When it comes to generating leads for your business, there are almost too many routes to go down. Two of the most popular ones are video mini-courses and quizzes, for good reason. Both create really powerful lead magnets – but in very different ways.
The decision whether to choose a video mini-course or a quiz will depend on your specific business, what your goals are, and your audience’s preferences.
To help you decide which format is right for you, let’s delve into the pros and cons of each to clarify your decision-making… and get you high-quality leads.
What are your lead generation goals?
Before you start any lead generation campaign using any lead magnet, you need to start by setting your goals. What do you want to achieve with this campaign?
- Find better quality leads and disqualify people unlikely to convert
For example, if your current lead conversion rate is low, you set a target of increasing lead conversion by 30% in the next quarter. As well as finding the perfect customers, you need to use your lead magnet to disqualify people unlikely to turn into paying customers at the top-of-the-funnel, lead magnet stage.
- Boost brand awareness
For example, if you’re looking to move into a new market your first aim is to increase your brand awareness in this new target area.
- Get customer feedback
For example, if you’re choosing between 2 possible new features to go into development, ask your customers before you invest any resources. Get that product-market fit evidence – down to the fine detail – before you even produce a prototype.
- Deliver excellent customer service at every touchpoint
For example, you want to know how your customers feel about their online shopping experience with you because you’ve noticed a recent increase in clients dropping off before they reach the till. You need to find out where the exact stumbling block is, so you can smooth it out for them.
Once you’ve established your lead generation goals within your business strategy, you can get into the specifics of each lead magnet campaign. Whether you’re using a video mini-course, a quiz, or any other kind of lead magnet, hyper-focus is the key to success.
One lead magnet with one CTA, leading directly to one main offer.
What are the benefits of using video mini-courses for lead generation?
A video mini-course is a series of short lessons to achieve a laser-focused learning objective. You might be sharing knowledge, a physical skill, or the application of information to a specific context. It’s designed so your audience can do whatever ‘it’ is by the end of your course.
Usually, a video mini course is a maximum of a few hours long, divided up into more manageable shorter videos. You might decide to deliver these altogether, over days, or a couple of weeks.
You can also include additional learning materials, like work booklets or quizzes, that boost audience engagement and increase your juicy data insights.
A video mini-course can attract leads in different ways, to support different products and services. The most obvious one is to drive sign-ups to a longer, paid-for course. You can refine your upcoming course with the data insights from your mini-course to make sure it’s exactly what your audience needs on launch day.
But there are many different types of free video mini-courses that can be used to kickstart successful lead generation in a variety of ways. A crucial element is tightly tying your video mini-course lead magnet to your main offer.
Video mini-course example
Imagine you’re a car mechanic…
Alongside all your usual services, you’ve created a long course called ‘How to take care of your first car’ that you want to sell.
You’ve already got your free video mini-course right there! Just take the lesson called ‘How to change a tyre’ and make that the offer on your longer course homepage. You might decide to chop it into even shorter videos and release them over a week, like ‘The tools you need for this job’, ‘What causes a flat tyre?’, and ‘Why you can’t drive with a flat tyre’.
You’ll attract 2 different types of audience here – those who just want to know how to change a tyre and others who want to know how to look after their car properly, are considering investing in your longer course, and want to try out your quality and style.
What’s in it for you?
You expand your email list of people with cars – and both potential audiences definitely have cars!
All of these potential leads need a mechanic at least once a year, and now you’ve started a relationship with them. Regular, personalised email sequences will keep you top-of-mind when the MOT comes round again.
AND, you’ll start a steady flow of people signing up to pay for your longer course.
Pros of using video mini-courses
As you can see from our example, using a video mini-course offers plenty of benefits, including:
- High perceived value
Video mini-courses are often perceived to have higher perceived value than other types of lead magnets because they solve an immediate problem, quickly – and for free!
A specific learning target is set and hit by the end of a very short, precise learning journey. The high value is from the built-in, quick win. You want to do the thing, invest a small amount of time, you can do the thing!
- Inclusivity
Videos include people with a preference for audio and visual learning, unlike text-based lead magnet formats like downloadable one-pagers.
- Showcasing your expertise
Teaching others what you know demonstrates your level of expertise. Pinpointing a specific pain point and showing your audience how to resolve it with your tried and tested process is very powerful. It cements your reputation as a key person of influence and generates trust in your authority in the field.
