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

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the day, 760 be pathologically helpful. Content, strategy, creation and distribution with Ray van hilst.

Robert Plank 0:14 Hey everyone, and welcome back to the marketer of the day podcast. We are here with Ray Van hilst from Yoko CO. We had Chris Yoko on a couple years ago. He's over at marketer of the day.com forward slash 710, their website is Yoko co.com and Ray has 20 plus years of marketing experience, and he is busy empowering account teams and clients to define their Web and Digital Marketing Strategies and overseeing project execution to ensure success for both the client's business and their overall goals. We're going to be talking about search engines, websites, designs, pages on your website, all kinds of fun stuff. So Ray, glad to be talking to you.

Unknown Speaker 0:56 Thank you so much. Thanks for having me today.

Robert Plank 0:58 Glad to have you and I was just two minutes before our call, I was clicking around back on the Yoko co website. Because, like, you guys, seems like you're always kind of like recreating and like, as far as, like, you know, rebuilding the funnel or the front page of the navigation or the design, I always feel like it's so, like, tiring, right? It seems like almost like, like, why the heck am I? Am I? Am I doing it kind of like when they paint the Golden Gate Bridge, by the time they're they're done hitting one end, it's time to start over. And I always feel like us, like, is it a waste? But then when I see someone's like, company or business, always like, redoing the website, and, like, every time it looks better, I'm like, oh, like, I guess there is a reason for that right to, like, keep things fresh and keep a fresh coat of paint on things. Oh,

Ray Van Hilst 1:41 it totally is, man. And you know, it's one of the things that I was literally chatting with someone about this yesterday, the fact, if you think about how most marketers and most companies treat their website, a lot of people are like, there's the Oh, God, I hate my website. This thing sucks. Let's rebuild it. You go out, you hire a web firm. You send out RFPs, you build the website, you spend like, four or five months working on it. It's perfect. You're like, Okay, move on to the next thing. And you people, they forget about it. And you're happy for a few months after about a year, and then your traffic drops off, and about a year and a half later, or two years later, like, Man, this thing sucks. It's a piece of crap. You do that whole vicious cycle over and over again. And I think, you know, the opportunity that marketers have is, you know, we always say, you know, when we think about the cycle, how we explain website design and development to clients, the website launch is actually at the bottom of the circle, the you get your payback on the way back up and to keep on innovating and making those progressive tweaks as you go. So it's constantly working for you. I think, I think that's the part of thinking about that funnel that people forget about.

Robert Plank 2:51 And so you're mentioning, like, this cycle of how, you know, it's kind of like a never ending process. And so you say that the launching of the website's on the bottom, like, what's this, this cycle, and what are the pieces of it? Yeah,

Speaker 2 3:01 so, so thank you for asking that's a really awesome question. Kind of gets into what we do at Yoko in our philosophy. So have you, perchance, have you read the hero's journey by Joseph Campbell?

Robert Plank 3:14 I haven't. I tried to read it once. It seemed like it was like old timey language, but I guess the concept of, like Luke Skywalker, would love to hear all that stuff

Speaker 2 3:22 exactly, exactly. So, so if you think about it, you know, so, so first of all, I read a book when I was in college, so it's clearly a long time ago, and my classical mythology course, but in the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell says that, you know, he maps out the journey that all heroes go through. So let's take Luke Skywalkers examples as you brought them up, I use them as example. It's you have the call to adventure, which is my website sucks. I don't know if I really want to do this. I don't. Oh, I want to leave Tatooine. I can't leave tattooing. What's going on? I meet Obi Wan Kenobi. They finally leave. They cross the threshold and decide to work together. They get the Millennium Falcon. He learns how Falcon. He learns how to use a lightsaber, by the way, just non sequitur. How did a kid who's never left Tatooine automatically know how to fly a TIE Fighter? Just,

Robert Plank 4:11 I've always video games, video

Speaker 2 4:13 but, yeah, but it's just like, got in. He's like, Woohoo. I'm a hot shot pilot with zero training.

