270: Boost Your Marketing: Use Outgrow to Create Calculators and Viral Quizzes with Randy Rayess

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show episode 270 boost your marketing. Use outgrow to create calculators and viral quizzes with Randy Reyes. Hey everybody, and welcome back to the program. Our guest today is Randy Reyes, and he's the co founder of outgrow, which is a growth marketing platform where any marketer can build highly converting calculators and viral quizzes to increase customer engagement and boost demand generation. Now, Randy is passionate about growth hacking, content marketing and personalized marketing, and he also co founded venture pact and previously worked in private equity at Silver Lake, partners in machine learning and in payments, awesome stuff. So Randy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I am glad that you're here. And so, you know, it sounds like you do lots of cool, interesting stuff, calculators, viral quizzes and stuff like that. And so I mean, in the companies you have and the services you provide, what makes you stand out compared to other people who do these kinds of similar things?

Randy Randess 0:58 Sure, I think the key premise, and the key differentiating factor, is that outgrow is made for is for the marketer, and so the tool is built so that a marketer can easily create these types of interactive experiences, and the interactive experiences that They launch with our tool come pre optimized and designed for to convert, right? So it's for to get the user to convert and to better engage with the user. And so that, I think is the foundation of the company, is that the future of marketing is going to be more personalized and more interactive, and that's going to be kind of a fundamental component to how everything works. So so those are all things that are that kind of help differentiate what we do,

Robert Plank 1:49 awesome. And this, this whole idea of having, like, the, you know, the quiz, I've seen it more and more, and it seems like, you know, in the olden days, it felt like, you know, that was where you could just, you know, crank out some kind of silly article or some blog post every day, and then it seems like, over the last few years, it's kind of turned into now to kind of get noticed, or now to get to be, like, really authoritative, and Google, you have to have like, this super long blog post. And then I'm all I'm seeing now that there's like, the rise of these sort of tools, like these, these calculators and quizzes. And, I mean, are you kind of seeing the same thing? I mean, is it a matter of, like, is this like, a nice to have, or does everyone, like, kind of need this to compete in the future?

Randy Randess 2:27 Yeah, I think everyone's gonna need it. And the reason is that if you as a user just think of, think if you take off your marketing hat and you just put on act as a consumer, what you're gonna care about is you care about the ability to the ability to get your answer your your answer to your question that's relevant to you as quickly as possible, right, right? And when you go into a site, when you go into a site, it should use the site should be able to answer that question for you. And so what happens, though, is that you end up with, you know, these very long blog posts, which are great, but as a standalone entity, it may or long ebooks. It's just too long for me to figure out what how that what that answer is, and how it's relevant to me. Whereas, if you create an experience, which home should you buy and you ask me questions about where I work, about how many kids I have, about where I want to send them to school, about where my spouse works, all these questions now allow you to pray for me with a recommendation that's much more personalized and relevant, awesome,

Robert Plank 3:37 so people don't have to sift so it's almost like we were saying that, Like, you know, the old way was to put out a bunch of crap, and then the newer way is to, like, have some longer content. But then it sounds like what you're saying is, the problem with that more long form content is people have to kind of sift around and say, you know, this isn't for me, or that part to me. And so this example of, like, what, what home should you buy? So, like, kind of, what are we talking about here? Like, you said that, you know, people can put in, like, you know, like, are you married, or what's your income, or do you have kids? And that kind of narrows down what kind of house they buy. But when we're talking about, like, quizzes, like, how, like, how many questions is a typical quiz that we're talking like, what kind of time commitment will people be putting into this?

