Argentum Blog

Book Launch! Marketing Your Book By Working Your Network

Occasionally I get asked for recommendations for marketing a book. This email, from my business school friend Sheryl O’Laughlin, is a great example of leveraging social media and your connections to spread the word about a book or anything else you’re personally passionate about. It was written by Sheryl to spread the word about her...

Have I Got an Opportunity For You! Evaluating an Unsolicited Tactical Opportunity

If you’re like me and the companies I work with, you probably get unsolicited emails pitching goods and services every day. Some are worthy of your consideration, but most aren’t. I’ve seen clients asked to sponsor Bears radio because they’re headquartered in Chicago or to pay to participate in a holiday promotion on an obscure culinary cable...

The News Section of Your Website Makes Me Sad

Is there anything sadder than a “Press” section on a website that’s filled with nothing but unrequited press releases? The good news about this is that many people have clearly gotten the message that public relations is a great tactic if one of your core marketing strategies is Generate Awareness. The bad news is that a sizable...

The Care and Feeding of Your Brand Ambassadors

One of the Techstars companies I mentored this summer, Pak’d, delivers healthy custom lunches to your door. Targeted at moms, Pak’d has had a lot of success using a “Mombassador” program in the Chicago area as part of its launch. I was recently having lunch with Rebecca, one of the co-founders, when she asked me for advice about managing and...

Five Favorite Marketing Hacks

There’s no greater marketing challenge for a startup than a budget that is almost non-existent. Whenever I work with entrepreneurs who are in a low to no-budget situation, one of the first things I ask them is: How much skin are you willing to put in the game? Because in the entrepreneurial world, passion and scrappiness are going to be...

Learning About Your Customers For Free

I had coffee a few weeks ago with an investor. One of his portfolio companies is having some growth problems and he’s been thinking that maybe they need to spend money on marketing help. The company is a farm-to-market retail store in a somewhat obscure location without much customer foot traffic. Because the company is small, can’t...

Hiring an Agency

Because Argentum’s niche is marketing strategy, we do not provide creative services like ad design, logo creation or web site development. But we gladly help our clients identify and hire the creative and digital talent they need. As a result, we have been fortunate to work with lots of great creative agencies, not only on behalf of our...

Give Your Sales Force Marketing Flexibility

Many of our clients come to us to help them become more strategic in the way they approach their marketing spending. One of our middle market clients was in the midst of a major geographic expansion when we first began working together to build a comprehensive marketing plan. The plan we developed together included two key tools to facilitate...

Netflix: Building a World Class Brand

Earlier this month I facilitated a two-day marketing team offsite for a technology client that went public about a year and a half ago. The company is in the midst of building their 2016 marketing plan so the CMO wanted to bring together her large, geographically diverse leadership team in one location for team building and brand...

Blowing Up the B2B Sales Funnel

Last night I read an article from the Harvard Business Review called What Salespeople Need to Know About the New B2B Landscape. The authors talk about the implications of the latest B2B research from Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. The research offers up a new way of looking at the...

Argentum's blog, Marketing Op-Ed, highlights interesting, real-world examples of marketing with a little bit (okay, a lot) of opinion thrown in. It's written by Susan Silver, President of Argentum Strategy Group, with the occasional guest blogger added to the mix.