Robert Plank 4:18 Those were all the buttons are, yeah. It's like, Could, could you suddenly fly a fighter jet? I don't think so,

Speaker 2 4:22 exactly. I have a friend who flies seven, seven, sevens, and he's not gonna let me anywhere near the cockpit, and I play video games. But anyway, but I digress. So, you know, so they have the trials and tribulations. They blow up the Death Star. That's not the end of the franchise. The franchise went on for another nine movie, you know, eight movies, and we can talk about how good or bad is, but there's additional adventures that happen along the way. So the same thing within your website, you know, process of looking at that that you have, you know, I need a website. This works great. You hire a firm. You You're or you're reluctant. You. Hire firm, you work together, you launch, and the launch becomes a moment of transformation for an organization. And that's one of the things that we lean into that like, Okay, this is now an opportunity for you to transform who you are and use this as a tool to increase your impact. So going forward around that is a matter of like, you know, continue adding content, looking at your metrics, looking at your funnels like you mentioned, you know, what are your conversion funnels look like? Tracking that and making those progressive enhancements over time. And since we made a video game reference, you know, just a bit ago, I we find that our clients we work with year over year, they're basically leveling up each year and asking more and more advanced questions. And so it no longer becomes of the how do I redo, you know, version A is, let me rebuild my website. Then version B is, how do I optimize my landing pages? Version C is, you know, how do I add customizations, or whatever, and things like that. You're constantly getting better, as opposed to build it. Love it for a while, let it suck and build it again. You know, it's around that frustration,

Robert Plank 6:06 and so you see that difference. And like, yeah, so they're like, they're asking more advanced questions every time around. And maybe, maybe there are a lot of things thrown out, but you're not necessarily sort of from scratch, right? Because you kind of, like, have that memory of how things we were forced so, like, this time around, are they asking about like, speed or like mobile friendliness, or like, what are the more advanced questions they're getting into? Yeah,

Speaker 2 6:30 so, so from our perspective, you know, we, as we work with our clients, we think about things like speed and mobile friendliness. We just take care of that. That's like table stakes for us. But it might be, for example, conversion optimization. We just did a report. We have a few clients. We do ongoing Analytics reports, and we're looking at them, like, based on what we're seeing. So this client literally their traffic. Something in August changed in the Google algorithm, and their traffic literally doubled. Okay? So, like, you could see it's like line it just went with that. But the while the conversion doubled or the traffic doubled, the conversions went up just a little bit. So I'm like, Well, why is that? So that's an opportunity to look at and say, Okay, let's rearrange these landing pages and do some tests and see if we can increase the conversion because we've taken care of issue number one of traffic. Now let's take care of Issue number two conversion, and take those on a page by page. So it might be things like conversions. It might be things like adding additional features in, like, I want to add income, you know, content personalization, or something like that, or what's or building out a content strategy. What's, what content should I keep adding to my site? And, and looking at those progressive enhancements as we go,

Robert Plank 7:48 super cool, like we mentioned like content a few times, and, and I feel like, with a lot of things that we're talking about here, like when I when I see the web these web pages, I always like, know that there's all kinds of missing pieces, but then I kind of look at like web pages again and again. And I think even though this person's in, like, the financial industry, I could, I can apply this to my own and one thing that I always like forget to do, which is always a good idea, is like pillar posts, right? Or like someone brand new comes to my site and there's all this content, all this blog posts, but hey, here's what someone should be like looking at as soon as they get here. So when we're talking about, like, content, what sort of things along those lines are people missing out on these days?

Speaker 2 8:28 So I think one of the first things for people to understand is you're taking a look at managing your website, and in particular, when you go talk to your CEO and ask for budget for a website like they're going to say, it'll be like, oh, let's tell everyone about our products and how awesome we are, and how we say, you know, and or we need to have our team and our leadership pages, and that's really important. Yeah, no one gives a crap about that. Let's be honest about it. When you're coming to a website, when you're visiting a website and doing something, you're coming to solve your issues, you know, you have a problem that you solve is something that you're looking into, and you're expecting that website to help you address that issue or solve a problem for that so that could be, you know, I'm looking for a better printer. I need, you know, sales optimization software or an example that's that's relevant to me right now, I've decided my new hobby is going to be backpacking. I don't know a thing about backpacking, but that's what I want to do. So I'm looking at articles about how to get started and backpacking. Well, I end up on an article on Rei website, and they're not hitting me with like, the sale and the leadership. There's like, here's the thing, your checklist of things you need for backpacking, right? So look at who your users are and your audiences are, and think about what questions they're having that would bring them to the site in the first place, and then architect that content based off of those questions they might be having and they might be they're going to be love content at different levels of the conversation. Uh, of how they look at it. They may have no idea about how to do something, or they may have a general idea, and they just need some more specific information. But it's a matter of having content and pages that address those things, and from there, then you direct them to that next page, address answer that question, and then leave them where you want to go, be it a deeper level of content to our product page or something like that. Be helpful.