Randy Randess 4:18 Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to call up one of the previous things that you just mentioned that. So the the long form content is great, and you should have long form content for your SEO. But what we're seeing people do is they compliment a long piece of content. They compliment a long piece of content by adding a by adding a quiz. So if you have a long blog post about how to buy, how to buy legal services, alright, to find a great you know law firm, that's great, but then you compliment it with which you know, which law firm makes sense for you. You. Right? And then you have a recommendation for that, or how much can you save in legal fees by going with our law firm? Awesome. And so now you're complimenting that with it, and that works well. Your second question was about, what is the ideal quiz or calculator? And so you know, B to B versus B to C quizzes vary the B to C quiz, you generally want it to keep it, keep it relatively short and fun. You have gifts in it. You kind of keep it engaging. And it's usually, you know, four to seven questions. The B to B quiz are usually five to nine. They can be a bit more informative, like, how much does my mobile app cost? Does it cost me to build a mobile app? You're gonna have nine to you that one might have nine questions, might have 12 questions, but like, you're giving them an estimate on a mobile app. So that's gonna take a bit longer. So I think that's kind of how I would look at it.

Robert Plank 5:56 Okay, cool and and so, so pretty good guidelines there. And just sort of, so we can sort of get, get, like, a visual of what this whole quiz thing is. Do you have any, like, URLs that we can all kind of go to to see one of these quizzes in action?

Randy Randess 6:13 Sure, yeah. So you're saying which, which links to go to,

Robert Plank 6:17 yeah, like, if there's just a link just to, kind of, like, see a really good example or a case study of this? Yeah.

Randy Randess 6:23 So we have, we have case studies on our blog, and we also, like, so if you go on outgrow.co over there, if you scroll down, you'll have three live examples that you can click on. And then if you scroll down further, there'll be a bunch of blog posts and articles and resources which you can click on. And then we also have our own calculators that help highlight the value of our tool. As I said, we kind of drink our own, our own Kool Aid there. So yeah. So those would be the good ways to do it. And of course, on outgrow.co we have our you can just sign up there and you can create a free trial. So everyone would be able to get a free trial, and they can for seven days, they can just try out the tool and build an experience and see how it works. And there's no credit card required. So we have that to kind of get people in the door and trying it out, because a lot of people haven't even actually launched calculators or quizzes before, and so it's good for them just to go in and see the experience, right and

Robert Plank 7:26 and I'm on outgrow.co right now, and I think the the if I'm getting this right, the the sample quizzes are about two thirds of the way down the page, and I'm seeing like, what kind of engineer could you be, and how much should you pay for a video campaign, And what is your risk of getting a heart disease? And what's really cool about this, just from, like, you know, seeing it for the first time, and seeing just a screenshot, it looks like these quiz there's like, there's ways to make the quizzes look completely different, like the engineer one looks like, there's like pictures to click on, and then the video campaign, when it looks like a sort of a multiple choice kind of thing. And then the heart disease is kind of like a, a, what would you call like, like a mad libs, like a fill in the blank words that you can kind of, kind of switch that around so that. So this is pretty cool. This is like, changing my like, what I usually think of for for a quiz, because usually I think of a quiz, I think it's like a, you know, like something you'd see on like, Buzzfeed where, like, you have to, like, you know, answer one of four questions to kind of page through. But what's cool about this is, like, these quizzes, they look awesome. And it also looks like there's, like, a there's very little clicking like, it looks like all the, you know, kind of plowing through the questions can be done like, usually just on one page, and people won't have to kind of click through each and every step. It looks like, exactly,

Randy Randess 8:40 yeah, we there's a few things we've done to optimize for conversion. So we have different templates that they just choose. The user will just choose a template based on so they come pre optimized, and then they just click through. Then once they've created the marketer, once they've created the tool, it's very easy, because it's all pre optimized. You just choose the template, those templates for the end user taking the calculator quiz, they're going to have a lot of things that's going to help them convert right? So you have automatic progression through questions. You have the way it's optimized specifically for mobile, and the way it's designed for mobile to make it easy to tap and move forward. So there's things that you can do there to really help move users down through the funnel, through the through the quiz or calculator, and help them convert,

Robert Plank 9:28 awesome, cool so, so the the temperature are kind of designed for to to convert, designed for people to to finish those quizzes. And so, I mean, what, what sort of, what did these quizzes hook up to? Because, like, you know, when I've seen, I've seen, like, a couple of these sort of quiz things like, you know, way, way in the past and back in the day, like they, they weren't, they definitely weren't as advanced as this tool, but, but I've seen things where, like, um, you know, somebody like, takes a test and then it says, well, to get the answers, you have to enter your email address to get it. And it's sort of like, like, a. A micro commitment kind of thing where, like, they already committed to answering the test, so they might as well do that one extra bit the end of entering their email address. And I'm seeing on your screenshots that you can also kind of get the get the quiz answers, and, like, see how people scored, or see what the survey results were, or see, like, how long people could or how long people went to the quiz, and so, I mean, what sort of things does this sort of hook into in that sense?

