Vertical Measures
A Guide for Successful Digital Marketing

When it comes to making purchase decisions, most turn to Google to research the products or services they intend to buy. According to Google, on average, a prospect completes 68 percent of their buying decision before contacting any provider. “The Internet has become a big part of the purchase process today and companies need to take advantage of it,” begins Arnie Kuenn, founder and CEO of Vertical Measures. A respected expert in online marketing since leading his previous firm, MediaChoice through the Internet boom and bust. It’s been five years since he co-authored his second book, Content Marketing Works: 8 Steps To Transform Your Business. The concept provided a step-by-step “how-to” book on content marketing that included the various aspects of digital marketing—all coming together to form a full, documented strategy.

Vertical Measures—a 60-person group of marketing experts based out of Phoenix, Arizona—provides uniquely designed and engaging approaches to digital marketing that accelerates real growth for organizations across all industries. And to support this, they’ve released their latest installment, a beautifully-crafted page-turner, The Customer Journey: How an Owned Audience Can Transform Your Business.

A true leader in the digital marketing landscape, Vertical Measures has conducted countless workshops, hosted conferences, and has been a catalyst in the content marketing arena for years. From their results and ongoing measurement of digital marketing ROI, they’ve concluded that businesses without a documented digital strategy are quickly falling behind.

“Five years ago, I would teach workshops around the country and start by asking the audience a simple question: ‘How many of you have heard of, or know what content marketing is?’ – Less than 50 percent of the crowd would raise their hands.”

Arnie continues, “Today, it’s a different story. We have more team members traveling around the country to speak, and more of our audience understands the basics of content marketing and the true value of it. We may get a lot of people to raise their hands for that question now, but when we follow it up with, ‘How many of you have been successful at digital marketing for 12 months in a row’ – the hands drop back down.”

What they’ve have discovered, is that organizations still struggling with online success lack two things:

1) their executive team is not fully onboard with digital marketing, and
2) they do not have, or are not implementing, a documented strategy that fully embraces the customer journey.

We help our clients grow their owned audience by leveraging their industry expertise and fusing it with more than 10 years of digital marketing success

Vertical Measures helps their clients produce the right content and promote it at the right time and place to lead customers through their journey toward making a purchase decision—all the while, capturing that audience’s information to become what Arnie refers to as an “Owned Audience.”

Owning your audience means you can reach them at the time and place of your choosing, and it can become one of your company’s biggest assets. An easy example, “If it costs $50 to gain a brand-new contact for you—and you have a total of 180,000 contacts in your data base—some would say you have an asset valued at $9.0 million. Or, consider Dollar Shave Club that recently sold for more than $1 Billion. It’s not that their razors were so great, it’s because they had built a huge, online audience.” Arnie explains, “The more you grow your owned audience, your owned contact list, the more valuable the asset becomes. And we use mapping around the customer journey to do it.”

One of the challenges that most organizations are facing right now is the large number of choices, solutions, tools, and agencies in the digital marketing space. This paralyzes the decision-making body, and implementation of wrong solutions can create more complications. To avoid such complications, Vertical Measures maps the customer journey to understand the challenges your audiences face at each stage of their journey to making a buying decision.

What makes Vertical Measures different from the many agencies out there today? They practice what they preach. Their agency implements the same digital marketing approach for their business that they recommend to clients and their followers. In fact, the success of Vertical Measures is a testament to owning an audience, and then leveraging that audience for growth.

2019 is a year of excitement and new opportunities for Vertical Measures and their clients. Arnie expresses his pride in the evolution of Vertical Measures and the team they’ve built. He adds, “We have a big sense of humor and don’t take ourselves too seriously. All the while, we’re doing some serious work for our clients—but we let our results do the talking. We have designers, writers, SEOs, analysts, and more amidst our ranks, but when it all comes down to it, we identify as one thing: digital marketers with a passion to transform businesses.”