that whets their appetite and a description that makes the reader want to learn more.
  • Click Question 1 blue button.
  • Add image to match question if you can.
  • Copy & paste the question from  your Pages file.
  • You can click Add an Answer button for more choices.
    • Have a maximum of 4 choices.
    • Click radio button of correct answer.
    • Click Save button near top middle.
  • Click plus sign below Question 1 blue button
  • Make question and answer #2.
  • Have no more than 10 questions.
  • Quiz must take less than 3 minutes.
  • Click on Score 0% – 50% button.
  • Have maximum of 4 of these buttons.
  • Use interesting language to describe quiz users in each range of number correct.

Immediately after last question…

Insert a lead generation form.

If you are using Riddle:

  • Click on the Collect Leads button after you finished creating the last question & answer.
  • Then click on Lead Generation Form.
  • Click on 2. Connect button.
  • Click the Connect to AWeber button.
  • Click on green button to get authorization code.
  • Paste authorization code into box & click on Connect AWeber.
  • You will get an email saying you’ve connected Riddle to your AWeber account.
  • You will see a number of fields that could go into your form.
  • Click Customize link to do things such as change colour of buttons and fonts.
  • Click tiny blue save button at the top.
  • Click Advanced button to do things such as adding a Facebook pixel.

Notes on the above bullet points

AWeber

  • If you want AWeber to automatically send out your emails as soon as someone has filled out a form, click the Connect to AWeber button.

You can use MailChimp instead of AWeber. I talk about AWeber because it is the only email forwarding company I’ve every used and I am very pleased with it. Besides that, I get a small amount of money if you pay for AWeber.

AWeber is one of the most widely used email automation marketing tools on the market today. If you use the process above, AWeber and Riddle will be integrated to make the whole process of collecting leads and quiz responses an intuitive and quick process.

Form Intro

Here you insert the text you use to entice the quiz taker into giving their email address. Right after the last question they will still be thinking about giving information. That is the ideal place to ask for their email address.

So, have some enticing text in the Description such as this: For more background information behind these quiz answers, fill in the form below. We will immediately send you a PDF form giving you the rationale plus more information supporting each answer.

For the Label you can have a very short title that would draw them into reading the Description. For instance, the italicized text above could have Background Information for the label.

They then fill in the form with their name & email address. That data will go to AWeber. That company will in turn email the quiz user whatever PDF file you gave them.

Campaigns

Campaigns is the AWeber platform that automates sending emails to the right person at the right time.

 

Learn more: How to get started with Campaigns.

Selling a product

In the example on this page we will be earning our money by selling a high quality e-book about serving people with disabilities. To promote the product, a website appealing to the target audience (restaurant general managers) was created.

quizThe financial benefit of a restaurant general manager having the e-book would be increased sales. The manager would use the information for staff training. People with disabilities would have more pleasant experiences in the restaurant. They would frequent the restaurant more often as would their friends and families.

In order to make the website more appealing, it would be about more than just customers with disabilities. It would be about how to increase your restaurant sales. So, the domain name howtoincreaseyourrestaurantsales.com was purchased.

I did not want the website to be only about serving people with disabilities. So, it also includes a section on where to get free software to help people order online and also reserve a table.

I want to send people to the most important page on the website. So, I used an URL shortener to make it easier to deal with. For instance, people can now go to https://howtoincreaseyourrestaurantsales.com/disabilities-introduction/ by simply typing bit.ly/disabledpatron into a browser window.

Attached PDF file

You may be offering the visitors an e-book in the form of a PDF file. That is what I am doing for How to Serve Customers with Disabilities e-book. I will be hosting it in Google Drive.

The e-book was created using Microsoft Word. I took the final version of the e-book and, in Microsoft Word, clicked on File > Save As. For the saving location I chose a folder in Google Drive. For the file format I selected PDF.

 

More information about attaching a PDF file

Adding a link into an AWeber message
Connecting your AWeber account to your Riddle account
Creating messages to be sent to subscribers
Hosting a PDF file on Google drive
Message sent out as soon as email is received

Glossary

List — The way that you differentiate messages and subscribers from others in your AWeber account. For example, you may have a quiz about a pet grooming business. From the quiz answers you could tell whether someone was mainly interested in dogs or cats. So, one subscribers’ list at AWeber would be about dogs and another would be about cats.

