How to Optimize and Measure Conversion Content [Podcast Episode]

Measuring the success of conversion content doesn’t revolve around just one metric. 

 

I had a fantastic talk with ZONTEE HOU, founder of Media Volery, about the best ways to create and merchandise conversion content. In this episode, she explains the importance of the CTA, the value of auditing and refreshing older content, and so much more. 

 

Want to see exclusive tips on how to get buy-in and access other marketing resources? Sign up for our podcast newsletter!

 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to create and merchandise good conversion content

• How to know when gating content makes the most sense

• How to measure success through a combination of metrics

• How to better understand your audience’s psychographics

Related links/resources:

• MEDIA VOLERY
• ZONTEE ON TWITTER
• NEW YORK TIMES RUNNING NEWSLETTER
• ZONTEE AT CONVINCE & CONVERT

Transcription:

Amanda: Hey, friends, welcome to Cashing in on Content Marketing, I’m Amanda Milligan, the marketing director at Fractl, and every week on the show, I interview marketing experts about ways to know the value of your work and get buy in for your strategies. This week, we’re exploring how to improve your conversion content with the fantastic marketing strategist and founder of the digital marketing agency, Media Volery, Zontee Hou. Welcome to the show, Zontee.

Zontee: Really happy to be here. 

Amanda: Thank you so much for taking the time and we were talking before we started recording that we haven’t really had an episode about conversion content and I think it’s because it’s not, and maybe you can correct me on this but I feel like it’s a little easier to get buy in for this sort of thing but it’s trickier to get it right, and to measure the impact of it and tweak it so that you’re getting the most out of it and I’d love to kind of dive into some of that today so that listeners can improve what they’re doing and get more of the value out of it.

Zontee: Yeah, absolutely. I think that at every stage of the game, you find that content marketing doesn’t always directly tie to those conversion events but there should be some kind of behavior or activity that does occur out of them, right? And so, I think that part of the challenge for content marketers is sometimes reframing what those points of conversion or behavior are, so that they are more deliberate in designing them into both the content itself and also the process of planning an entire campaign, or overall strategy.

Amanda: Yeah, there are a lot of different layers to this and I figured just to start, I would kind of ask a pretty open question that might be tough to tackle just because it’s general, but like, what actually makes good conversion content? I mean, there’s so many different ways you can go about it so, like if somebody decided, okay, I want to start an email list, but I don’t know where to start on how to get these people to sign up for it, you know, what would you recommend to people who are kind of at that stage one?

Zontee: Yeah, I think that the key is really defining, not only what is the event or action that you want the person to take, but why they should take that action, right? So, to your point, if I want to build up an email list, I have to give people a really good value proposition for what that email is going to do for me on a day to day basis. Now, of course, if you’re already doing content marketing, you know that you have to create a lot of value within each individual piece of content, that should be inherent in your strategy but what a lot of people find difficult is how to merchandise it. I work with so many clients across different verticals, tech and software, even architecture or engineering, where they know that the content that they are creating provides value when it is in the hands of the person who uses it but they don’t know how to tell that story to someone of why should they stick around to continue to get more of it, that’s the piece that I think that we struggle with when it comes to something like email marketing so, you have to merchandise to the audience really clearly, why should you sign up, what are you going to get out of it, and make that a really simple call to action, and then put that in the places where they are going to convert. So, you’re going to see that as a key message on your website, and maybe with a ribbon or some kind of pop up but you’ll find that, for instance, with marketing agencies like yours or mine, there are some who are actually doing it through paid social or paid ads, putting it in front of the right audiences, giving them that really compelling reason to sign up for their content. If you’re not thinking through how to make that really obvious in the first three seconds, then you’re not doing it right. 

