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Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Identify the Community You Serve
You might be a solopreneur who has
your service offers and a couple of
products under your belt.
You might be a blogger who has
established some content and has
started building income through referrals
or reviews.
You may even be in direct sales and
have managed to build a community
group around your brand.
You’ve been working on building your business for months. But something’s still missing.. You feel like you can’t quite connect with your audience and you’re not sure
what to do.
One of the best ways to grow your brand and serve your community is to use quiz
tactics. When you quiz your audience, you don’t have to guess what they want anymore. They’ll tell you want they don’t want or like and share with you what they
would love to see you offer.
Don’t spend any more time trying to figure out what your community wants until you take time to connect with your community and discover what they want. When you do this first, you’re likely to create very happy customers and happy customers tell their friends about your service or product.
You are in luck because I’ve already created an in-depth workbook on how to identify your target niche market – you can download it from my free resource library.
Before you create your quiz, you need to identify who your ideal client is. Ask yourself
who you want to sell to and why. A good answer will be specific enough to bring a
picture to mind of your perfect customer.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Avoid Generalizations about Your
Customers
You may be tempted to come up with a generic
answer like, “My target audience is women”. That might be a start but there are billions of
women in the world. Your product or service
can’t possibly help them all.
You have to drill down past gender and other
generalizations to really identify who you’re serving. You could start by asking yourself
some of these questions:
• How old is my target client?
• What’s her income level?
• Is she religious?
• What’s her educational background?
• What language does she speak?
• How will my product or service improve her life?
All areas are not going to be important to every product or service. For example, if you
sell handmade baby blankets, then religion may not matter to your ideal client. It all
comes back to who you want to serve.
Don’t Look to Family or Friends for Answers
When it comes to market research, don’t ask your spouse, parents, cousins or friends what they think of your business idea or product. Even if one of them happens to be
within your target market, chances are they will tell you what you want to hear. It’s a rare person who will tell you the truth despite personal considerations.
You even have to be careful about doing ‘on the fly’ research on forums and in online
chats. The social environment isn’t conducive to thoughtful answers.
Your Target Market Should Excite You
By the time you’ve identified your target market, you should be excited and bursting with ideas. If you’re not happy or worse, if you now dread the thought of serving your
community, then you picked the wrong one.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Go back and start over. Keep clarifying who it is you want to serve. It’s so much easier to build your business when you’re serving a community that you care about rather than
one that you’re just lukewarm about.
Find a community and fall in love with them. These are the people that you’ll be serving for years to come, so don’t skip this vital business building step.
Journal Your Thoughts (Use your workbook)
1. Do you have a clear picture of who your ideal client is? If so, describe him/her.
2. What's your ideal client's income level, age, and education background?
3. How will your product or service improve your ideal customer's life?
Asking Questions that Get Answers
The secret to getting useful
answers when quizzing your
audience is to be specific with your
questions. General questions will
only get you general responses.
Then you’ll be frustrated that your quiz didn’t help you at all.
But specific questions will result in
better answers. You can start by
identifying what you want to learn
from your answers. Every quiz you
design should have a clear goal.
For example, a business owner
wants to know how to price her
hand-crafted baby blankets.
A general question might be: What
would you pay for a hand sewn
baby blanket?
A better, more specific question could be: What would you consider to be too high of a
price for a hand-sewn baby blanket? (Please provide a dollar amount answer.)
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Focus on What You Need to Know
The first question is too open ended. You’re likely to get a wide variety of answers and not really know anything in the end. But the second question gives you more
information. It shows you what your community is willing to pay for a blanket and more
importantly, how much they won’t pay.
Even if the answers are varied, you can still see clearly an average limit that can serve
as a boundary for your pricing. You’ll know without a doubt that you’re not pricing your products too high.
Follow Up a Question with
More Questions
A blogger wants to know if her
readers would be interested in a new
membership based product she’s thinking about launching.
She could ask her clients: Would you
be interested in a blog content
membership product?
But a better question would be: Do
you find that you need blog posts on
a regular basis?
The blogger could then follow up this
question with more questions to give
her more information. She might
want to ask:
If yes, would you be interested in securing my services for a flat fee of $47 on a monthly
basis?
Offer Multiple Choices
If you’d like, you can use multiple choice options in your quiz. This can be helpful when you have a general price range but aren’t sure yet just how much to charge. For
example, a business coach needs to price her new video course. So, she asks this
question:
What would be a fair price for a video course about social media marketing?