Tag — One element of a subscriber’s information. For instance, you might have a quiz about favourite categories of foods. The category could determine what kind of information you would send the each person. The categories would be called “tags”. One person’s tag could be fruit. Another person’s tag could be vegetables.

You would send these tags to AWeber. Then, when the emails are sent out, there could be a different email for each tag.

Read the article about how to use tags with AWeber campaigns.

This is Facebook Advertising to a Special Audience

Facebook advertising, a combination of 3 parameters

Facebook advertisingTo succeed in Facebook advertising, you must have:

    • The right targeting
    • A great image or video
    • Compelling copy.

Targeting

With the right combination of interests, behaviours & location, you can drill down to as low as one person in your target audience.

What you see to the right is part of an infographic called All of Facebook’s Ad Targeting Options. View it here.

Targeting is such a complex concept that you will likely lose money with Facebook advertising if you don’t understand it.

In my case, I want to make a sponsored post in my news feed. It will be targeted towards restaurant managers in Canada.

There were 22,317 people in Canada who had registered “restaurant general manager” as their occupation in their Facebook profiles.

I assumed that the most likely person to be interested in the e-book would be the manager of a restaurant. I also assumed that managers of very small restaurants such as what you’d see in a mall food court would not be interested. So, I tried to exclude people who are interested in fast food.

Note that targeting audiences is not an exact science. Facebook is not able to obtain all of the correct data. So, targeting involves a certain amount of guess work.

Below is how I set up my targeting aimed at people who are most likely to buy an e-book about how to serve people with disabilities.

Sample ad creation with a target market

Facebook advertising

          1. Facebook advertisingI opened Facebook and went to Create > Ad near the lower left-hand corner.
          2. For marketing objective I chose Conversions.
          3. Bottom of page: I named my campaign Conversion to Buy E-book.
          4. For Website I entered URL of page that has the pertinent quiz plus Add to Cart buttons.
          5. Left the Languages box blank unless I would have wanted a language other than English.
          6. Facebook advertisingUnder Detailed Targeting, I typed in restaurant manager. That gave me 3 options. I clicked on Restaurant General Manager. For reasons that seem illogical to me, that restricted my potential reach too much. So, I had to add another option.
          7. In the next box (and MUST also match…), I clicked on Suggestions and then Restaurant Management. That increased my potential reach by a huge amount.
          8. Then, still in the Include section, I clicked Suggestions. Then I selected more examples. If the Potential Reach went down and the Daily Reach went up, I would keep it. Otherwise I would delete the selection.
          9. Facebook advertisingBy including more categories, you increase your potential audience. By excluding, you make it more specific. It is best to keep your targeting narrow rather than being broad. Narrower audiences are often easier to reach on a limited budget and are more likely to convert into sales. However, in my case, I could not find a good reason to logically exclude more potental buyers.
          10. In this section you can also look at your target audience’sinterests. This can be as finely targeted as the type of pages they “liked”.
          11. Also, try to find when they are researching on how to increase customer base.
          12. Clicked Save This Audience.

Budget & daily reach

Up to a point, the more you spend per day, the more people will see your add each day. For instance, my ad could potentially be seen by 71,000 people. With a $2/day budget, an estimated 88 – 460 people per day would see the ad. With a $4/day budget, an estimated 170 – 860 people per day would see the ad.

including & excluding

For my ad, I entered Canada for the location. For what to include in the Detailed Category, I typed in “restaurant manager”. I was presented with 3 choices and I chose “restaurant general manager”. As long as they are the general manager, I am not concerned about their age or gender.

Facebook advertisingThere are other categories that you could include or exclude for your audience. To decide what to do, hover over the letter i. (See graphic above.) That will give you a definition of the category. Use that knowledge to help you decide whether to include or exclude people in that category.

For the Interests category, I excluded people who are interested in Fast Food. My assumption is that most fast food restaurant managers would not be interested in buying our e-book.

A great image

Facebook advertisingA mediocre image will not do. You have to get a picture that tells a story.

There are plenty of free image websites out there. I went to freeimages.com and entered “restaurant wheelchair” into the search box.

There was no free image that was good enough. So, I clicked the Related Images from iStock button and paid $36 USD for it.

A Facebook ad photo should be 1200 x 628 pixels. So,I used the Eyedropper tool to grab some light red from the man’s shirt and resized my photo with two bars.

Compelling copy

When writing your copy, imagine you are writing to one person and one person alone. That will be the person you have found with your target market.