My favorite example of a great newsletter that I think has been merchandised really well is from the New York Times, they have a newsletter dedicated to running content, you wouldn’t think that running would be its entire nature of this particular newsletter but they found it, they had enough content on their website about running and the topic of exercise and wellness, that was popular that they could put together this regular newsletter and they were really aggressive about merchandising that in every one of those related articles, even things that, like I said, were a little bit broader, not necessarily about running specifically, but about wellness, health, being proactive about your life, and telling people, if this resonates with you, and you want to get it directly into your inbox, because we’re going to bring x, y, z experts right to you, then you should sign up; it’s a low ask, but there’s a high reward in that case, right? So, I think it’s, again, storytelling around the value of the content.

Amanda: That makes a lot of sense. So, it sounds like there’s kind of two parts of this, there’s, are you going to create something new to try to draw them in, are you going to build a landing page for this? You know, whatever a specific piece of content but also going back and auditing kind of everything that you already have on your site that’s relevant to it and making sure that you’re including those relevant CTAs in there, so that they have that next step of the journey.

Zontee: You’re absolutely correct, Amanda. I think that people often forget that they will already have a large bank of evergreen or pre existing content that presents a huge opportunity for merchandising these calls to action. This is true not only for something like an email newsletter signup, or building a list, but pretty much any kind of conversion event that you can think of, there are going to be examples of this pre existing content that you have at your disposal that you should be optimizing and I think that that is often overlooked, because quite frankly, marketers, like most of us, in the world, are attracted to new and shiny things and we– I always tell people, we get tired of our marketing before other people do and that’s silly, right? Because for the vast majority of our audience, it’s brand new and, you know, as well as I do, the vast majority of most agencies, especially their audiences are actually being driven by SEO and so, if someone’s coming and exploring your content, they’re often doing it fresh, there’s no reason you couldn’t take a blog post or an E book from a couple of years ago, and refresh it with one of these calls to action.

Amanda: Absolutely. So, I wanted to get your thoughts on this debate that I see sometimes on Twitter and elsewhere about gated content. So, email list is a little less relevant just because they’re directly signing up for something that they know will give them value but you know, oh, we have an ebook, we have this resource, we need your email and people go back and forth about whether that’s worth doing or if you just give it away for free, what is your take on that?

Zontee: Absolutely. I think that this really depends on your business model and your goals, right? So, for instance, one of our former clients is the awesome marketing website, Marketing Profs, for them, almost every piece of their content is semi gated, because their goal is to get you to sign up for additional content, and even a free membership will give that to you. So, they’re really trying to push that message of sign up, so that you can get access to this for free, but we have your email address, and we can send you more. In their particular case, again, that list building is so important to them and the ask is very low and so, there’s a good match of value for them and their audience. In that case, that gating makes sense. But if you are an organization like my friends at Content Marketing World where they have for years and years and years published a b2b and b2c benchmarks report and their goal is to get that data out there, because it’s about thought leadership, they’re not gating that content, because they want it in the hands of as many people as possible because the value there isn’t in building their list, or getting your contact information in the majority of cases, they know that people who are interested in their content will eventually sign up for something of value on their website, what they want is the thought leadership and their name brand out there in the hands of as many people within the marketing space as possible. So, there’s no value in them getting that content, right? They just want you to have it and enjoy and you’ll see that again, in other industries, like financial services from brands like TD Investing, for instance, a lot of the reporting that they’re doing is just available for download; the goal is not necessarily about collecting information. And so, you have to ask yourself, is the audience who is going to be reading this content somebody whose contact information I need? And if so, what am I going to do with that information? If, again, the goal is something like thought leadership, brand recognition, people becoming more familiar with the information that you’re putting out there, then putting a gate on that is probably a waste of your time because even if you’ve got all those names, what would you do with them?

Amanda: Yeah, I love that answer. I think a lot of people kind of, they get scared not to like, oh, I got to capture everything, just gate it and we’ll collect their emails and do something with it later, that’s a great point that; it always has to go back to what your intention is with why you created this in the first place.