Robert Plank 10:24 Yeah, be helpful. Think about the questions that brought people to you solve the real problems. And I mean, it's always sounds like really basic, simple stuff, but it's easy to forget. And when you were explaining all that, what came to mind was there's like a handyman that I call on every now and then. And he has, like, a really good website, and there's a blog section, and he'll have articles, like, here's how to hang a flat screen TV on your wall. And he's like, we you need these screws. You need to find this and do some kind of, like, anchor point. And he'll like, go through and be like, here's the parts to buy. Here's how you drill this hole. And he like, there's pictures. And it's just like, it's all the stuff. And I read this whole blog post, I'm like, Whoa. He explained everything to the point where I don't want to do it. It seems like a lot of work, even though, like, I could do it if I wanted to, right? I could go and buy all the stuff. So, like that. That blew me away, that even something that you can we would consider as, like, like, a blue collar profession, even he is like, Oh, if you're looking to hang a TV on your wall, here's all these steps, or, or you can just click this button and make a phone call, and I can

Speaker 2 11:28 do it, dryer repair. I've literally, like, looked watched videos and looked at blog posts on how to repair my dryer. Got the drum pulled out, and I was like, screw this. I'm calling someone to do it, you know. And called that guy. That's a per those are perfect examples of, look at your content, give enough to you know, just help people out. And there's some people to be like, Okay, I'm ready to do this on my own, and good luck. And when they screw up, they'll call you. But other people are just gonna give you a call and go through that

Robert Plank 11:56 nice and so when, like, How involved is your company in this kind of content creation? Is it a matter of, like, that client has to, like, come up with something, or your team of writers figures it out? Or, like, who does the kind of content creation work? Yeah,

Speaker 2 12:10 great question. So when we're doing an engagement like this, what we start off with is developing the first thing we do is you develop user personas. So it's really easy when you're in a company, or when you're in an organization, of making assumptions that my users are people that do X and like, Oh, I know my users, and I know my customers and whatever. And usually what we find is the internal stakeholders are so myopic of who they think they're talking to, because they talk to such a small subset of it that our expertise of talking to so many people were able to broaden their horizons and their viewpoints of what who they think their users are. So we'll map out these fictitious users, these personas, and some different ways that we do it, and we'll be like, okay, is this the person that's coming in? Like, you know, I'll use like, you know, executive Edward is the person that you know is signing off on something this the CIO of no that wants to say no to all the tech projects you bring to them and so on so forth. So we'll, like, map all them out, and then we say, Okay, now, based on that, and as a fun exercise, we do is we call like, content needs matrix. We sit down and we brainstorm, what are all the questions this person would have of your product from that? Let's continue using the dryer repair example of like, how do I fix my dryer? How do I take the screws off? What parts do I need? Where do I get the parts? How long should this take? Literally, like, just go through and pull those quite put those questions down and document them. Once we have them in, we align them all with each persona, and that becomes a little bit of sorting rocks, because different people will have, like, different questions they do. From that perspective, we actually then organize them into categories. We'll have things like, Hey, these are, this is information about product. This is information about validation, like, I'm ready to buy from you. Why should I buy from you? Looking at reviews like how long you've been in business and stuff like that, we will also map out there's what we call in that conversation, the conversation spectrum, oblivious, curious, intrigued, invested and converted. So oblivious is my driver's working help. Oblivious. Curious is, oh, this might be repair I can do myself. Intrigued. Here's what it looks like. I'm now frustrated. Invested is, Why should I give you a call and then convert it as the make the phone call? This is so these are all questions that people go through. So we'll lay those in. And then the magic question at that point then comes is, do you have that content? It does exist in your site now, or is this content we need to make? So we'll use that as a working exercise to go through and then map out the information architecture, or even look at like a blog strategy. Hey, these are blog posts you need to create over time and link to these places going through that. So. A good way to be intentional about it, as opposed to, like, I think we should write about

