Beyond the Playbook: Crafting Unique Strategies for Each Client

Many agencies rely on standard frameworks or playbooks for every client, so it’s refreshing to find a consultancy that starts from scratch, building bespoke strategies that truly meet the unique needs of their clients.

How do they achieve that level of customization? Why does it even matter today?

That’s what Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton is talking about in the follow episode of Social Pulse Podcast: Agency Edition with Zontee Hou.

Zontee is a leading marketing consultant and head of Convince and Convert. Zontee’s consultancy is renowned for creating impactful, tailor-made strategies that fit the diverse and ever-evolving needs of their clients. They’re diving into how she and her team at Convince and Convert approach this intricate process, the challenges of hiring the right talent, and how they ensure their strategies are actionable and effective within their client’s organizations.

If you’re looking to move beyond generic playbooks and craft strategies that drive real results, this episode is for you.

[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Agency Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]

The Convince and Convert Approach

What sets Convince and Convert’s approach apart from agencies that rely on that set playbook for every client?

Zontee Hou: I think that the reason that we are so set on a bespoke approach is because we were founded by Jay Baer, who you may know as a marketing guru who practices what he preaches. And from his seminal work utility, we came to a very content marketing-driven, value-driven approach to marketing.

One of the things that I think Jay has always emphasized to me, and that we’ve taken forward with the company as we’ve evolved and grown, is the importance of truly understanding the customers so that the marketing is clearly aligned with business goals. And so when we are working with our clients, we are helping them understand their customers.

When we build the strategies, we focus on not only what are the unique needs of those customers but also how their decision-making is impacted throughout the marketing funnel.

And then the other piece of it is, of course, the maturity of the clients.

Higher Education Clients

I’ll give you two examples of clients in the higher education space that we’ve worked with recently.

1. One university is one of the top private universities in the US, and they came to us as a very mature organization. Their digital marketing approach was very advanced already. They’re already successful with influencers. They’re successful with content creators. They’re successful at creating unique content for specific audiences. Now, what they wanted to come to the table and work with us on was making sure that they were extremely future-looking, very on the cutting edge, and thinking through how they could build the right marketing engine within their organization in order to achieve those goals. That’s a very different set of needs and recommendations that we would make for them.
2. Then another client that we’re working with currently is also a university, but smaller, more rural, and much less advanced in terms of their current team and their resources. Their goals are to make sure that they not only have a healthy engine but that they’re hiring up a team that can allow them to become true players in their space, where again they have some very specific needs in terms of their in-market or in-state audiences.

We’re designing a strategy for them that is going to look a little bit more like the basics that focuses more on hiring that focuses more on operations and also helps them think through what levels two and three, right? So we go from a major university where again they’re extremely advanced and we’re looking at levels seven and eight, they’re already leading in the field. They’re trying to be better and more cutting edge versus someone who is coming into the level set and making sure they’ve just got the right machinery within their organization.

I think that that’s why it’s important for us to come to the table and be thoughtful, strategic, and unique with each of our clients.

We’re not just building a strategy that helps you achieve your goals, but we’re helping you build a team and an organization that can meet business objectives.

Getting Started With Custom Strategy

How do you even start? How do you begin to craft that kind of custom strategy for each new client?

Zontee Hou: Most of the time we’re coming in with clients, we’re counseling them on the research that needs to be done. Now, of course, some clients will have some existing research that they have done either surveys, focus groups third-party research, or a combination of those things. Plus, of course, social listening and voice of customer data. Once we have that material compiled, we’ll identify where the gaps are.

I’ll give you an example in the B2B SaaS space, software service. We came in to work with a client and they said to us, “We want to reach agency owners.” They wanted to understand how we reach agency owners with content that is going to be compelling to them, and it’s going to bring this new audience to the table because that was a space that they wanted to grow. They had some specific conjecture about what they thought agency owners would care about. They want cutting-edge information about trends. They’re going to want to understand content from marketing experts.

But, in fact, Mike, it’s the stuff you and I are talking about today that marketing agency owners wanted to know about.

When we did the research, we fielded a survey and asked agency owners, “What do you want to learn about? What do you care about? What are the business challenges that are at top-of-mind?”

It was things like growth, scaling, building the business, pivoting when you have a challenging field in front of you because your main line of vertical has collapsed, right? Those are the things that agency owners wanted to know about.