Randy Randess 10:28 Yeah, so I think, so, I think the key thing is, you, you're the way, the way that each quiz or calculator works is that you have the Legion form usually shown right before the results, and so. So then what happens is you're able to convert people right? So you want to if in a B to B scenario, putting Legion form right before the results is great, and most people will do that in a B to C scenario, if you put the Legion form right before the results it can push people away sometimes, because it's only four or five questions, and it's fun. So there, what people usually do is they put it on the results page. So what they end up doing is they end up providing an offer on the results page.

Robert Plank 11:18 So what you're saying is that the quizzes don't just have to be for lead generation. You can have based on the results of the quiz. Can you send them to one offer if they answered certain things, and a different offer if they gave different answers?

Randy Randess 11:34 Yes, oh yes, yes, you can do that. So it's but that's like a custom CTA. So So what you basically are doing is you're saying, if people come in and they get a perfect but let's say you do a graded quiz, how much do you know about you know, finance, and they do really good job. You might want to send them to a different link at the end than someone who's done a really bad job. If they've done a really bad job, you send them to educational material. If they've done a really good job, then you send them Okay, now here's some more information for like experts on this. So you would send them differently.

Robert Plank 12:12 Awesome. So that's pretty cool. And then so people can use these quizzes for for lead generation and to send them to different offers. Are there any other sort of uses or calls to action that people can put at the end there?

Randy Randess 12:26 Yes. So I'll give you examples of good, good things to include there. There's a few tricks, right? So let's say you're trying to get some. Let's say you're trying to get some. Basically, a call schedule, right? That's a lot of a lot of people say, I want to get a call schedule. In that case, what you're going to do is you're going to say, Okay, you have I'm going to ask them for times that they're usually available for call. I'm going to get their lead data, and then maybe at the end, I'm going to send them a white paper that gives them some overview on something, or at the end, I want to give them a another some people will do like another quiz. Some people will provide them with an offer, right? You're going to enter, if you do this, you're going to save 10% and then the other thing you would do is you could say, oh, actually, you're gonna do, you're gonna enter a raffle, like a sweepstakes, to win a signed COVID Brian jersey. And so you're basically, you kind of look at the things, there's like offers, there's sweepstakes, like raffles, and then there's something of value, like a free consultation, a call, a white paper, an e book, something that you think is relevant and direct, specifically relevant to what they've provided. So those would all be good things,

Robert Plank 13:53 awesome. So so people can use these, like you said, for offers, for sweepstakes, or to give away a kind of freebie. And so, you know, you have all these sort of examples and case studies where there's different quizzes, like, there's, there's like, a quiz for, like, if people have a risk for, like, Zika virus and stuff. So in your kind of, in your experience and your travels, have you ever come across sort of a topic that was kind of difficult or maybe, like, too dull of a topic to turn into a quiz.

Randy Randess 14:25 Well, so if it's very dull, usually they'll do like, usually they usually what they'll do is they'll say they'll create a calculator instead of a quiz, right? So like a fun quiz, like, you know, which Disney Princess Are you or whatever. That's not that relevant to a manufacturing company or to like a construction company, but what a construction company would do is they might give you know, how much does it cost to construct or to renovate or to replace or to repair? Or this piece of your home or your apartment. So, you know, you don't have to only look through it from the glance of a quiz you have calculated any recommendations, right? What type, if you're a roofing company, what type of roof should I get? Right? Oh, that's and so you might not have a, you know, you could have a fun quiz like, you know, which roofing, which celebrity roof style best matches your your style or something. But, you know, you could do that as well. So you got to be creative. And, you know, some a lot of companies will work with our, the ideation team to get this kind of going awesome.