      • Focus all of your attention on that one person and his/her needs.
      • Make sure your text and your image have the same theme.
      • Write text in a grade 5 or so level.
      • Have a clear goal.
      • Have a clear CTA (call to action).
      • Keep it short. Let them know how we can help them solve a problem in a clear, concise manner. When they read it, they should know:
        • What you are offering.
        • How it will benefit them.
        • What they should do next.
      • Go to your Facebook feed and read a bunch of ads for ideas.
      • Run 2 Facebook ads that are identical except for minor changes in text. See which one converts better.

Placement

Budget of $1 or $2/day

Look at case study #4 in the web page of 13 case studies. For $30/month, it cost the company $0.25 to reach each 1000 customers using Facebook advertising. Compare that to $0.75 for LinkedIn and $2.75 for Google AdWords.

In the Placement section of the Facebook Ad Creation page I selected:

      • Automatic Placements
      • A budget of $2 CAD/day. This will rise as I am tweaking the ad.
      • I set the dates to be starting we expect to have the e-book finished. It is set to run for a month. (I will not finish the ad until the e-book actually has been finished.)
      • Bid strategy is Lowest Cost.

Facebook advertising numbers

      • You can have: One image plus text
      • Ad image sizes: 1200 x 628 pixels
      • Text limit: 90 characters
      • Headline text limit: 25 characters
      • Link description limit: 30 characters
      • Maximum amount of text overlay: Less than 20 percent of image.
      • Video aspect ratio: 16:9 (full landscape) or 1:1 (square) (other aspect ratios available for specific campaign types)
      • Maximum video length: 120 minutes

To find the numbers for the less common types of ads, go to the Complete Guide, select the page and Cmd F to search for “slideshow”.

Facebook advertisingIf your image size is not 1200 x 628 px, it will get cropped. So, I resized my photo with two bars.

The link URL was greater than 30 characters. So, I changed it to bit.ly/disabledpatrons.

Analyzing for ROI

To help figure out your Facebook advertising ROI (return on investment), use a Facebook pixel. That is a small piece of Javascript code that you paste into the head section of your key pages. It will tell you how many people take action on your ad and which ad leads to a conversion.

The above does not give enough information. So, read more at Measure Conversions.

Sample Facebook pixel

<!– Facebook Pixel Code –>
<script>
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘322497177900987’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’);
</script>
<noscript><img height=”1″ width=”1″ style=”display:none”
src=”https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=322497177900987&ev=PageView&noscript=1″
/></noscript>
<!– End Facebook Pixel Code –>

Note that the code snippet in orange does not come with your Facebook pixel code. It is one of  nine different standard event codes that is added just before the ending script code (</script>).

This particular standard event code tracks when items are added to a shopping cart. Learn more about standard event codes.

Learn much more about Facebook pixels.

If you are having trouble pasting the code snippet into your head section, read over this Header FAQ.  If Facebook advertisingyou are confused when it talks about “child theme”, enter
“child theme” into the search box and press Enter.

Misc. valuable information about Facebook advertising

  • The higher the relevance score, the lower the cost per click (CPC).
  • If you fail to place the right ad bids, two things might happen:
    • You’ll pay too much for your ad results or
    • Your ads will not get delivered due to low bids.
  • Never assume your advertising strategy is perfect from the beginning. Start with a low dollar amount. Never assume anything. Always test everything.
  • Average cost per click is $0.20 USD in Canada and $0.26 USD in the USA. source
  • Run your Facebook ad campaigns with automatic placements for some time. After you’ve got some results, you can exclude the placements where costs are highest.
    • After you’ve got some results, you can exclude the placements where costs are highest.

The above ad on Facebook was our very first quiz ad. Among other things, that page has the same Add to Cart buttons that you see in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Figuring out your ROI (return on investment)

 

Go to the Build Your URL page.

 

The information you just read only scratches the Facebook advertising surface. To learn more, read some of the related pages below.

Related pages

5 Ridiculously Powerful Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies
Aspect ratios for Facebook ads
How AdWords Life Events Targeting Lifts Brand Interest 175%
All of Facebook’s Ad Targeting Options
9 Tips to Write the Best Facebook Ads Ever
How refined your targeting can get
Complete guide to advertising on Facebook
4 steps for successful advertising on Facebook
How to target specialized audiences with Facebook ads
Facebook pixel for conversion optimization & tracking
Facebook ad bidding
Creating a campaign using video views objective
Facebook relevance score
Checklist of what to include in your ad