There’s a reason your Facebook News Feed is full of quiz-result posts from your friends and family.

Personality assessments are fun.

  • Which Harry Potter character are you?
  • What will you look like when you’re 90 years old?
  • Where should you live?
  • What’s your crystal? Flower? Color? Perfect career? Most compatible dog breed?
  • There are more quizzes like these online today than you can shake a stick at.

But if you think personality assessments are purely for entertainment value, you should think again.

Personality assessments have a ton of value as marketing tools. Value for both the user and your business.

These assessments are fun, sure. They’re also a very low-commitment interaction with your business. On a subconscious level, these assessments “train” users to see interacting with you as pleasurable and easy.

Personality assessments also help people self-identify. They tap into that undying fascination with trying to understand who we are as people. “In our age, we’re constantly reflecting on who we are, and technology has really changed the way we interact,” says Denise Friedman in the New York Post article Why online quizzes are taking over your Facebook feed.

From a content marketing perspective, assessments increase sharing. A lot. BuzzSumo data reveals that the average quiz gets shared 1,900 times.

Quizzes get shared even more than articles. In fact, the number one story in The New York Times in 2013 was actually a quiz! And quizzes have gained even more popularity since then.

There’s more marketing power behind personality assessments than social sharing, however. With this tool, you can trigger the psychological principle of “commitment and consistency.” By using your knowledge of your audience to create quiz results that make sense for user and flatter or compliment them, two things happen:

  1. The quiz result reinforces a belief the user already has about themselves. As any seasoned salesperson will tell you, getting the customer to say “yes” to something — even something as simple as a quiz result — is an important step forward in the sales process.
  2. It aligns the user and the company in a subtle yet powerful way. The user feels like the company knows them, and they’re more likely to pay attention to what the company is saying … and selling.

This all starts, of course, by knowing your customers. Create quiz results that reflect the most favorable personality traits of your target audience and you’ll be well on your way to marketing success using personality quizzes.

Here’s a great example from Influitive:

My quiz result was “Content King/Queen,” and the summary included this statement that made me proud to be the queen: “Your wordsmithing skills always have your team in awe (and asking you for help with their writing).” Other results include “Data Hound,” “Social Butterfly,” and “Creative Mastermind” — all of which have flattering summaries that reinforce positive beliefs the user likely has about themselves.

After the personality summary, the user is invited to download an ebook about increasing customer advocacy. That invitation (the call to action) is written in a way that speaks directly to that personality type. Here’s the CTA for the “Content King/Queen” personality type:

Ready to try personality quizzes in your marketing? You can squeeze a tremendous amount of marketing value out of interactive personality assessments in 3 ways.

Send Predetermined, Targeted Content

Create a unique piece of content for each personality result, and deliver that content to the user automatically at the end of the assessment.

This requires that the user share their email address with you, of course, which has value in and of itself. Beyond that, though, this targeted content feels more personalized for your audience. It helps you build rapport with them and zero in on their specific issues.

Sending this content also opens up a deeper dialogue between you and the quiz-taker.

Finally, sending targeted content is one more opportunity to get people sharing your content.

Think of a one-page PDF with more detailed personality results that gets automatically sent to the user via your marketing automation tool. If the user is excited about the results, he’ll forward that on to friends and family.

Yes, the instant gratification of immediate quiz results is a powerful thing. Definitely give the user their result right away if that makes sense for your business. But also offer them a more detailed, in-depth, and/or high-value piece of content in exchange for their email address.

See how Sally Hogshead does this with her infamous How to Fascinate Test.

This personality test reveals how the world sees you. You receive your results right away, which are your “primary Advantage” and your “personality Archetype.” After the quiz, however, you are invited to sign up for a more detailed personality profile. This is a nice one-two punch of instant gratification and high-value, gated content.

Use Results to Improve Your Buyer Personas

Personality test-takers must answer a series of questions in order to get their results – which is a huge opportunity for you to learn more about your audience.

Quizzes are unique pieces of content in that you are not pushing your knowledge or viewpoint on the user. Rather, the user is telling you about themselves, and initiating the dialogue.

Think about it.

Users are willingly – happily! – sharing their personal information with you.

This insight is gold for your marketing strategy.

Track the popularity of certain answers, and track the frequency of the personality-type results.

Soon you’ll see trends emerge which help you paint a more detailed picture of your audience.

Add those details to your buyer personas to give your marketing and sales teams valuable insight they can use to build more genuine, long-lasting relationships with target buyers.

Generate Leads for Specific Offers

Another way you can use the results from personality assessments is by creating specific offers for each personality type. Another way to approach this would be to create personality results that align with your existing offers. (The former feels a bit more genuine to this humble copywriter.)

If you took the first piece of advice in this article and gathered email addresses in order to send targeted content to users, you have a segmented sales lead list ready to go.

Create specific offers for each personality type, then send those offers to the appropriate segments. Those offers will be better received because they were purpose-built for the audiences you’re sending them to. Also, because you’ve already opened the dialogue with the targeted content, your sales email is less likely to get thrown in the trash or marked as spam.

Subtler than sending an offer, you can also use assessment results to guide users to content that fits their interest. Whether you decide to gather email addresses with your quiz or not, you can easily provide links to related content alongside the personality results. This content can be other articles, sure – or it can be product or service recommendations.

Personalized product recommendations convert users to paying customers 355% better than non-personalized recommendations.

That number is nothing to sneeze at!

Don’t Just Tell Users Who They Are – Invite Them to Tell YOU

Personality assessments are clearly great marketing tools. They’re fun for users and provide insight to marketers.

The three tips in this article will help you squeeze even more value out of the personality quizzes you’re developing for your audience.

Remember – a quiz helps the user learn who they are, but the results also tell you a lot about who your audience is, and opens up an invaluable dialogue.