I’m guessing you’ve seen one of the hundreds of pseudo-personality-tests out there on Facebook? But did you ever consider using one for your own business?
- What Sex in the City character are you?
- What superhero would you be?
- What emotional intelligence score do you have?
These are the most basic forms of scorecard marketing. We give a prospect a set of questions which is longer than a typical lead generation form, and in return they get some instant feedback on an aspect of their personality or abilities.
In a B2B scenario, we might be asking about their company.
These quizzes are designed to be relatively quick to answer, and give a simplistic answer – usually just choosing one character, or a single score as the result.
- You are Samantha
- You are Wonder Woman
- You have the emotional intelligence of Patrick Bateman
The aim of these quizzes is usually to gather a large database of prospects to market to based on the outcome.
For example, OI once ran one for Corgi Classics – a model toy car company – with the question “which James Bond are you?”. Each respondent got a James Bond actor, such as Sean Connery, and a little description about why they were like them. We also reminded of the car the drove, from the vintage Aston Martin with the bulletproof rear window, to the underwater Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved me.
It was spectacularly successful in converting to sales, but also in getting itself shared and generating more free leads than the original paid ad campaign brought in. I’ll go into the reasons for this later.
Adding more dimensions
As a lead generation strategy, the most famous bit of scorecard marketing of recent years was run by the Cambridge Analytica team who used and abused Facebook data to build huge audiences for political campaigns.
Behind the scandal of data breaches, what hasn’t been spoken about much is the kind of data that they gathered on the original individuals, before using Facebook to find their friends.
Cambridge Analytica used a common, and publicly available personality test called “OCEAN” or the “Big 5” personality test. Several free versions are available around the web and for fun (we’re data geeks and proud of it) we built a simple one here using some free tools.Take the OCEAN Personality Test Here
The OCEAN test doesn’t just give you one result, it gives you 5.
You get a score for each of the 5 dominant personality traits which are:
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- SOMTHING
- Neurotocism
You typically have one dominant trait, but it also recognises that you are stronger or weaker on other measures.
The personality types can predict a whole set of behaviours from divorce rates to leadership skills, happiness and well-being. Political leanings are just one of the things we have learned have are related to these personality types.
So, we have a set of respondent (prospects) a set of data on them, and different campaigns we can target them with depending on whether we know they like James Bond or Donald Trump.
How can we use this in our own marketing?
Creating our own scorecard
We can create our own scorecards by creating a set of questions about the prospect, and grouping them into a simpler set of scores.
For example, a personal trainer might ask questions about:
- Exercise frequency
- Exercise intensity
- Flexibility
- Nutrition
- Rest & recovery
Imagine the scores which might come back for yourself on each of these 5 factors.
Most people will have one clear winner and one where they are doing badly.
For me, Excercise intensity would be ok, but Nutrition leaves something to be desired.
Knowing that you are doing well on one score is a nice feeling, you feel like you’ve got something back for the effort of answering the questions, but now there’s a nagging voice at the back of your head.
“You should really sort your diet out Steve. What’s the point in killing yourself in the gym then filling up on pizza 3 nights a week.”
This is the magic in scorecards which score on more than one dimension.
An answer to a quiz is one thing, but exposing a weak spot is way more powerful to give some a reason to act. Typically people will work harder to avoid pain than they will to achieve a more positive gain.
A quiz result which gives you a nice warm feeling inside, does have a place though, and it comes in useful if you want your scorecard quiz to get shared as widely as the Cambridge Analytics ones did.
“Viral” content – The Holy Grail of marketing
Let me get this straight – I’m not a fan of the term “viral”, except in zombie armageddon horror movies.
It’s been overused by marketing agencies for decades and used to sell campaigns which are barely interesting, let alone infectious. Very few people understand what makes a piece of content go viral, and even fewer have a brand they can apply those rules to without looking like they’re trying too hard.
There’s also a huge element of hit and miss in what a core group of influencers will or won’t give their stamp of approval to.
If you want to go deep into this, I strongly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”, but here is the golden rule as far as I’ve been able to figure it out from watching hundreds of campaigns flop or fly.
People will share things that make them look cool.
There, that’s it.
You need a positive result for someone to want to share it, or they have to think that they are showing themselves to be cool or ahead of the curve by sharing something brand new.
Take my James Bond example. Everyone has a favourite, but really there’s nothing bad about being compared to James Bond. Even the Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton versions. People will share that.
They won’t share “Your business strength is process engineering.”
It’s dull, even for process engineers.
So, be realistic about whether trying to add a referral mechanism is genuinely going to work for your brand, or whether it will make you look like a nerdy kid trying to hang with the cool girls to gate a date to the prom.
Building your own scorecard
A scorecard marketing campaign has 5 key parts to it
1) A Landing page
This can be quite simple and just gives the benefit to the prospect of completing the quiz. Sending someone directly to the questions can be daunting so this will help sell them on the effort they need to make, and set expectations about how long the quiz will take them. 50 question quizzes are quite common.
2) The questions
These usually require a yes/no response, or possibly a set of statements with a 1-5 scale of agree / disagree.
Each question will give a result behind the scenes that either adds to or detracts from one of the dimensions you have chosen to report on.
3) The algorithm.
This sounds complicated but isn’t really.
All you are doing here is totalling the scores for each dimension, and maybe turning them into a percentage.
You now have 5 scores which you can pass into…
4) The report.
A chart of some sort is essential to show the highs and lows of their report.
Then some text content to explain each of the dimensions and how scoring high or low might affect their future.
The report should finish will a call-to-action to find out more about working on their weaker dimension, or capitalising further on their strengths.
5) The email
Because this is a marketing exercise, you did gather their email address right? The email should point back to their copy of the report and repeat the call-to-action.
This is your first opportunity to start talking to them about how they can working specifically on their weakest dimension. Depending on the capacity in your marketing content, you now have the data to drive a well segmented email campaign, and to fuel other channels such as Facebook ads.
Getting started
The most demanding part of the process is coming up with a set of questions that will highlight the individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
If you have a good knowledge of the problems in your market, and how you can help your prospects you have all you need.
Start with a list of 30-50 things you can help your customers with at a very granular level.
If you need help with that, drop us a line.