So by conducting that research, we were able to go back to the client and say, Listen, you had a hypothesis about what you thought this content marketing strategy might look like, where you wanted to go with it. But in fact, it’s the wrong direction. And it’s not going to be valuable for the audience that you care about reaching. What if we take this different approach to content marketing and we design a program around these specific needs?”

Now, that allowed us to not only have a lot of credibility but a lot of specificity in terms of the content marketing strategy we built for them. And then when it came to the tactical execution, we were building them an influencer program where we were able to identify people who spoke specifically to agency growth, to scaling a team, to identifying different technologies that are valuable for agency owners.

And of course, yes, there was a little bit of trends information there, too, but specifically focused on those agency owners. And you guys in the audience know exactly what I’m talking about. We are focused on a lot of those day-to-day challenges.

So by building a content marketing strategy that spoke to that, we were able to build a program that was so impactful. The campaigns that came out of it, we ran multiple times because we had so many agency owners sign up to get that content and learn from that program. And for them, they got tons and tons of MQLs that they found were exactly in the sweet spot of where they wanted to be.

And I think that that’s the example of where I would start.

If you don’t have the research at hand, doing the research is critical because you might have hypotheses, but they might not necessarily hold true.

In fact, I have some clients who are in the financial services space. We’re talking multi-million, multi-billion dollar companies, where I’ll say to them, “Well, what research do you have about your customers?”

And they’ll say, “We don’t have any formal research. This is what we think we know based on conversations with our sales team, conversations with our accounts teams.” And that is good information—don’t get me wrong—but if you do not go out and ask questions of your audience about what they care about, what’s on their mind, what their priorities are, then oftentimes you put emphasis in the wrong places.

And I’m not saying that asking your questions of the audience is always the most accurate because people will always say to me, well, customers don’t know what they want. You would never have gotten the iPhone if you asked people what they wanted their phone to do, right? I agree with that. I get it. Sometimes there’s innovation, but oftentimes that innovation comes from what we call cultural anthropology. Observation.

If you have the opportunity in certain industries to observe how people behave out in the world, you are also able to come back with valuable research.

• Sephora. I love the example of Sephora. It’s one that I share in my book where they noticed that whenever people walked into their stores, they would pull a notebook or their phone or something out of their pocket or their purse and look for the colors that they had previously purchased.
• For Sephora, that was a learning that allowed them to realize they had an opportunity to create a great app that would do that work for their customers—which not only deepened their relationship with their customers but allowed them to have more data to offer more personalized and relevant recommendations to their clients in the future because again they had the online/offline kind of experience merged into one.
• But that came from this research that their internal team was doing. So whether you’re the agency making the recommendations to your clients about where to start, or you’re the client and you’re saying, “Hey, we want to go out and hire an agency,” I think knowing that you have to have high-quality research is the first step.

Mike Allton: I agree with that resonates with everything you just said. We have a community of agency owners that are using Agorapulse and one of the questions we asked them before they joined the community is, “What are your top challenges? What are your top pain points?”

Consistently, the number-one answer is how to grow and scale by agency, which is why for four years running now, we’ve been hosting a massive virtual event every year called Agency Summit where we bring in Tiktok, LinkedIn, and agency consultants, a 100% to help those agencies grow and scale their business.

But I want to back up a second. I think some folks listening might be thinking to themselves, “Oh, well, maybe Convincing and Convert can come up with a custom strategy for every single client, but that’s not me. My agency is different because of X, Y, or Z.”

Check out other episodes of Social Pulse: Agency Edition.

Could you just share a little bit more about the services that you guys offer and the kinds of clientele that you have? What IS Convince and Convert as an agency?

Zontee Hou: Convince and Convert as a consultancy focuses, again, on the strategic aspect of the work most carefully. We are owned by Lane Terralever (LT), which is a larger agency out of Phoenix. And so they often are our partners when it comes to additional execution work. So if you come to us for a social media strategy, an overall digital marketing strategy, a content marketing strategy, and then you say, Hey, we need additional executional work,” our team at LT will also help you build the website, build the emails, send out those emails, and create a social media calendar that you publish every day.

We consider our work at Convince and Convert focused on the strategy piece because sometimes we’re working with teams who already have agencies in place or who are going to do a lot of the execution in-house. So we are not necessarily doing that part of the execution, but we sometimes do support some of the execution.

Our work is about building the strategic and operational plans that allow teams to take a strategy and put it into action. Now, sometimes that comes in the form of maturity maps. Sometimes that comes through in the form of training. We do a lot of training for teams, and sometimes that comes in the form of ongoing strategic advising. We’re working alongside them on a quarterly (or even monthly) basis to make sure that they’re continuing to reach their goals and that they’re getting that high-level expertise where we’re deeply diving into topics with them.