Robert Plank 15:34 And so sort of along those lines about, you know, people sometimes, you know, working with, with your team to have these quizzes that are like, you know, really, really fun, and have a good hook and get attention and stuff like that. Have you seen anyone sort of, sort of screw up the crit the quiz, and not necessarily in terms of, like, choosing a bad topic, but when it comes to, like, you know, the details of it and like the questions. Do you see anyone kind of, you know, making a quiz in a way that could be better?

Randy Randess 16:03 Yeah, there's a lot of you're saying, like, what? What are specific strategies to make the quiz more successful?

Robert Plank 16:08 Yeah? But yeah, like, for example, like, maybe, like, somebody like, makes the quiz like too long, or like too confusing, or like, in the wrong order, or something like that, or ask the wrong questions. Maybe,

Randy Randess 16:19 yes, yes. Yes, there's definitely, there's definitely, there's definitely things that they can do to improve. So I'll give you an example of the ordering point that you had, and then mistakes like people fall into. Okay, so the the ordering question, if you ask start off with a very invasive question, right? Give us your home address. That's not gonna work, because you haven't built trust with the user. And do you really need their own address? So that that's the that's the key thing there. The the other point about the the other point around Okay, strategies to make it more successful in terms of conversion. As you go through the go through the questions, what we usually say is that if you put your market research, because you have a marketing team, and then sometimes the market research team comes in and wants to ask these little more invasive questions, you shouldn't have maximum. The max amount of questions that can be market research oriented are like one to three questions. If you go beyond three questions that are market research oriented, the user is going to realize that these questions aren't that relevant. Okay, so those are things that those are things that make an impact on

Robert Plank 17:46 awesome, and as you're sort of describing this, this whole like thought process, is there a way to to see, like, the abandonment of the quiz? Like, is there a way to see if someone goes to the quiz and they maybe for they answer like, the first two questions, but then question three, like, is one of those invasive ones that, like, always gets people to drop off. Is there a way to see, like, you know, 80% of people left at Question three?

Randy Randess 18:10 Yes, yes. You basically see where the drop off is, and that gives you, it's a good point that gives you insight into if people dropped off right after question three. Something's wrong with Question four,

Robert Plank 18:21 right? Cool. So that's so that's like, a way to like, I don't know what you'd call that, but it's almost like a like, like a micro drilling down to your conversions and seeing, like, not just the, not just the conversion of like, the web page itself, but like question, the question. So you can make that that quiz. If there's like, that little like, you know, roadblock there. You can just make that quiz really easy to kind of to fly through there and so, and I'm looking at the like, the features and stuff like this, and it looks like that this pretty much hooks into like everything, like, if someone wanted to, to make it so that if they ran a quiz, if it hooked up to, like, a Google spreadsheet, or sent them a notification, or, you know, hooked up to their email list. It can do all those things, right,

Randy Randess 19:04 right? Exactly. Yeah. So what will people will do is they'll integrate it with their marketing automation tool and with their CRM. And most of the time, if a lead comes in and the question is like, when do you plan on, you know, repairing your home? And they say, the next three months, you might send that to someone to your actual CRM, someone to talk someone actually call you and talk to you if they say, Hey, I'm just kind of exploring. And maybe in a year or two, then you send them to a marketing automation, your marketing automation tool, and you put them on a lead nurturing campaign, so an email automation campaign, so you handle people differently based on the answers they've given. And so now you can much better segment and target leads. And that's why not only do convert more leads, they're just much more qualified, you know, so much more about them than their name in their email. So that's another aspect that actually really differentiates the experience.

Robert Plank 19:51 And that sounds awesome, yeah. Because like that, that way, when you segment them, you can just focus your efforts on, like, just just those warm leads, or just those hot. Needs, and kind of have your COVID, like, you know, go to a postcard campaign, or go to the autoresponder, and, like, you know, spend your time where, where there's the biggest bang for your buck. So, I mean, this looks like a pretty awesome tool here. And then, am I right? Am I correct in seeing that, uh, that, basically, you guys host it. So this will work in, like, any kind of web page, like, if it's, you know, Wordpress, if it's if it's Wix, like any web page, a quiz can be added to it. Is that, right?