Zontee: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the reason that people get hung up on collecting the information is because we know now more than ever that we have really measurable information, right? And again, that can be valuable for your business, but only if you are segmenting it towards people who are of high value. I always refer to this case study a couple of years ago, the agency has since been bought out but they had published a great case study about how they reviewed their own data of people who had actually become clients and realized the vast majority of them did not come through their content, the content was great for building thought leadership but it wasn’t what actually drove people to necessarily become clients and because they realized that, there was this really strong decoupling of these two groups of people, the people who were coming in for content tended to be really early in their cycle and again, it was driven by thought leadership, they actually ungated the vast majority of their content because they realized they didn’t want those names or need them anyway.

Amanda: Yeah, that’s a really good example. Like, if somebody’s realizing that and making a decision based on those insights. When you’re looking at content, no matter what kind of conversion content we’re talking about, how do people get a sense of if it’s going well, like what is– and you see those questions all the time, like, what’s a good conversion rate? What’s a good open rate? And all benchmarks people are striving to get, I know you really have to just build on your own progress, you know, just progress by yourself, but how do people know like, okay, this is the thing that I should focus on optimizing right now as opposed to this other thing?

Zontee: Yeah, absolutely. I think that you’re exactly right, that the best person, organization that you can learn from is yourself, I always tell people to benchmark against yourself, and then try to improve those numbers over time. But in terms of how do you know which numbers are important, again, I think you have to go back to the goals, right? If it is important to your business strategy to build a list, and that is really key to you, then you need to put more energy into optimizing the opt ins to that list and the behaviors within that list, that’s both open rate as well as click through rate, as well as surveys for qualitative and quantitative behaviors, right? So, our largest client and partner is Convince and Convert, which is the consultancy started by Jay Baer, and for them, their media business, which is convinceandconvert.com, the blog, the podcasts and video content that they produce, which is sponsored in many cases, they are very focused on this idea of list building, right? Within that behavior, they are looking for ways to optimize those opt ins from different places within the website but again, also looking at the quality of that list. If they find that they get a lot of unsubs, because they’ve made some changes to the subscription process, then they know what they’re actually getting is a lot of people who are underqualified for their list, and it’s not working the ways that they’re looking for. So, the thing that I think you have to keep in mind is it’s an ecosystem, it’s not one single number, it’s figuring out, are all of these numbers in tandem giving us the results that we need in order to produce better business result? If we’re not doing that, then we’re actually hurting ourselves in some other way, again, don’t look to chase one single metric for the benefit of that one single metric, because it might be at the detriment of other behaviors.

Amanda: Yeah, that’s a great example of that, too, instead of just looking at the subscriber number, that you have, actually seeing what the unsubscribing rates are, when you make different changes, that’s a great point and I think that’s something that people might overlook, just in pursuit of higher volume of people that they’re reaching. Are there any other examples of those types of metrics that people should be paying attention to that maybe go overlooked a lot?

Zontee: Yeah, I think that as we were talking about before, with this example, of an organization where they ungated, their content, marketing qualified leads, and sales qualified leads are really important, right? Ultimately, the vast majority of us are selling some kind of product or service, what we need to know is, is the audience who is coming to the table actually making purchases? For a small business client of ours in the craft space, what we saw was that certain channels, such as Facebook drove a lot of traffic and still drives a lot of traffic to their website and there’s a lot of content consumption, that the people who are coming from that channel tend not to actually behave in a way that they’re buying anything from this company, right? What they’re doing is they’re just looking for the freebies, and then they’re leaving and what we found was that the referral traffic from Instagram was very heavily related to buying behavior. If we run any kind of a product on Instagram, it immediately would spike in sales and so, we were able to really see where we would focus more of our energies with those channels, and really think about how we could tweak our advertising behaviors, our behaviors around promotions of products, and even where we ran certain kinds of contests, and special content for these different channels because we knew that one channel was going to drive much more value for the company than the other. So, I think that you are constantly having to look at how you can provide value to the company or your brand, right? Again, having a big audience is not valuable unless you’re selling that audience, if you’re not selling that audience, and you have to sell products or services, then you really have to look at what are the most valuable kinds of behaviors that happen within your audience.

Amanda: Based on this conversation, is there ever a situation in which the top of the funnel content should have like a pretty direct call to action rather than trying to move people through the funnel? Like, is there ever a time where that kind of strategy makes sense?