Our main industries are higher education, financial services, healthcare, and technology. We have done a lot of work in the home builder space and the travel and hospitality space. Visit California was a client of ours for many, many years. We’ve also done work in—I mentioned hospitality before—brands like Caesars Entertainment, P. F. Chang’s, Hilton, etc.

So, in some ways, I think the reason that we’re also very open to a bespoke approach and that we feel very strongly about that is because we have worked with organizations in so many different industries.

I’ve worked with clients that range from health providers in the addiction space to folks who are associations for sports fishing. So it means that we have to be adaptable and understand the unique challenges and needs of an audience in each of these different specific industries and quickly become experts in that specific set of needs.

Mike Allton: I definitely love that you’re taking that approach with your clients, and you’re looking at each business as it is truly unique—yes, they could be in the same vertical the same geography, or whatever, as other businesses that you’ve worked with, that’s great, that gives you more experience in that particular industry—but you still take that unique approach.

Key Factors

When you’re building that kind of tailored strategy for each organization, what are some of the key factors you’re coming up with?

Zontee Hou: I think that first of all, when it comes to strategy, there is no point in building a strategy that the organization cannot execute.

So we are understanding the unique makeup of the organization itself, the org chart—but also the politics, right?

What are the considerations that this particular marketing team, communications team, or task force within the organization is facing? We’re also looking at from a bandwidth perspective: What are the resources that they have at hand? What are the resources that they need to fight for to get? What is the environment in which we’re building strategy? We’re also building strategy—as I mentioned before, of course—based on the unique needs of the customers.

But not all customers, right? I have had folks come to me and say, “You have 32 different personas that we’ve designed, and it’s pretty difficult for us to market to them because there are so many.” And I’m like, “Yeah, because that’s kind of an overwhelming way to do your marketing, right? Like, what kind of organization has 32 personas—unless they’ve got a huge marketing engine.”

One of the things that I’m often counseling our clients on is understanding who are your best customers, who are the customers that we absolutely have to go after in order to be really effective.

That is an important part of the marketing strategy because we don’t have the resources to go after every audience. We need to hone in on the most valuable audiences and then design a strategy that helps us win them over as a priority while also bringing along other folks.

1. I’ll give you an example of a client that I think has done a great job of this, which is Sam’s Club. Of course, Sam’s Club is the big box retail sister of Walmart. They are selling large quantities of all kinds of things, but they also have a great selection of unique offerings, especially seasonal stuff. So now in the summertime, you can go and get your inflatable pool, for instance—which is something that I think I need to pick up for my toddler daughter, by the way.

They honed into some very specific kinds of audiences who were their highest-value audiences. The people who loved to host other folks at their homes? They’d love to entertain. Those are the people that it makes sense for them to spend more energy going after. And this is something that they talked about on our podcast, Social Pros, that once they identified that as an audience that they wanted to go deeper after, they were able to work with us on here. “Here’s some different ways that we can do some unique programs and campaigns that speak to those audiences.” Happy hosts are likely to buy a lot. They like to buy in quantity because they’re going to have a whole bunch of people over, and they’re likely to repeatedly buy and therefore want a go-to resource.

So it, of course, makes sense for a company like Sam’s Club to want to go after them. It makes much more sense for them to go after that than every single kind of buyer within their community. Because, again, some people are going to come along for the value, their shopping, [as] a habit, etc. Those are not the people you necessarily have to win over.

We’ve got to win over the people who can be convinced, but again, they are likely to then become loyal customers as afterward.

2. I think helping our clients prioritize their audiences is the second piece.

3. And then I think the third piece of it is understanding what is their maturity level. Not every client—as I mentioned earlier—is ready to go whole hog on a particular kind of marketing space. You can say, “I could design the best, best influencer program for you.”

But if they don’t have the budget, the bandwidth, and the desire, it doesn’t make sense for us to go all the way into an influencer program.

On the other hand, if you’re an organization like Sam’s Club, where they’re like, “We are ready, we’re mature, and we can execute on recommendations specific to a robust influencer program,” then let’s go after it. Let’s do it.

By being really thoughtful about the culture of the organization, the audiences that are of the most value to go after, and the maturity level of the organization of where we are now, where we should be in 12 months, where we should be in three years, that helps us to figure out what is the right size set of recommendations.

