How Quizzes Boost Your Content: The BuzzFeed Quiz Phenomenon

Interactive content is the name of the content marketing game.

Your content needs to be personalized, relevant, engaging, optimized––the list goes on! But if there is one thing that you always need to remember, it’s that your content needs to somehow spark interaction between you and your audience.

There are many ways to do this, but traditional CTAs or asking people to share their thoughts in the comment section can only take you so far. People need more, and that’s why interactive content truly shines when you put it in the format of an online quiz. 

And of course, if you were around during the online quiz revolution of the 2010s, you know that BuzzFeed was the pioneer of this genre that pretty much made the brand an overnight success. As a result, quizzes became extremely popular marketing and sales-aid tools in every industry over the years.

Let’s explore this phenomenon in more depth, and give you the tools you need to create better quizzes to take your business to the next level in 2024.

What Made BuzzFeed Quizzes So Popular?

Do you know what kind of pasta you are?

We’re pretty sure that you could dig up a BuzzFeed quiz that would tell you that in just a few clicks. After you find out, you’ll already have become a lead in their pipeline because you signed in via one of your social accounts, or you gave them your email address.

And that’s how the magic is made.

BuzzFeed quizzes may have started as a social experiment, but they quickly revolutionized the way marketers think of online content. 

In fact, the quiz format to this day remains one of the best online marketing strategies for lead generation, and also for helping the sales process in general. Why? Because BuzzFeed inherently understood the importance of the word “social” in social media.

These quizzes are social tools; they are meant to engage and spark interest, and it doesn’t really matter how absurd they are, so long as they offer a fun way for people to uncover and share bits of themselves in the online community. And that’s another aspect of BuzzFeed’s success–the shares.

Online quizzes bring many benefits to the table, and one of them is the perk of getting your content shared across platforms and communities. BuzzFeed’s quizzes achieved their peak shareability by simply tapping into evergreen topics and focusing on content, lore, and genres with a global fan base.

For example, Harry Potter.

Since the Harry Potter franchise is a global phenomenon, you’ll have a tough time finding a millennial or a Gen Z-er who’s not obsessed with what house they belong to, or what material their wand is made of. 

This approach is the golden recipe for movies, books, popular franchises, music, even cooking, cars, makeup, and gardening–it doesn’t matter, people want to participate.

And that’s the key takeaway behind the success of BuzzFeed’s quizzes: popular topics + shareability.

So how can you emulate that approach?

For one, you need to detach yourself from your core offering and shift focus from you to your audience. This is something that the BuzzFeed community understood very well right from the beginning. 

These quizzes will generate leads more efficiently if you make them about the customer and about having fun, rather than using them to blatantly promote your brand. Of course, you can always tie your core offering to the quiz, but you need to do it in a way that doesn’t spook the quiz takers.

If people get a sense that the quiz is trying to sell them something, they’ll be out of there pretty fast.

BuzzFeed Quiz Examples

BuzzFeed quizzes have long been a staple in the pop culture world, providing an entertaining and engaging way to interact with trending news, celebrity buzz, and pop culture moments. Through a mix of fun videos, trivia quiz, and shopping recommendations, these quizzes tap into the interests of the BuzzFeed community and keep users coming back for more.

Favorite Trivia Quizzes

One of the hallmarks of BuzzFeed's approach is its ability to create quizzes that resonate with other BuzzFeed quiz takers globally. From finding out which Disney princess you are to comparing your trivia knowledge with that of your favorite celebrities, these quizzes turn everyday pop culture knowledge into a social experience. Favorite TV shows, hot trending series, and even your morning routine can become the basis for a quiz that feels both personal and universal.

Market Research and Engagement

BuzzFeed uses quizzes not only as content but also as a tool for market research. By analyzing quiz results, BuzzFeed gains insights into what content performs well and how BuzzFeed quiz takers engage with different topics. This data drives future content creation, ensuring that the quizzes remain fresh and relevant. Additionally, quizzes are a clever way to collect email addresses, offering quiz results in exchange for signing up for push notifications or following BuzzFeed on Twitter, Facebook, or via the BuzzFeed app.

Integrating News Articles and Current Events

BuzzFeed also integrates news articles and breaking news into their quizzes, providing a unique blend of entertainment and information. This method has helped BuzzFeed maintain better news credibility among users who appreciate staying informed while being entertained. Quizzes related to all my news or a news break might challenge users on how well their trivia knowledge compares to actual trending news events, making the experience both educational and fun.

Celebrity and Pop Culture Integration

No stranger to the celebrity world, BuzzFeed frequently features quizzes that involve celebrity trivia, shopping recommendations based on celebrity styles, or scenarios involving favorite celebrities. These not only engage users but also encourage sharing among friends on social media, increasing the quizzes' reach and impact.

BuzzFeed App and Social Sharing

With performance improvements and new features continuously being added to the BuzzFeed app, users can expect an even more seamless and interactive experience. The app's integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter makes it easy for users to share their trivia results or quiz results with friends, turning each quiz into a potential social engagement tool.