Zontee: Absolutely. I think that people forget that the funnel length and timeframe really depends on the investment for the consumer and that’s oftentimes investment relative to other things within that category, but also in terms of real dollars, right? For instance, we have a client that is an architect, hiring an architect is a 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars investment, and usually means that you’re spending upwards of $100,000 on a project for your home or your business, right? Selecting an architect is a very long lifecycle process, you’re not just going to hire somebody based on the first blog post that you read, because quite frankly, you have to know that it’s fit. So, they are looking at an investment in quite a lot of content that is focused at many different stages of the funnel, because you have to build that trust, the reputation, the fit, the experience, etc, etc. Whereas for some of our clients, like I mentioned, my craft client earlier, the purchase behavior might be around something that’s less than $15, for something that’s $15, your audience doesn’t need a really huge amount of trust in order to select the thing if you present it in such a way that it hits them at the right time and with the right messaging, the call to action can absolutely be within that top of funnel content. So, for our craft client, what we will often do is around above here are five products that you might like for Christmas shopping, one of those products happens to be ours, or maybe two of them, well, that’s great if somebody buys it from that page, wonderful, that’s still a blog post or a video content or a slideshow that they can enjoy and it gives them advice that maybe they’ll take on and use elsewhere in their lives but also, if they want to buy something right away, they can absolutely do that.

Amanda: That makes total sense, yeah. This actually kind of gets to something else I wanted to ask about and I think you’ve may have talked about this in the Convince and Convert blog posts, about understanding your audience’s psychographics so, not just kind of like the top level demographic information about them, but why they want to come to you and and you’re touching on that with this kind of, are they spending $15 or, you know, $1500? And what kind of problems are you solving for them? But how can you go about getting that information, I think a lot of marketers know that they do want to expand on their audience personas or their understanding of their target audience so, we have had a couple episodes about that, but you touched on some things that I hadn’t seen before so, I’d love to get your thoughts on that.

Zontee: For sure. I’m a big proponent of focusing on psychographics, it’s something that I teach in a classroom with my graduate students at Columbia, and at the City College of New York, it’s something that I talk about all the time with my clients. And the things that you have to keep in mind is that mindset really impacts the, I’m going to say willingness of your audience to listen to you, right? If you come into a situation really being open and interested in exploration, learning more, etc, you’re going to have a completely different behavior set than somebody who’s coming in because they are stressed, they are feeling like they have a very short window to make these decisions and they’re very concerned about the buying decision making process. So, having a good understanding of your audience psychographics in the situations that you sell to them within is very important. Now, you asked the question of how do we get this information, the best case scenario would be market research, investing in, working with a great market research firm to solicit attitudinal and psychographic information from your existing audience and people like them. Now, that’s a really big investment project so, of course, there are a lot of marketers for whom that’s not gonna be possible, or it’s something that they’ll have to start thinking about now and plan as perhaps a year long process in which they’re going to make that investment. If that’s the case for you, what I would highly recommend that you do is look to your industry trade organizations, because oftentimes, they are doing a certain amount of that research on an ongoing basis, because they know it’s really valuable to your particular industry. 

So again, we have clients in everything from travel, to FinTech, to consumer goods, and higher education and in every one of those verticals, we’ve been able to get a lot of really good data from third party sources that is specifically addressing these kinds of questions within that industry. So, those are the places that I would probably direct you to look and the key thing is, don’t be one of those people who Googles around and just tries to find benchmarks in the industry because I promise you if you go down the rabbit hole, and I do this quite a lot, you will find that the people who are writing about those pieces of research are rarely the people who actually conducted the research, find the original third party research with the actual data sets, and then interpret them based on what is actually available, don’t read someone else’s interpretation or someone else’s interpretation of someone else’s interpretation. Unfortunately, a lot get lost along the way and a lot of times in the consolidation of the data, you get a lot of muddiness in what is actually true but again, if you find the original resources, you can do a lot of really interesting things. And in some cases, like I mentioned, we have worked with travel clients, with clients in certain industries, you’ll find that there’s really great data sets, for instance, when we were working with a client within the city of Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Trade Organizations for the region had actually done quite a lot of this research on an ongoing basis so, we had benchmarks for several years.