Mike Allton: It’s one of those seemingly counterintuitive aspects of marketing, niching down, focusing, and limiting the audience seems always like it’s not the best move, but so often, that’s what pays out, folks.

I hope you’re understanding why they’re called Convince and Convert. Because Zontee Hou was laying all kinds of fascinating and insightful comments left and right. Talk about balancing unique and innovative strategies for clients while also maintaining consistent, scalable, repeatable processes. And I’ve got a bunch more questions for her, but before I get to those, let me share with you that Agorapulse can help you deliver that consistency for clients. Sign up for a free trial now.

Hiring New Talent

Mike Allton: You talked about how when you started 10 years ago you wanted to throw everything in the kitchen sink at new clients, and you’ve evolved since then, right? But I imagine now when you’re hiring new people to join your agency. You’re probably trying to make sure that they don’t also take 10 years to figure out not to send everything and do hundred-page recommendations to clients.

How are you identifying and hiring talent who are capable of the kind of strategic thinking that you guys are becoming known for today?

Zontee Hou: Yeah, it’s a great question.

I certainly think that whenever you are an agency owner, hiring is one of the most challenging things that you can do.

• When you are managing an agency [or] being a leader within the organizations, you’re always identifying talent.
• Some of the things that we are looking for within our organization are people who have done the work, who have led either team within organizations, or who have been on the agency side for a long time. They’re bringing their years of experience to the table, but they are also fantastic storytellers and translators of key insights.
• In our line of work, it’s not only our job to become experts in our clients and their industry quickly—but it is also important that you are excellent at synthesizing information, distilling down the research and the findings, and then pulling out the insights that then lead to a strategy that your client will not only agree to but also really benefit from.
• Then our job is to turn that strategy into a set of frameworks that is easily, let’s say, socialized within the client’s organization because we’re not just bringing along our direct client contact. We’re making sure that the executive suite is saying, “Yes, that’s the strategy from a marketing perspective that we want to implement.” And we have to bring along all of the people who are doing the execution within the organization.
• Whether that is junior people or people who’ve been there for 20, 30 years, we need to make sure that we’ve turned our strategy into a set of frameworks and processes that they can truly buy into and use on a day-to-day basis. So, we’re looking for people who are excellent communicators and teachers of strategic thinking.
• (Now, over the years, we’ve had quite a lot of people within our team who’ve also taught in a college or a grad school classroom, myself included. I, for many years, taught at the City College of New York and Columbia University.) Some of those skill sets overlap.
• I tell people that when I’m speaking on a stage, or I’m doing my consulting work, or I’m in the classroom, the work is similar in the sense that I’m teaching marketers how to implement processes, methodologies, and strategies for themselves. So that takes not only the ability to socialize it and explain it.

Make it meaningful in a way that they can build on top of it, and I think that it is difficult. Don’t get me wrong, Mike. Sometimes I feel like hiring is the most challenging thing I do, but it is very rewarding because when you find people who are great translators like that, you can see that they really make a difference. We’ve had so many clients who tell us repeatedly, “So-and-so, my strategist, the person that I’m working with, is truly like a member of our team, truly transformational in the way we think about marketing,” and I find that so rewarding. And so that’s always very exciting, to be honest.

I am not necessarily looking for people with a specific kind of background. I think you have to have a certain number of years of experience to, of course, be able to bring that to the table. But we’ve had people who’ve been in marketing for 10 years. We’ve had people who’ve been in marketing for 20, 30 years, and each of those perspectives is going to be valuable.

“The more important thing to me is that they are excited to do that work of synthesizing information, extracting insights, and doing the work of translation.

If that feels like it’s something that is really exciting to you, then that’s the kind of person that I want on my team.”

Mike Allton: That’s brilliant because what you’re talking about is making sure that we have our own internal standards and processes that we can follow, and that gives us the framework and the approach that we can then be consistent—even though we’re being creative and new and innovative and bespoke for every single client.

I mean, these podcasts that I’m doing are an excellent example. I’m not asking the same questions of every single guest that comes in. And yet I still have a standard approach, a framework, and a process that I’m following for each and every episode that allows me to save time when I’m preparing for each one of these guests and terrific, amazing people like you are coming on and giving us all kinds of value, but I’m not just regurgitating the same content, the same questions over and over again.

Data-Driven Personalization

Tell us about your book. Tell us about Data-Driven Personalization and the role that plays when it comes to developing these kinds of unique strategies and any other insights that you might like to share from it.

