5 tips for driving revenue & engagement with quizzes

You've probably seen quizzes all over the BuzzFeed homepage or making the rounds in your Facebook News Feed. While they might seem like they are just for fun, newspapers are finding quizzes are a unique and valuable solution to engage their audience, while meeting advertisers' needs. 

We've seen everything from a "How Cupid Are You?" Valentine's Day quiz resulting in increased social following and customers for the six sponsors to a "Which Royals Player Are You?" quiz that drove tremendous social engagement for a media company around the Kansas City Royal's trip to the World Series last year.

Below, I've outlined some best practices around executing a successful quiz strategy, as well as some advertisers to target and how to package and price your sponsorships.

1. Make a plan. As with any promotion, quizzes are better if you have a plan. Be sure to add quizzes to your promotions calendar – you can run holiday and seasonal quizzes near relevant seasons and holidays, and evergreen quizzes (like "What Breed of Puppy Is Perfect for You?" anytime)!

2. Get all departments involved. Quizzes are a promotion type that your whole team can rally around. They can generate content for your editorial team, provide a unique solution for your sales team to bring to advertisers, grow your social following for the marketing team, and collect data that will be valuable for everyone at your company.

3. Use quizzes to solve advertiser needs. An advertiser quiz is a quiz that is made for an advertiser after a needs analysis conversation to determine their business goals. These can be to educate people about a specific topic, to drive leads, to collect data, or just to highlight an advertiser's business, products or services. A perfect example of an advertiser quiz is KTUU's Captain Cook Trivia quiz, which was created for the Anchorage Museum to promote its Captain Cook exhibition.

4. Align quizzes with other promotions. You can increase the excitement around a promotion by adding a quiz. For example, you could complement a College Basketball Tournament with a "Which College Basketball Player Are You?" quiz, like Madison.com did with its "Which Badger Are You?" quiz.

5. Have fun! As Chris from Madison put it, "Quizzes are fun to make and fun to play, and they mix up your content and keep it fresh."

How to package and price quizzes
Any quiz sponsorship package you create should include all of your unique promotional assets. The best way to figure out what to charge for the whole package is to price each element individually and then add it all up to determine the overall value. As you are pricing, be sure to also take into account your costs for creating and setting up the quiz and to add a dollar amount for that as well.

Need some inspiration? The following is a sample package for a quiz being run by a mid-size market newspaper:

This is a unique promotion your talent will talk about, so it has a lot of value!

You can also use quizzes to leverage incremental buys to get more money from your advertisers. If a car dealership is placing a quarterly buy, adding a quiz you create just for them makes your offer more appealing and can make your pitch stand out from the crowd.

Want to learn more about how to create opportunity around quizzes? Download our free playbook. In it, you'll find sections on why you need to run quizzes, how quizzes drive revenue in every market, how to sell and promote quizzes, case studies and more.

Matt Coen is the president and co-founder of Second Street, a leading provider of private-label online promotions platforms and partner success services for media companies based in St. Louis, Mo. He can be reached at (314) 880-4902 or matt@secondstreet.com.