Amanda: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s great for anybody listening who kind of needs a place to start and I think that, you know, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a great place to go about auditing everything that you’re already doing, it’s like if you don’t have this, then you’re not really going to be super successful at deciding what needs to change so, this might be kind of like a first priority for people listening, would you agree with that? 

Zontee: Yeah, I definitely think that having a really strong understanding of your audience is very important. We do a lot of persona work with a lot of our clients and again, that’s based on a lot of research and research, of course, has both the qualitative and the quantitative side. So, if you have this data in hand, and you have this quantitative information, but you feel that you need to get more of that qualitative data, sometimes pulse surveys, which are short, less than 10 minute surveys that you can send out to your existing audience and again, preferably people who are either similar to them, or even people who have recently become former clients or consumers of your brand, that you can still email, if you can send them a short survey and find out more about their behaviors, their expectations, their needs, and wants, and even their watering holes, where they actually spend time learning about your particular product or service, that can be really helpful in filling those gaps as well. And one of our small business clients is a co working group in Brooklyn, New York, and they have a couple of locations and we’ve been conducting an annual survey on their behalf, that is one of these less than 10 minute surveys, asking about some of these specific questions, it not only helps us from an understanding of their audience and the changing needs of this audience but it also becomes part of our marketing story that we can use in not only our content, but also our paid promotions. For instance, 98% of their members, in our 2019 survey said that they would recommend the space to someone else, that’s a very powerful number, that becomes a really powerful part of our arsenal when it comes to marketing and that’s something that we learned from this survey. But then of course, we got all the nuance about the whys and the hows, etc.

Amanda: How can somebody, they’re looking at their personas now or trying to decide if they have enough information, what is the information that they need to have to make sure that it’s robust enough? Like, what are the things you think people are often missing? What types of questions or answers?

Zontee: Yeah, absolutely. I think that oftentimes, when people create personas on their own, and they’ve not done this work before, a lot of it is very anecdotally driven and it is very driven by, we know our customers, we’ve had conversations with them over the last 10-15 years, we know exactly what they want, but that’s often extremely biased based on first of all, self selection, right? The people who tend to have selected you up to this point are not necessarily the people who are going to select you in the future, and it tends to be very colored by our own experiences of our customers, which often tends to be when they either need something or something goes wrong and therefore it misses a lot of the process steps for that customer. That’s why ideally, a third party piece of research, or a survey that allows you to really audit all of the steps of the customer journey can be really valuable, because the issue isn’t just how do each of these steps go for the customer, at what points are they needing different kinds of help, but also what else is in their consideration set out there that you may not know about when they are not in contact with you? And so, I think that when you’re formulating those questions, you want to look, again, beyond all the touch points that you experience day to day, to all the touch points that they need with your product or service and then you also need to look at the volume of people who fall into these different categories. One of the reasons that I really love working with our market research partner, which is a company called Audience Audit, is that they do a lot of this attitudinal research where they identify what are the groups of behaviors that create the different personas? So, instead of you coming up off the top of your head with the name and profile of a particular buyer, they’re actually identifying, our buyers aren’t necessarily all in clumped by age, for instance and that’s a very common demographic dimension that is often used in designing personas. People will say, our young buyers like this, our middle aged buyers like that and our older buyers like this third thing, well, what we find when we do attitudinal research is that you’re going to have somebody who’s, let’s say, a very open exploratory buyer, that person falls in all three age groups however, they tend to cluster a little bit more perhaps with the younger buyers but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t open buyers within your middle aged and older demographics. And so, it forces you to start thinking about your audience in terms of what they care about, rather than what they look like and that’s really key.