Zontee Hou: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so thrilled to have it now available everywhere books are sold. It has been a true labor of love. It took me about nine months or so last year to write it. Just after I had my daughter. In fact, people joke that I had two babies in a row and I was like, “It’s not a lie. [They both] took about the same amount of time.”

The book is about why marketing leaders need to have a seat at the data table and to truly have a data-driven strategy that focuses on the needs and wants of the customer and aims to offer them a more personalized experience with the brand.

This is particularly useful for agency owners to think about because I think it’s an opportunity for us to lead with our clients in terms of thinking because I wrote the book at this moment, because for the last 15, probably even 20 years, we’ve been talking about how now that we’re in digital marketing land, we should be able to know more about our customers than ever before or connect the dots and understand exactly who’s buying what.

But, Mike, you know as well as I do that—unless people are doing a great job of using Agorapulse—many times there are dots that are not yet connected. And because of that, we often miss out on key insights that would help us focus on those best customers that we talked about before and also identify who are our next best customers to go after.

Competitive Advantage

One of the examples that I share in the book is one that many listeners may actually be familiar with, which is that in 2002, Target’s marketing team decided [they] want to go after newly pregnant women before they have signed up for any lists for baby registries or to get free samples or anything like that.

• They wanted to win them over in the first trimester. And the reason they wanted to do that was because in the first trimester, nobody else had that information. These newly pregnant women are likely to be building habits that then make them loyal customers in the future.
• The marketing team went to the data analytics team, and asked them, “Hey, could you figure out a way for us to get this data out? What are the attributes that allow us to identify somebody?” It took them six or eight months to figure it out. They finally figured out a model that indicated things, like you suddenly stop buying scented lotions and shampoos and you go all to non-scented things. You stop buying this, you start buying vitamins.
• There were a couple of basic behaviors that they could identify and say, “This is likely somebody who is in their first trimester.” And the campaigns that the marketing team was then able to run against were so successful that they were identifying people before their families even knew that they were pregnant.
• And so it was very, very powerful stuff.
• Now, again, this is in 2002 and it took a huge company like Target six to eight months to use their data analytics team to like query this information out—but you can see how powerful it is to win over these people before anybody else has that advantage. That gives you a competitive advantage.

AI’s Role

Now we’re in an age when AI actually makes it relatively easy for us to add a layer of intelligence on top of our data. And if you had a good data set that was united, you could ask them, “Identify all of our customers who are currently pregnant, who’ve identified that they’re pregnant, identify what they were buying in months, like one through three of their pregnancy. What are the patterns in there?”

Now identify and create a segment of people who look exactly like that. In just a couple of queries, you could do that.

So we’re at a moment right now in marketing where technology is making it cheaper than ever before to leverage the data.

But the thing is, while marketers recognize the opportunities, most organizations are not investing in building this underlying infrastructure that allows you to create these powerful marketing campaigns.

And that’s why marketers need to have a seat at this table. If we don’t do the pushing because we know what the possibilities are, nobody else in that organization is going to be doing that pushing.

I promise you there is no IT team or analytics team that’s thinking about “How do we win over this really special audience before anybody else gets to them?” They’re not asking those questions. We are asking those questions.

And that’s why I think that marketing has to be leading this approach to a truly data-driven strategy when it comes to organizations that want to build a competitive advantage.

Check out our other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Hospitality Edition, and B2B Edition.

Advice for Agencies

Do you have any final advice for folks who are looking to either do more data personalization—or just have these kinds of bespoke strategies in place in their organizations, in their agencies—and try to work with clients on that kind of personal level? What advice would you share with them?

Zontee Hou: I think those two questions kind of tie together.

And it’s about this idea that ultimately, by knowing our customers better than our competition, truly understanding what it is that drives them, why they make decisions, who impacts their decisions, what their considerations set, how long our relationships with them, we can make better marketing decisions., build more powerful campaigns, and be more effective than our competition.

And so I think if you are starting to recognize that there are gaps in the way you understand your audience, I highly encourage you to not only pick up the book, of course, but to do the work of understanding what your opportunities are to build better customer profiles because it’s doesn’t have to be a heavy lift.

I’m not telling you to go out and build a giant data warehouse that is as big and powerful as Amazon‘s or Netflix‘s. I’m telling you to start recognizing the power of collecting data and information about your customers in a formalized and organized way that allows your marketing team to ask better questions, build better hypotheses, and run better tests that are ultimately going to result in more valuable, more powerful, and more highly converting work and campaigns from a marketing perspective.

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