In fact, by leveraging entertainment, market research, and social media integration, BuzzFeed continues to dominate the quiz scene, making each quiz a gateway to a larger entertainment and pop culture conversation. Whether you're a trivia star looking to test your knowledge or just looking for the perfect gift ideas through shopping recommendations, BuzzFeed's quizzes offer something for everyone.

5 Ways BuzzFeed Style Quizzes Boost Your Content

Now that you’re familiar with the BuzzFeed phenomenon and the recipe they used to build their popularity over the years, it’s time to put your own stamp on it.

We’ll now talk about the benefits and key focus areas of online quizzes, along with how to implement each of these focus points into your strategy. The result will be maximum engagement, sharing, and lead generation.

Here’s how to do it. 

1. Interactive and Engaging Lead Generation 

An online quiz is typically considered a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a piece of content intended to attract prospects and offer something of value in exchange for their contact info, which will allow you to follow up and even provide a call to action. Now, it’s important to remember that quizzes are excellent customer retention tools as well.

The key is to continuously provide substance, value, and variety to the users in order to excel at lead generation as well as customer retention–inspiring people to keep coming back for more.

When it comes to both acquisition and retention, one of the best ways to provide quiz variety is to have numerous engaging templates ready. This should include topic and visual templates.

Such as personality quizzes template from our very own quiz repository. 

involve.me has over 50 amazing quiz templates you can choose from to suit your marketing goals, all of which you can personalize to fit your brand’s identity and your customers. 

You can choose industry-specific quizzes for some of your more specialized marketing campaigns, but there are also many general quizzes to maximize engagement from a broader audience. 

Try mixing both approaches and use our topic suggestions to keep dishing out interesting quizzes people will want to take–and share!

2. Boosting Your SEO

One of the lesser-known, or lesser thought of benefits of online quizzes is that they’re great SEO tools. 

You can think of an online quiz like any other piece of content that you can optimize for better ranking and discoverability in the SERPs. Things like meta descriptions, headings and subheadings, branded and general keywords, all of these and other SEO features in your quizzes will help them climb the search results.

But of course, there are also indirect SEO benefits, like email communication, social sharing, and of course, backlinking. 

Each of your quizzes should aim to collect some customer contact info–preferably their email address. This will allow you to follow up and guide them on their journey. Best of all, you’ll share great content with them via email, which will guide them to your site and socials, improving your SEO.

On the other hand, when people share your quiz on their social profiles, that’s more engagement and traffic for your brand. 

With that in mind, make sure to integrate the right keywords in every quiz you make. 

3. Enhancing User Retention

Dwell time is a big deal for any website, and with added dwell time come other important KPIs like heatmaps and focus areas, scroll speed, and of course, page interactions. 

Online quizzes are great for boosting all of those, and more. 

People take their time reading each question carefully and choosing their answers, which literally translates to engagement, interaction, and more dwell time. This is great for user retention overall, but true retention comes from quiz variety.

That said, you have to know how to ask these questions for maximum engagement. 

Here’s a checkbox:

Calculators, tests, fun surveys, true or false formats, you name it, people will keep coming back for more, especially if the questions are relevant and interesting. Most of all, they need to be educational and provide something of true value–people want your quiz to help them grow.

Personal development quizzes are great for this, as you can teach users about some effective problem-solving techniques in their personal and professional lives using a fun and interactive format. The same goes for other soft and hard skills, many of which can be closely tied to what you do as a company.

This can bring the user closer to your brand, and improve brand retention over time. 

You can start with a very simple format like that to gain traction initially, and then move into lengthier quizzes over time to build up engagement and inspire people to come back. 

4. Improve Brand Awareness

Brand-building is a continuous process because even though you might have a well-rounded brand, you still need to keep building it up in the eyes of the market and the online community.

One of the most important elements here is brand stickiness. Stickiness simply means brand retention, or your brand’s ability to stay top of mind or at least be easily recognizable. 

This takes time, of course, but your quizzes can definitely boost the process. Because people tend to better remember the things they actually interacted with, you have a unique opportunity to position your brand as a recognizable figure in the market.

One of the best examples comes from Neil Patel, the digital marketing guru who uses online quizzes to spark engagement and stay top of mind for new and established followers. 

5. Educate Your Audience

An educational quiz is one of the most effective quiz formats you can use. 

You can also use it internally for company development and numerous employee-focused incentives and processes. You can always do a virtual team building trivia knowledge event to spice up the agenda and make it easier for your attendees to internalize new information.

So don’t just think that quizzes are great for your customer-facing strategies. 

When it comes to educational quizzes in general, though, your focus should be on providing value with each question and answer. You can choose a specific topic or niche to base your educational quiz on, or you can choose a general scope and engage the users with question variety. 

Make sure to double-check your info, however, because you don’t want to put the wrong information out there! 

Over to You

Are you ready to take your content marketing strategy to the next level with the popular quiz format?

Now that you know how online quizzes can help you and how to utilize them for lead generation, go ahead and try out the free involve.me quiz builder to make the most of your content strategy in 2024.