Amanda: I think I’ve heard that a couple times but the way that you just summed it up is excellent, I think it really makes the point. So, knowing that somebody could do all this work, or maybe they already have, and they have these great personas, but they still aren’t getting exactly the results that they want, how do they go about deciding what to fix first? Is it the content itself and the story they’re telling the content? Is it literally the call to action that they’re using? Right? Is it, you know, the value that they’re offering with the call to action? Like, where do you begin that process? 

Zontee: Amanda, this is a great question and one that I can only answer with my general mantra, which is test, test, test, test, test. You are looking at a lot of specific things that could be places where you have different factors and absolutely every one of those things is something that I would test, even if I do have pretty good personas, oftentimes, again, we have our own biases, we come to the table and we think that our wording or our storytelling is the right way. Now, that might be informed by a lot of experience and you might be pretty close but as you said, you could adjust the call to action, you could adjust the framing, you could adjust the color, you could adjust the layout of the page within the journey on your website, or from your landing pages. In all of those cases, the only way we can figure out what actually works for our audience is to test, we have a hypothesis, and we test it. We think that persona A would prefer messaging that is more focused on the feature set of our product or service, okay, that’s a great idea/hypothesis for us to test, let’s run a couple of different pages that have different information about the feature set framed in different ways and let’s see which one seems to get the best click through rates, that’s really the only way we can get more detailed. What I hear from a lot of small businesses is well, we don’t have the resources to get this information and the truth is, I think that if you consider this a process that’s ongoing, it’s easier to get there, right? 

You don’t have to do all of this testing in one month, if you commit to the idea that, in the next 12 months, we’re going to run at least two experiments every month where we are changing these things out, over time, we’re going to get a lot of information pretty quickly about what are the specific tweaks that we can implement across all of our different media that produce better results. For instance, many, many years ago, when I was still on the brand side, we had a list that was nearly a million email subscribers, which is a really huge list and it had a really great open rate but what we found was by testing which day of the week we sent out the email, we actually were able to increase that open rate and then once we had run quite a few experiments to get to that point and decided to change from, I think we changed from like a Sunday to a Friday or from a Friday to Sunday, I don’t remember, but once we made that change, then we were doing other experiments on how do we organize the content within? Do we put a product up front, do we put it sort of in the middle? How do we get people to select those different products? Do we do better with the higher priced products? Do we do better with a variety of products? And all of those different tweaks taught us over time, we elected to essentially do one or two experiments a week in that particular case, because again, it was a larger list and we had the resources for it, but again, over time that accumulates pretty quickly.

Amanda: Yeah, I think that can definitely get people to buy in a little bit easier because it can be very overwhelming, just marketing in general, if you’re talking about like, wow, there’s probably 50 things I could be doing right now, and you think you have to do them all at this moment and it’s very overwhelming. So, kind of adopting it as like a philosophy of, we’re just going to continuously test different things and constantly update it, I can see why that is definitely the way to go. 

Zontee: For sure, and I think that doing it as a fundamentally structured process is also really helpful because, you know, you were talking a little bit about how do we get buy in from our supervisors, from their supervisors, etc if you can show them this the schedule of different things that we’re going to be testing over the next 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks and these are the things that we’re going to be looking for from a numbers perspective and this is what we hope to learn and therefore, what that could actually spell for us in the future, and then connect that with, again, your business results, then I think that it’s actually pretty easy to get buy in. Because if you can show them that a 10% lift in the number of people who are clicking through from your emails would result in X, Y, Z number of dollars spent, then it’s pretty apparent to them that they could be making a lot more money if they just give you the time and the space and the tools to do these experiments.

Amanda: Right, that’s the ideal situation. As we approach the end of the episode, I’ve been asking everybody that I interview in 2021, something that’s completely, actually I won’t even say completely unrelated, but unrelated to the core topic, which is about creativity. I’ve been asking people how, especially after like the year that we’ve had and how tough things have been, how have you been managing to kind of think creatively, or think, “outside the box,” I hate using that phrase, but so to keep yourself like energized and thinking differently?

