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How a personality quiz is growing a beard brand

It’s generated over 150k leads, earned tons of backlinks, and helped to improve their products. Learn how Beardbrand’s quiz does it.

Facial hair is big business these days. Since shedding its image as a foul feature of the unkempt and unwashed, the beard is now treated with respect. And an entire industry has grown out of the beardsman’s desire to flaunt his facial fluff.

Eric Bandholz fell in love with the bearded lifestyle after attending the 2012 West Coast Beard & Mustache Championships. He realized there was an army of hairy guys like him with unmet grooming needs.

So Eric launched Beardbrand: a web-based community uniting beardsmen around the world. He later added an online store to sell beard care products, and the business has been growing consistently month-on-month ever since.

One of the reasons for this growth is the quiz typeform that Eric and his team created to help beardsmen find the products that best match their face fur.

We spoke with Eric about Beardbrand’s typeform to find out how it became front and center of the Austin-based business. Take a look at the typeform here, then check out the interview below.

powered by Typeform

Tell us about your typeform. What’s it helping you to do?

We created our Beardsman Quiz with Typeform to provide a unique, entertaining experience for our audience. The quiz also helps customers to find appropriate beard products based on their lifestyle. And it helps us get a better grasp of our fans and their interests.

We also allow quiz takers to sign up to our newsletter. This has played a crucial role in growing our email list and staying in touch with our existing and future customers.

How did you put your quiz together? Take us through your planning and building process.

It all started because we wanted a unique way to interact with our audience, rather than just traditional advertising. So we came up with the Beardsman Quiz as a fun way to get people to experience our brand.

Once we had the idea, we looked into software that could make it happen. Using Calculator and Logic Jumps, Typeform was a good alternative to the more expensive quiz software out there.

We ended up creating ten questions and six personality types for the quiz.

Scoring quizzes can get complex quickly. For example, one question with five answers has five results, but two questions has 25 different combinations of results. But once we had it outlined, it was just a matter of building and testing the quiz.

The nice thing about Typeform is we were able to create a second quiz very quickly using the duplication feature.

The Beardbrand office—beards not required.

There are lots of tools out there, why are you using Typeform?

When we looked into launching this quiz we considered lots of options, including software specifically designed for quizzes. We decided to go with Typeform because of the flexibility it offered and the incredible value it brings.

Apart from the quiz, we’re now using Typeform for internal job management requests, wholesaler requests, and rights usage for social media. It’s become an integral part of our communication strategy.

How long did it take to make your quiz?

This Typeform was pretty complex and required a bit of research to understand how to setup rules and logic jumps. Fortunately, Typeform has an excellent knowledge base so we could implement the project without any assistance.

In addition to setting up the Typeform, we created custom illustrations to represent the different types of beardsmen. So from ideation to launch it took about a month. Before publicly launching, we did a beta test to refine the questions and answers.

How many people worked on your typeform?

We had a small team of four people. I worked with my business partner to create the questions and answers. Our graphic designer illustrated the images, and our marketing project manager integrated the typeform into our website and email flows.

Hey, you've got a beard too!

How did you make your quiz typeform look good?

To make the Beardsman quiz our own, we removed the Typeform branding and embedded it in our website. This allowed us to point users to our domain and generate backlinks for SEO.

We also used the redirect feature to deliver the answer on custom built landing pages. This allowed us to integrate our products into the results to help generate revenue.

How are you getting your quiz out to people?

The quiz has become a major part of our communication strategy. It’s front and center on our homepage so anyone who visits us sees it.
Eric Bandholz, Founder & Creative Director of Beardbrand

We’ve also integrated it into our post-purchase email flow, and we’re doing paid marketing to share the quiz with people who aren’t familiar with our brand. We also created a YouTube video, which has been viewed over 80k times and can be seen here:

How are you using your responses?

Right now, we mainly use results to communicate with quiz takers who join our email newsletter. We follow up and share additional grooming tips and information about our products.

We also plan to do an ad-hoc analysis to better understand our audience and their passions. One interesting takeaway we’ve already observed is that the majority of our customers mention travel as a top hobby.

Because of this, we’ve decided to make our products travel friendly and less than 100ml / 3.4 fl oz. We wouldn’t have known that a large portion of our customers love to travel without this quiz.

What kind of results are you getting?

We’ve had nearly 150k people take the quiz, and it’s helped us build our second most successful email list.
Eric Bandholz, Founder & Creative Director of Beardbrand

I always love to see when fans take the quiz and share their results on Twitter.

Any advice for people looking to create a typeform like yours?

It’s a lot of work, and requires creativity and attention to detail. You’ll need to develop a compelling quiz that people will want to take and find out the answers to. From there, you’ll need that keen eye to make sure you’ve rolled out the data and logic jumps correctly.

If you’re willing to put in the hard work, you can see tremendous results and separate your brand from the generic marketing of other companies.
Eric Bandholz, Founder & Creative Director of Beardbrand

How did Eric do it?

Eric’s lead generation typeform is attracting thousands of potential customers to his brand. Here are some tips to help you get started.

What features does Beardbrand’s typeform use?

Inspired? What to do next

Ready to get a whole heap of leads like Beardbrand did? Keep these things in mind to replicate their success for your business:

  • Take a behind-the-scenes peek at how Beardbrand built its typeform, with to replicating its personality quiz.

  • Add this to your account, then make it your own.

  • Got a typeform that’s bringing joy to your business? We’d love to see it, maybe even feature it as an inspiration case study. Let us know all about it here.

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