Randy Randess 20:29 Yes, yes. You can embed it. You can launch it as a pop up. You can have a full page experience. So there's a you can basically put it anywhere you want. So once you've created that, you can distribute it as you wish, people in email and Facebook and social the way people use it is, they usually put the front page the welcome page, and then they link out to the calculator quiz. And then on your websites and on forums, you'd either embed it or you'd link out. So those would be the main things

Robert Plank 20:59 awesome. And so sort of, as you and I are kind of starting to wind down our conversation here, like, as far as, like, you know, outgrow, and you'd see the people using it, and, you know, like, I'm sure you're adding new things to it all the time. Is there, like, any, like, cutting edge stuff with outgrow that's like, just come out, or is coming out soon? Or maybe, like, a really cool advanced feature that maybe some of your customers, like, aren't making the best use of but they should.

Randy Randess 21:25 Can you just repeat the first part? Yeah.

Robert Plank 21:28 I mean, what are like the cutting edge features that are just coming out with outgrow or that are about to come out soon?

Randy Randess 21:35 Yeah, sure. So I'll give you an examples of some cutting edge features. Basically basically the first, the one of the key things on the results page is to be able to add an image on the results page. And so that one you could see on the outcomes page. For quizzes, you have images, you get gifts, all those things to be added to make it more engaging, we added conditional results. And so you can show different results based on people's different categories. We've added event statements so you can handle people who have diabetes and at the same time they are so they have at the same time they're a smoker. You want to handle those people differently than people who have diabetes, that are non smokers, and so you have this interaction between questions that you can now handle with our advanced formula builder. There are other things, like graphs and charts that were that those are on you're saying, in terms of roadmap, we're adding a lot more graphs and charts into our results page, so working on that, and then other things like the logic jump and being able to show different questions based on answers to previous questions. Oh, that's so you'll say, Oh, if someone says that, you can show a different question. And so we're working on making that as easy and under as understandable as possible,

Robert Plank 22:55 awesome. So it can be sort of like, like a choose your own adventure. So it's what's sort of like, maybe you could have something that's like, you know, what's your what's your health problem? And it's like, if they if one of the things is diabetes, that could open up, like, a chain of, like, a couple more questions related to that,

Randy Randess 23:10 right? Exactly, exactly, right? So if someone doesn't speak, if someone doesn't, if someone doesn't have diabetes, and you probably want to ask them all these questions about diabetes, if someone does, questions about diabetes. If someone does, then you might want to ask them a whole set of questions about

Robert Plank 23:27 diabetes. And so you'd ask you to be differently awesome. I mean, this is pretty cool, and it sounds like, and it looks like you've kind of taken this sort of, sort of simple idea that, you know, like I said, I've seen it used maybe 10 years ago, and not very well, and it's certainly been updated to the, you know, the current way that the internet is, and all these cool, amazing features. And I mean, to be honest, like you're really blowing my mind with all these kinds of possibilities, like with the graphs coming up and the if then, and like, having a certain answer if these two questions were answered, or, you know, saying this thing if this question was not answered in this way, like all kinds of really cool stuff. And it looks like just from sort of clicking around the quizzes and seeing the way that the interfaces and seeing that the images it looks like this is really newbie friendly and really easy to get started fast. But then if someone wants to jump into some of these advanced features we're talking about, then they can kind of do that. They can have it either way. They can have it the easy way get started quickly. But if they want to get fancy, they can do those fancy things as well.

