How to Use Quizzes and Surveys to Attract Copywriting Clients

In an ideal world, a client who needed copy would magically find your portfolio site, instantly know you’re the right copywriter for him, and immediately hire you for his many, lucrative projects.

<sigh>

In the real world, it’s a little less simple. First, you have to capture a prospective client’s attention. Then, you often have to “nurture” your prospective client to educate him about yourself and your skills. Finally, you have to convert that prospective client to a paying client.

Luckily, all of this doesn’t have to be nearly as painful as it sounds. You can set up intriguing and alluring ways of capturing a potential client’s interest and — just as importantly — contact information, and then create automated systems to nurture and sell that the prospective client.

One of the most effective ways to do this right now is by way of quizzes and surveys. People love taking quizzes — it only takes a glance at Facebook to validate how many people take quizzes and post the results. (And even more people take quizzes and don’t post results.)

Similarly, people love taking surveys. They love telling you about their opinions, thoughts, and lives, and they love clicking on attractive buttons online to do it.

So how can you take advantage of that yourself? You can set up surveys or quizzes on your website that people will want to interact with — and use those surveys and quizzes to gather their contact information.

One of the most impressive software programs I’ve come across to let you generate quizzes and surveys is called Interact. (Full disclosure: they’ve given me free access to the program, but my review is entirely unbiased.) You can quickly create a quiz using one of their templates or by designing your own and end up with a high-quality, Buzzfeed-esque quiz that’s easy to publish on your site.

I’ll go over a few more features in a second, but let’s talk about how you can use these. Remember that you want your quiz or survey to be relevant to your target audience: Prospective clients. Your quiz needs to reveal information to them that they want to know, but it also needs to relate to your end goal of getting them as clients. Your quiz topics could include things like:

• Does Your Website Copy Need Upgrading?
• Are You Making These Common Marketing Mistakes?
• Test Your Email Marketing Knowledge
• Right or Wrong: Can You Spot the More Banner Ad Tactic?

Using your knowledge of copywriting and marketing, you can create the questions and answers to this quiz and then set it up through Interact to have people opt-in with their name and email address in order to get the answers.

They get to see the results of their quiz, while you get both their contact information as well as information about precisely where they need help with their marketing!

You can also use surveys to generate information about your prospective clients and even use branching logic to send them to different questions based on answers to previous questions. (It’s called “branching” logic because it looks like tree branches when it’s all visually mapped out.) For example, if a question in your survey is “Have you worked with a copywriter before?” you could set up the survey to ask a different question if the prospect answers “no” versus if they answer “yes.”

Interact quizzes are also mobile-friendly, which is important since quizzes and surveys are great content to post on your social media pages and profiles. If someone takes one of your quizzes from their phone while they’re on-the-go, you want to be sure that the quiz is actually accessible on their phone.

Here’s a quick example of one that I created, just so you can have a look:

The software also has a robust analytics section, allowing you to see where people are dropping off in your quiz or survey (and probably where you need to tweak a question), as well as other important information about how people interact with them.

While Interact does have a free tier, not all of the features I’ve mentioned are available in that tier. The next level up isn’t too expensive, but do be sure to put in some effort and make your quizzes and surveys as effective as they can be to make sure you justify the expense. (You know my philosophy: A software has to pay for itself to justify using it!)

You’ll want to put some time and energy into creating, optimizing, and promoting your quizzes and surveys, but these could turn out to be very effective ways to generate attention from prospective clients, get them into your email funnel, and then sell them on your services.

Your turn! What other ideas do you have for surveys and quizzes that prospective clients would love? Let us know in the comments below!