Robert Plank 15:05 beer. Yeah, whatever sounds good that

Speaker 2 15:07 day. Yeah, whatever sounds good. That's not very consistent. Yeah. Content on the fly is not a content strategy. And there's a lot

Robert Plank 15:14 of good things in there, in your in your answer, like, and that's, again, it's like, there's all kinds of, like, old things that I sometimes forget or forgot and need to be reminded of. And like, just that whole strategy, or that whole, maybe not strategy, but like that technique of, of like starting with the questions, and then the answers kind of write themselves, and then, like dumping the questions and then sorting them into different personas. I mean, again, it sounds so simple, but most people don't do it. And then also what you mentioned there, like, having the different kind of levels in the conversation when, like, they might be oblivious, so they might be more kind of seasoned, like, that was mind blowing for me when I heard about, I think, from like, Eugene Schwartz, or something about, like, there's people who are like, even, like, problem unaware, right? They don't even know they have the problem, problem aware, solution aware, all those kinds of steps. And, yeah, it's like you said, it's easy to be myopic about it's easy to think like, oh, they know what products I have all this talk about is it's like, well, hang on a second. They might be like, they might be four, five steps back. And you need to kind of make those blog posts there to figure that out. And so when you say, like, coming out with content, are we talking about, like podcasts, YouTube's long form blog posts with the table of contents, daily, weekly, or does it just matter on the yes yes industry, so content

Speaker 2 16:31 strategy breaks down into the there's three levels of the of your content strategy. There's the content your users need, that they're asking for. There's the content that you want to promote that drives in action, and then there's your technology that you're going to use to deliver that content. So across those channels, you may take a look at it, and you can take a look at your content strategy as you go through this. I heard someone from LinkedIn, B to B marketing use this. I forget her name. She was brilliant. She was at a conference. So I'm gonna, I can't give her credit for, but it was, I will say, was LinkedIn B to B marketing. So the old school way of doing content marketing was look at like, Okay, we're gonna publish, for example, in our blog. We need to do a blog a week and just, and that's like the newspaper model, right? Of doing a blog a week of so on and so forth, and doing something a different topic each week. And then, based on that, there's nowadays you want to repurpose, you want to repackage that. You want to chunk up your content. So you do the blog post, maybe do a short video intro, promote it in social, etc. And we do that on our website. If you go to our website and look at a lot of our blog post. So you'll see a lot of them have videos that we sat down and we did a series of videos and cranked out in one day, like 20 videos with Chris and I and the rest of the team, and then we sat down and we started writing blog posts. So we have videos of them that we put in YouTube, that we share on social, we have the blog post coming in and stuff like that. So that's a that's one strategy of doing it, and you want to look at within that, because within your content distribution platform, like not all audiences are going to see that. But the other thing that I always point out to people like, when you're publishing that content out in social and YouTube, that's rented real estate, that's just a billboard, right? That's just you don't own that you you that post you put in Facebook that's on their rented real estate. They're controlling whether or not people see that. So that's why you want to drive them back to your website, which is the real estate you own, so you can control that experience. The other way to look at it is what, what she called the movie franchise methodology. So if you look at it, I am, I see you're wearing a Batman t shirt. So I'm going to use a Marvel reference instead. Just get a little DC Marvel reference antagonization going. One could probably argue that the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to an end of Infinity Wars is one long movie, right? That's it's really one long story arc. Yeah. Well, you could take a look at a piece of content the same way of Do you have a big honking piece of content that you can use and chunk into different sections and then merchandise into different things? When a movie comes out, that movie gets put out there. But then you also have press tours, lunch boxes, interviews, short clips on Facebook and stuff like that. So particularly depending on an industry you're in, and the best example I've seen as Mary Meeker, who that used to do the internet, the big Internet Report with Kleiner Perkins, something CB. That's like a big honking report that she unleashed at the code conference, like that was her, that's her move, her big movie release, and then that just got distributed into let's give this as a presentation in the conference. Let's give this do a sub report. Let's do an interviews around the. So on and so forth. So that's another way to look at your content around that, and how you for your strategy, how you put that together. That's something to sit down with the content strategist and kind of figure out, what kind of content do we have? Is there a seasonality to it? Is there a big thing that we're focused working on, etc? And

