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Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures

Arnie Kuenn

CEO of Vertical Measures

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Arnie is a world-renowned speaker with 30+ years of entrepreneurial expertise.

He is the co-author of Content Marketing Works and author of Accelerate. Arnie speaks to and trains thousands of people every year all around the world.

In 2006, Arnie founded Vertical Measures, a highly respected Digital Marketing agency. In 2008, he founded the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association (AZIMA). In 2014, he was honored as the Interactive Person of the Year in Arizona and in 2015 entered the Content Marketing Hall of Fame. In 2017 he was named Content Marketing Person of the Year in Arizona and his company was named a Best Places to Work.

Article

Content Ideation Process Made Easy (5 Steps)

A lot of people ask me what’s the shortcut when it comes to content marketing. And the truth is that there is no shortcut, but I try to offer them what I think is the one thing they need to get down pat in order to excel at content marketing.

I always recommend “Ideation” or…

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Arnie’s success

Making the content ideation process easier

Result if you follow the steps in Arnie’s session

Content ideas sourced from your staff that’s already vetted by customers and the wider online marketplace

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I would say there’s just a few steps. And I would say actually, hopefully a lot of you that are watching this, I’ve heard some of these things before, the key is you really got to believe it and try it and try it for an extended period of time.

So everything I’m talking to you about is not going to just happen in the next few weeks. For you, it’s going to take six months. In fact, I break for a minute about our company, we have done, we track everything, we measure everything. And our average clients are not cherry picking. But our average client who follows the, some of the principles I’m about to give to your listener, it’s a chunk of them.

If they stick it out for 12 months, our average client has grown their traffic by 66%. If they continue for another year, so two years of work and effort and following this process, our average client has grown the traffic to their sites by 167%. So we know it works if you follow the steps.

So the one of the steps I’m going to talk to you about is this ideation, research, brainstorming, whatever you want to call it, but it’s basically how do you come up with content ideas that your audience, your market is looking for.

And where I would start, I’ll just give it two or three steps and leave you just pointing at me when you want me to stop looking, I might feel the whole time right here.

But the first thing I would do is, I would go right to your own employees, your staff, and just ask them, what did they get asked all the time. Right? And it’s a simple thing you can do, it’s free. In fact, the first two or three things I’m going to talk to you about is 100% free, it just takes effort. So find out and it doesn’t matter if they’re in accounting.

If you deliver products and if it’s a delivery person, anyone who’s talking to your prospects or clients, but especially your sales people, you want to just ask them, and you start jotting it down or enter into Excel or some spreadsheet or whatever, but just start jotting down all the questions that they say, here’s what I get asked every day or every week, or every time I stop here or whatever.

And write, there is an awesome starting point. Hopefully, when we do this for clients, sometimes we’ll come up with hundreds of ideas just by interviewing dozens of people on their staff. And the sales people is really important, because you know, of course, they’re front line, you know, they’re talking to people all the time, about prospects and probably clients. And they’re the ones who have to answer the questions. So they may even have a lot of this content, these answers written in their outbound emails, right?

So you might already have a leap ahead. So you want this list of questions. And then of course you would want to, you know, part of your strategy building will be to audit your site, look at your stuff. See, are you addressing these questions in the content on your website? Because if people are asking your staff today, it’s more likely that they’ve been searching and in the United States, anyway, it’s primarily on Google.

But most likely they’ve been searching on Google for those answers, or they finally gave up and decided to call and talk to somebody at your company. You know, and we don’t want to do that anymore. I mean, we just don’t do that, all of our research happens online.

So you want to be able to provide those answers in content, and ideally, maybe one page of content per question and answer. That’s how I would structure it if you can do that. And that’s one way to get started. I mean, that’s a step that most people are missing.

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