760: Be Pathologically Helpful: Content Strategy, Creation and Distribution with Ray Van Hilst

Ray Van Hilst is a marketing expert with over 20 years of experience. He works at Yoko Co, a digital marketing agency, where he helps clients define their web and digital marketing strategies. In this conversation, Ray discusses the importance of continuous website improvement, rather than the common cycle of rebuilding a website every few years.

Ray highlights the importance of content strategy rooted in user needs. He advocates creating user personas to understand your audience and mapping content to their questions and journey—from oblivious to converted. Content should be structured to guide users through that path while being repurposed across multiple formats like blogs, video, and social media. He stresses the value of providing genuinely helpful content, solving real problems, and making the user experience as informative and engaging as possible.

In distribution, Ray recommends repurposing content like a “movie franchise methodology,” using one core piece of content and adapting it across different channels. He also emphasizes the importance of owning your website as primary real estate rather than relying solely on social media, which is rented space.

Quotes

“The website launch is actually at the bottom of the circle—the payback comes on the way back up as you continue innovating and making progressive tweaks.”

“Be helpful. Help your customers out. Be pathologically helpful. They will thank you for it, come back, and buy.”

“Content strategy breaks down into three levels: content your users need, content you want to promote, and the technology you use to deliver it.”

“Think about the questions that brought people to you and solve the real problems—they will guide your content creation.”