- Increased interaction
You’re talking to your ideal clients directly through the screen. This is more than just sharing knowledge, they’re getting some time with you, seeing and hearing how you communicate, feeling all those non-verbal cues – building a stronger connection.
You can enhance this even more by including additional interactive elements within your video mini-course – like quizzes, checklists, and tasks. Better for your users, and more juicy data for you.
- Pre-qualify leads
If someone’s invested time and effort into taking your video mini-course, it’s a pretty strong signal that they’re interested in your paid offerings. They’re definitely further down the funnel than someone who’s just added your downloadable to their TBR pile.
You can strategically place other assets within your video course to finely tune that lead pre-qualification even more, like a waitlist or quiz.
- Repurposing versatility
The videos can be repurposed for other platforms, such as social media snippets, YouTube content, or as part of a larger course offering. You can also turn the same content into other assets, like a blog, report, guide, webinar… whatever you can think of!
- Scalability
You can create as many video mini-courses as you want, so you can make them hyper-focused on your different audience segments. And there’s no maximum number of people that can take your mini-courses.
When you build a video mini-course on a platform like ScoreApp, they’ll sit and generate amazing warm leads forever, without any extra input from you!
- Upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Taking your mini-course is a strong signal of interest in your product or service. And, within the course, you’ll position your main offer as the most logical next step in their development.
You can leverage this high engagement even more by including upselling and cross-selling options – which ScoreApp is a great tool for.
- Create a hub for community
People often flourish within a learning community. So make it easy for your mini-course participants to talk to each other with hashtags, forums, and discussions.
Not only does this generate a really positive vibe around your brand, but it also strengthens emotional connections between course takers and your business. A happy community is brilliant social proof that other ideal clients can trust your brand.
- Actionable data
Your video mini-course gives you a multitude of metrics about your audience. For example, tracking progress in ScoreApp can tell you things like where any dropoff points are, how long people are spending on the course, and completion rates.
Inside the ScoreApp data analytics features, you get specifics like this alongside your lead generation essentials, like conversion rates. You’re already imagining how you can use it all, aren’t you?
Cons of using video mini-courses
To give you a balanced overview, here are some potential downsides to creating a video mini-course:
- High production cost
Low production value just isn’t acceptable. Creating high-quality video content requires time, effort and budget… From scripting to shooting and editing, professional video production can be expensive – particularly if you’re buying equipment or hiring the right professionals.
Bear in mind that it might be more expensive than setting up a quiz. Luckily, if you choose to use ScoreApp to host your video mini-quiz, our monthly fees are affordable and great value.
- Technical challenges
If you’re new to video production, there’s a steep learning curve involved in mastering the necessary software and techniques. Video hosting, file size, and compatibility issues are all challenges to overcome to ensure a good user experience.
ScoreApp’s got your back with all of these features being easy to use, so you don’t have to worry about the technical aspects.
- Effectiveness relies on people completing the course
If someone who signs up for your video course only watches the first one, they only get one video’s worth of value. High drop-off rates kill the effectiveness of video mini-courses.
You need to monitor your metrics and feedback carefully so you hit the sweet spot of engagement – in terms of length, content and style. Use ScoreApp’s data and reporting features to stay in the loop with how many people complete the course.
- Requires follow-up
Your video mini-course is only the start of your sales funnel – it needs a strong follow-up strategy to turn your learners into buyers.
With ScoreApp, you can integrate your chosen email marketing platform and leverage email automation to make following up a breeze.
What are the benefits of quizzes as lead magnets?
Scored quizzes are all about your audience, by definition. You provide the questions and they answer.
It’s immediately interactive and completed in real-time – there’s no ‘saving for later’.
When potential leads invest their time, thoughts, and emotions, in return, they get personalised insights that help them solve a specific problem or meet a particular need instantly.
ScoreApp simplifies the process immeasurably with a remarkable range of ready-to-go quiz templates.
For example:
- The Firm Foundations Marketing Scorecard: Perfect for marketing consultants to assess the strength and visibility of their brand’s identity.
- Leadership Skills Evaluator template: Great for business coaches to help their clients identify their leadership style.
- Relationship Scorecard: Ideal for relationship therapists to help their clients self-evaluate their current relationship and identify where things are looking shaky.
Quizzes give you an absolute wealth of reliable, actionable data that you can use to make business-critical decisions.
Choose one of our quiz templates and you can get started in only a few minutes!
Pros of using quiz lead magnets
As you can see, we love quizzes for lead generation, and there are so many ways you can use them depending on your specific business, products and services, and your goals.