Randy Randess 24:21 Right? Exactly, cool,

Robert Plank 24:23 cool, and so, so you said that the website is outgrow.co Is that correct? Yes, awesome. So everyone who's listening should go to outgrow.co right? Now, that's O, U, T, G, R, O, w.co, and when people come to this page. Randy, I mean, should they click on the the Start Free Trial? Or what exactly do you want people to do once they if they come to this page and they're like, I'm not really sure what, what you know what to do, what to click on. What do you want people to do when they land on outgrow.co

Randy Randess 24:57 the first thing they should do is just Sign Up Free. Trial, try it out, just see how the experience is. Maybe create a simple quiz, quick, simple quiz, and put it on your site. See how people are responding to it and are engaging with it. If you don't have a lot of existing traffic to your site, then your first calculator quiz needs to be really useful, because that's going to be the reason people come to you. So you want to really think about that piece. Why are people going to come to if you don't have a lot of national traffic to your site, if you already have a lot of traffic to your blog, just start putting a few simple quizzes with each blog post, and you're going to get people to convert

Robert Plank 25:32 there. Awesome. And I'm getting this right. When people use outgrow.co can they create unlimited quizzes? So

Randy Randess 25:41 it depends on the tier they end up with. So we have a freelancer tier, essentials tier and a business tier. In the Freelancer tier, you can't build unlimited quizzes, but on the essentials plan, you can. Most people will, if they're really small companies, will start with freelancer. Our mid and larger size companies will start with essentials or business

Robert Plank 25:57 awesome. And that's that's a pretty good, good way to do things. And can people, if they start off on the Freelancer plan and they set up just their one quiz, they like it, they get it working, and they want to sort of move things up through the essentials. Is that easy to do? They can they just click a button and it just switches them

Randy Randess 26:14 over? Yes, exactly. That's exactly, right.

Robert Plank 26:16 Awesome. And, I mean, I really like those couple of nuggets that you threw in here at the end with us. That, first of all, you know, don't just make any kind of quiz. Make a useful quiz or a calculator. And I also like that idea that you kind of snuck in there about, you know, just try putting that quiz at the end of some of these blog posts. Because, I mean, it sounds like the quiz almost kind of writes itself. And maybe if people kind of look back on their their existing content, or the content they're coming out with, and say, you know, you wrote this big, long thing. Maybe look at it from the lens of, you know, it like, if then statement saying, you know, if your situation is this, here's this chunk of text, and it sounds like I really like that idea of, you know, if you're really stuck about a cool idea for a quiz or something useful, just go back to some of these blog posts and add a quiz at the bottom of that super cool stuff.

Randy Randess 27:04 That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. So you're doesn't have to be a complicated like some people come with these very complicated quoting calculators and things like that, and that's great. But that doesn't have to be your first one, right? Your first one can be a simple knowledge test. How much do you know? It could be something to compliment the quiz, I'm sorry, a blog post, so I agree 100% that those are good ways to just get started, because you have the creative and the content piece down is just converting it into an engaging format and repurposing the content. And it also helps with conversion, because most people don't get that many leads from blogs. People don't subscribe that much to blogs anymore because they've already subscribed to so many subscribed to so many. So to get that email a quiz, complimenting a great blog post, a lot of traffic is terrific, because now you have a better way to actually get the lead. And you know a lot more about that lead than a subscriber to an email. There's the email, so it's just, it's just a better from from all standpoints, and it's an easy thing to launch,

Robert Plank 28:02 right? I mean, I agree about a trillion percent. So everyone should go right outgrow.co dot co click that button and start your free trial and get that first quiz created, because this is a really cool way to differentiate yourself from the crowd of these days of you know, everyone has a blog, everyone has an opt in form on their blog. So now a way to sort of be special and be competitive and to give your visitors all this information but narrow down to just the things that apply to them. This is a really, really cool solution, and I'm glad that we had you on today, Randy, to talk to us about not only about the outgrow service itself, but also how people can make really cool quizzes. So everyone should go right now to outgrow.co so make sure to either if you're in the car, pull over, write it down. If you're by a phone, buy a computer, just type it in, just go there right now and click on that Free Trial button. So Thanks, Randy for stopping by the show and sharing what you had to share with

Randy Randess 28:54 us today. Thank you. Please

Robert Plank 28:57 subscribe, rate and review our show at Robert plank.com/itunes and like us on Facebook at Robert Plank show.com you.