Robert Plank 20:18 that's a really cool way of looking at it that I mean, yeah, when, when a movie comes out, they just go for every possible channel, right? There's the talk show appearances. They make the posters. I mean, they'll do like the novelization afterwards, of, like a Star Wars movie come out, and they'll make a book that's just the movie, but in novel form, like they'll literally, if it can be done in another type of media, they will do it if that's possible Exactly,

Speaker 2 20:41 exactly. And that's the same way to look at your content, the same way. Can I take the same content in the same story and just put it into a different medium, tell a slightly different way, and not have to reinvent the wheel every single time? And

Robert Plank 20:55 that's what seems to be a theme of our conversation here today, that it's easy to get stuck in your own bubble, and it's easy to just think about like, Oh, let me hammer out some blog post, or let me redesign my website. But a lot of our discussions have been either talking about other industries, or maybe we can see things done differently, or maybe it's, it's kind of just like, less painful, because we're looking we're just looking at a completely blank slate, not even thinking about our own business for a second. And there's also been kind of the using the movie analogies and things like that to, again, kind of get the creativity going, to think outside the box. And so this is all real, some really good stuff, and a lot of love for us to think about, as far as our websites and our content, and just kind of like, like keeping up, right, doing what everyone else says. Because there's all those competitors that that are making the blog posts and the YouTube videos, and they are saying, let's map out the month or map out the year. So you guys are yo calm. Is that right? Y o k o c o, y

Speaker 2 21:52 o k o c o.com Yeah. Check out our website. Take a look at it. If anyone wants to connect with me, go ahead and just Google my name. Ray van Hill, some the most search engine optimized name out there. Side Story I have ran into a friend from high school. He was always like, Dude, I always wonder, What happened to you? I was like, No, you didn't. I was trying to find Google. I was like, No, you didn't. He goes, What do you mean? I said, take out your phone and Google my name. It's like, damn. I was like, yeah. Five pages of search results of my name. I'm pretty easy to find, so Google me or email me. Ray@yocosio.com if people have questions or want to connect, and yeah, we'd love to chat with people and talk these kinds of challenges with them.

Robert Plank 22:34 Fantastic. So let's just leave it there. I was going to kind of circle around unless something comes to mind about like, one last tip, or one last thing for us to keep in mind. But if that comes to mind, great. But, I mean, I want to send people to out. I want to just keep it on, the focus on the call to action and say, ray@yokoco.com yococo.com Ray van hills, unless Do you have one final little tidbit, be

Speaker 2 22:59 helpful. Help your customers out. Help your users out. Be pathologically helpful. They will thank you for it. They will come back and they will buy

Robert Plank 23:09 fantastic and, I mean, it's a numbers game, right? It's like you're not going to catch everyone, but if you can stand out and solve some real problems, and that kind of makes the the extra difference, it gets, you noticed. So we want you to search Ray van hilt and see about those top those five pages of results. He's got it all plugged in on the website. I'm sure he owns the domain, all the social platforms, all the LinkedIn so see how much he has tricked out and maybe think to yourself, What if somebody searched dry repair in San Francisco, California. Maybe that could be you. What if someone searched your brand name, when your industry? What if you could get the traffic, get the conversions? And that team at Yoko CO, they're all super cool. That's y, O, K, o.com, that is Ray at Yoko co.com so we'll see everyone there at yo coco.com and thanks Ray for showing up and putting in all the jokes and all the movie references. It was a lot of fun, and I think the people will have fun listening. So thank you. Thank

Unknown Speaker 24:10 you so much. Thanks for having me.

Robert Plank 24:15 Please subscribe, rate and review our show at marketer of the day.com/itunes and like us on Facebook at marketer of the day.com/facebook, you.