Benefits of using quiz lead magnets include:
- High engagement
If someone has clicked on the quiz link, they’re already interacting! As long as the content is right for your audience, a quiz keeps them engaged because it deals with an issue that’s important to them.
Quizzes are not passive ways to consume information – a quiz immediately involves participants and the instant personalised feedback is a great motivator.
- Quizzes are easy to share
If you find something useful or fun, you want to share it with people you know. Good quizzes are easy for your audience to recommend and share on any platform. This increases the number of participants, warm leads and general buzz around your offer.
And now you’ve got them off the social media channel where they found you and onto your email list. Time to build that direct relationship!
- Pre-qualify leads without a sales call
With quiz lead magnets, there’s a great opportunity to include a small range of pre-qualifying questions in your quiz.
Questions like ‘What budget do you have for X?’ and ‘Do you have X, Y and Z already in place?’ This saves you an immense amount of time arranging sales calls or chasing people who aren’t ready to convert. Quizzes can help you to lead to a higher sales conversion rate overall!
- Easy audience segmentation
You can use the answers to the quiz questions to group your audience into categories. This segmentation allows you to personalise all follow-up emails by different client streams that turn even more leads into sales!
- Live data about your audience
If you don’t measure performance, you can’t know or prove the success of your quiz. Detailed quiz metrics analysis goes way beyond proving your campaign’s ROI.
This valuable data pinpoints areas to strengthen your marketing and lead generation strategies – as well as informs product development. And it’s all based on what your audience actually thinks.
Cons of using quiz magnets
These things might be holding you back from creating a quiz lead magnet:
- Price of setting up a quiz
To produce quizzes to a high standard, you need specialist quiz-building software. The cost of this can be prohibitive for some businesses and they can require a lot of time investment to figure out their technicalities.
These are two of the main issues embedded into ScoreApp’s design – ease of use and affordability. With ScoreApp, you can get started for FREE and then upgrade your plan as and when you need to.
- Dropout rate
You’re relying on your audience to complete the quiz to get the full value. It’s likely that you’ll include pre-qualification and segmentation questions, alongside all the content-focused ones. It’s important to strike the right balance here, as some participants may give up on these questions.
- Appropriateness of the quiz topic
You might not think that a quiz is the right type of lead magnet for your industry. However, we have a range of businesses successfully using ScoreApp to generate leads – the key is finding a topic that’s helpful and worthwhile for your audience.
If you’re feeling stuck for ideas, here is our ultimate guide to creating a quiz lead magnet.
- Going beyond entertainment
Platforms that only offer personality-style quizzes are great for entertaining your audience. But you need to get strategic to make sure this translates into sales.
Remember how we asked you to define your goals earlier? Go back to this before you get started – no matter which type of lead magnet you choose.
- Too simplistic to generate value
Some quizzes operate at a superficial level, meaning they generate leads but don’t support your position as an expert, or really educate your audience. This can tarnish your brand reputation and prevent building long-term relationships.
ScoreApp’s data-rich insights avoid this issue by giving you the information you need to know how your audience feels – and be the conversation that starts a satisfying relationship for you both.
- Quizzes need follow-up
Your quiz needs to be one part of a full lead generation process – it can’t do all the work by itself. Turning quiz participants into actual sales requires personalised email nurture campaigns – which can be time-consuming and tricky to create.
Luckily for you, ScoreApp integrates with many of the popular email marketing tools so you can create automated campaigns easily.
Which lead magnet format is right for you: Mini-course or quiz?
Strawberries and cream, Noel and Liam, salt and vinegar… they’re all great on their own, but even better together!
And your ‘mini-course or quiz’ dilemma is the same. It’s not a binary situation. Sometimes combining the two is the right answer, and sometimes they’ll work better by themselves.
You need to consider:
- Your overall aim for this particular lead generation campaign
- Where your customers are on their path to purchase
- Your audiences’ preferred method of consuming content
There’s no ‘right’ number of lead magnets – just the right ones for your audience and your campaign. Whichever format you’re creating, give yourself a huge advantage by using ScoreApp because you get:
- AI quiz builder with fully customisable templates that include question types and category scoring.
- Powerful, personalised results delivered directly to your audience – incredible instant value
- Landing page templates designed for maximum conversions
- Tracking and reporting analytics to inform business-critical decisions with reliable data – you can literally see everything!
- Seamless integration with your favourite tools
Take full control of your lead generation today and create your first ScoreApp video mini-course or quiz for free!