Zontee: That’s a really interesting question and I can certainly see that a lot of people are very burnt out during this time. Oh, actually, since the beginning of January, one of my colleagues has started this group where twice a week we meet for an hour on zoom and we just do two to three pomodoro cycles. So, 25 minutes of head down work, 5 minutes for a quick chitchat break and again, we meet twice a week and we use that time to do more creative, open, deep thinking projects. And I have found it to be extremely revitalizing because, A, it gives me a set amount of time in which I know that I have the space, the whiteboard space to concentrate on these kinds of creative but also deep-thinking projects. I turn off my messengers, I turn off my email, I don’t check other things, this is just the amount of time that I have, and I think that it’s all about giving structure to your creativity, it’s too much pressure. Listen, in my work, when you run an agency, and when you are heading up teams of strategists, everybody’s coming to you for the answers all of the time. If it were up to me to get most of my work done, without some structure, I would never have an opportunity because people are bothering me all day with questions, and I owe them that responsibility and I’m speaking to clients the vast majority of my time. But giving myself these couple of white boxes within my schedule has allowed me to say, this is my dedicated time specifically for this action of being more creative and doing this deep thinking and I think that that’s been really helpful to me. 

The other piece of it that I think has been really helpful is, if you have not heard of the book, When by Daniel Pink, I would highly recommend it. I’m in the middle of reading it right now but I’ve been a big fan of Daniel Pink for a long time, he’s written a lot of books about the behavioral economics and psychological impacts of all these different behaviors in your life and When is all about timing, the fact that we have a circadian rhythm and understanding what are the best times to be creative specifically for you, I think it’s such a helpful activity, because for me, it helped me realize that I can’t do creative things in the afternoon, early afternoon after lunch. If I try to do those kinds of activities, I will spin and spin and spin and I won’t get anything done so, understanding what are the best hours and times for me has also been really valuable.

Amanda: I love both of those suggestions. I feel like I need to talk to my team about the first and buy that book because I was thinking about that recently, I keep trying to want to be a morning person and I just don’t know what’s going on, not just because I hate mornings but I was like oh, right in the morning, but I just can’t, that’s not where my brain is at at that time and it’s hard to just force that.

Zontee: That’s exactly right and I think recognizing that there are certain kinds of tasks that you’re going to be better at at different times of day, I think gives you the permission and the grace to forgive yourself for not being as productive. Because yeah, I’m also not really a morning person but it helped me realize these are the specific time periods that I can use for analytical tasks versus rote tasks versus creative tasks and that just caught me thinking differently about how I live my life every day.

Amanda: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. So, knowing that the objective of this show is to help people understand the value of their content and get buy in forward, who would you recommend to be guests on future episodes?

Zontee: Oh, my gosh, great question. I know that you’ve already had some of my wonderful friends and colleagues on the show like, I love Neen James, I love Pam Didner. I would say that one person on the Convince and Convert team that I would love for you to speak to is the incredible Karen Myers who was recently the Social Media Director over at the University of Michigan and I think that because of her experience from that hands on tactical practice of social media every day, she really understands the importance of buying in a huge organization. I think that’s a great example of somebody that I would definitely connect you with.

Amanda: Awesome. Thank you for that recommendation and thank you so much Zontee for coming on the show and sharing all their wisdom, I really appreciate it. 

Zontee: You are so welcome, and I hope that if anyone has any questions, they’ll reach out to me, they can find me @zonteehou on Twitter and zonteehou.com, and of course, our website is mediavolery.com. 

Amanda: Awesome, thank you so much. If you’ve listened to this and want even more tips, sign up for our podcast newsletter by going to the podcast page on the Fractl website, and if you’ve learned anything from this show, we’d love it if you’d subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Finally, if you have feedback, suggestions, ideas, recommendations for shows that are as heart-warming as Ted Lasso, which I just finished, it was amazing, or anything you’d like to share with me, shoot me an email at [email protected], I’m a shameless extrovert who would love to hear from you. Thank you to Sean Kelly for podcast music and editing and to Joao Pereyra for the logo design. Excuse me. And thank you, dear listener, I hope you’ll join us next time.

•