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
• $47
• $97
• $197
Asking for Written Answers
Sometimes you need to give your people a chance to provide a long-hand answer in
their own words, especially if you’re trying to get to underlying motivations. So, ask for longer answers as needed, but don’t be annoying by requiring a certain number of words.
Even on brief surveys, you can offer an opportunity to add written comments or, better
yet – provide a space to ‘Ask Me Anything’. These spontaneous queries are often a source of great ideas.
Choose the Right Number of Questions
Ask as many questions as you need to in order to gather the information you need. But
be aware that the more questions you ask, the more time you’re asking for.
If you land on a quiz, your first thought is to guess how long it will take you to complete
it. If it looks too long, you’ll probably close the survey before you even answer one question.
When it comes to quizzing your community, remember the key is to decide what you
want to know. Then craft questions to give you clear answers that are useful in making
a decision.
Journal Your Thoughts
1. What's your goal for the quiz you're designing?
2. What will be the most important question on your quiz? Will you need follow up
questions to clarify the answers you get?
3. Make a list of potential questions to ask your community and write them below.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Tools to Make Quiz Building Easy
You’re clear on what your goal is for your quiz. You know what questions to ask and
which ones to avoid. You’ve made your quiz short enough that it’ll be do-able, even for
busy members of your community.
Now, you just need the right technology to create your quiz. But you’re stumped. You don’t what to use or how to gather your results. If that describes you, try one of these tools to design your quiz:
Formidable Forms
If you have your own WordPress site, Formidable Forms is a WordPress plugin. There’s a free version that’s suitable for most needs and you can download it here.
Formidable also offers a premium version of this plugin. You can use it to send an
automated email response to your quiz participants which is helpful. You can also ask
for submitted content in your posts and pages with their custom template options.
Once a person completes your quiz, you want them to be redirected to a ‘thank you’ page which you can design to your benefit. The free version doesn’t have this capability, but it will show a message to let participants know their answers have been received.
The premium options will give
you more control over the
look and feel of your quiz.
They’ll also create a mobile-
friendly version of your form
so your quiz is responsive.
You can learn more about the
premium versions by clicking
here.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Survey Monkey
This online software lets you design your own quizzes and surveys. Like Formidable,
you can choose between the free option and premium versions. With the free option,
you can get up to 100 responses in a month.
If you have a large community of several thousand people, then you may be better with
a premium option. But if you’re just getting your business started or you only need a small sample of responses, then the free version of Survey Monkey should have
everything you need.
JotForm
JotForm lets users create and manage quizzes, surveys, polls, and more. It integrates
with WordPress and you can include your own logo for branding purposes. You can
also choose between different question styles.
Like Survey Monkey, there are different
pricing tiers. If you opt for the free option,
you have less control over the look and
feel of your quiz.
However, a paid plan lets you fully
customize your form how you want.
JotForm also has over 200 survey
templates you can use to get you up and
running quickly. They also offer a ton of
integrations and widgets so you can
easily manage your results.
Don’t get hung up on which tool to use.
Pick the one that feels most natural to
you and start creating your quiz. Create a
free account and if you need to, you can
always upgrade to a paid plan later on.
Don’t forget if you have a community on Facebook you can use the native polling tools
for simple quizzes. Just remember this platform will make replies public so you may not
get high quality replies.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Journal Your Thoughts
1. Are you already using software that could be used to make quizzes?
2. What do you need from quiz software? (For example, custom 'thank you' pages,
Aweber integration, etc.)
3. How many responses do you anticipate getting from your quiz?
How to Get Your Community to Take Your
Quiz
Your questions are chosen, your form is ready and now you need people to complete it.
That means asking them to
participate. Go all out and
make this an event. Build
some excitement around it.
Open & Close the Quiz
Start by setting an opening
and closing date for survey
replies. If you’re looking to reach your own circle of
influence, give people a
window of about five days.
But if you’re looking to reach a wider range of people and
you’ll have others helping you spread the word, give
them two weeks. This gives
promoters time so to tell
their contacts about the
event and the chance to remind their contacts again, right before you close it down.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Blog about It
Next, write a blog post to announce your quiz and promote it. With Formidable Forms,
or JotForm you can insert the survey right into the blog post. But if you prefer, you can
have it on a separate page that you link to. Be sure to mention the deadline in your blog
post, this will spur people to take action right away.
Socialize It
Make it easy for others to share
about your quiz. You can do this by
adding social share buttons to your
blog post and quiz page. You can
use a free WordPress plugin like
WP Socializer or Shareaholic. If
you’re popular on Twitter and your content does well there, you can
also try adding a ‘Click to Tweet’ link. Use this website to create
tweets that are simple and easy to
share.
Thank Participants
After your quiz, you should have a
‘thank you’ page that lets participants know how much you appreciate them. But don’t stop there. Encourage your responders to share the survey link with their social circles.
Tell Your Mailing List
After you’ve launched your quiz and have posted about it on your blog, make sure to
email your list. Let them know about the quiz and invite them to take it. A few days later,
segment your list by who clicked on your survey and completed it. Email this section of
your list and ask them to share the link with others.
Give Your Quiz Some Social Love
Now, it’s time to share your quiz on your own social media platforms. Don’t make your request all about you. For example, don’t say, “Hey! Take my awesome new quiz: [link].”
Instead, make it about the participants. You could say something like, “Here’s your chance to sound out: what do you wish leaders in your niche knew?”
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
Ask for Support
After you’ve been on social media, reach out to friends who would be willing to help spread the word and ask for their support. When they say ‘yes’, you can give them social and email starter text to make it easy.
You’ll also want to follow up with them about reminders right before your quiz closes. Don’t forget to follow up with a special ‘thank you’ gift to all of those people who’ve been so supportive and helpful.
Woo Them with Gifts
Getting people to take a minute or two to complete a survey can be difficult. There are
so many demands on their attention but a dangling carrot can do wonders.
Offer participants something attractive in exchange for their completed survey you’ll see a greater response rate. Inexpensive gift ideas include: exclusive webinar access,
discount coupons, or a special report.
Don’t be shy about your quiz. After all, you’re working hard to build your community and
serve your members. That’s something you should be proud of, so don’t be afraid to talk up your quiz and let people know about it!
Journal Your Thoughts
1. When will you open and close your quiz?
2. Who will you ask to help you promote your new quiz?
3. What gift could you give to encourage your community to take your quiz?
What to Do with Those Amazing Answers
Before you publish your quiz and start getting responses, it’s smart to think about what you’ll do with these replies. Without a plan in place, you may be overwhelmed by
dozens of different ideas from your participants.
Gather Your Responses
Start by collecting the data in one central place. If you used Survey Monkey or another
online service for your quiz, then the data will be stored on their servers. You should be
able to read it by logging into your account.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
If you used a WordPress plugin, then the responses probably went to your email
address. To keep these messages from getting lost in your inbox, try using a label or
putting the messages in the same folder. Use a descriptive name like, ‘Baby Blanket Pricing Quiz’. This will help you later when you’re sorting through the answers.
Sort the Data
Look for trends and
bundle replies that share
common ideas together.
For example, if many of
your participants said
they’d like an option to coach with you then this
shows a real need in your
community.
You can use the answers
to initiate a fresh brain
dump and create a plan
for future content. Look for
ideas that can be turned
into free and premium
content that will ultimately
be included in a product.
Follow Up with Participants
Make it clear up front that participants will also be added to your mailing list.
Formidable Forms or JotForm can be set up to do it for you. You can send the user to
an email list automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand.
But you can go farther. Someone just shared their opinions with you. Do you think
they’re warm to the idea of hearing what you think about them? You bet!
Hopefully, your survey form sent them a ‘thank you’ email. That email can be warm, personal and invite further contact. That’s great – it’s a start, but you can do more. You can personally follow up or have a trusted virtual assistant do it for you.
Copyright 2017 jamsandscones.com
You can write and thank them for something specific they’ve shared. If you have an idea or product offering that might benefit them, then let the participant know that. They’ll
appreciate that
you reach out.
But stay
personal here.
Don’t create copy or try to
sell them.
Instead, write in
your personal
style and invite
action.
Expressing your
passion for the
opportunity to
serve is
engaging.
Also, feel free
to ask them
clarifying
questions. If
they shared
something
intriguing but
you’d like to know more, ask. They’ll love that you care enough to follow up.
When it comes to creating and launching a quiz, don’t make it a one-time gig. Regularly
quiz your community so you can make sure your content and your products are hitting
the right target.
Journal Your Thoughts
1. How are you organizing the answers you received from the quiz?
2. What surprised you the most about what participants told you?
3. What will you do with the information you learned? How will you use it to grow your
business?
