Argentum Blog

Top 10 Entrepreneurial Research Mistakes, Part 3: Care & Feeding of Your Respondents

This is the third and final part of our series on the Top 10 Entrepreneurial Research Mistakes. Use these links to read Part 1, Which Methodology to Use and Part 2, Asking Smart Questions. The series came out of a workshop we developed to help the entrepreneurs at 1871 be smarter about the market research they were conducting without the help of...

Top 10 Entrepreneurial Research Mistakes, Part 2: Asking Smart Questions

As we mentioned in our Part 1 post in April, being an entrepreneur sometimes feels like you’re playing the guitar while you’ve got a tambourine on top of your head, a harmonica in your mouth, and cymbals between your knees. Because of this, there are a lot of things that entrepreneurial companies try doing themselves, even if...

Best Marketing Job Spec EVER

As someone who has been involved with marketing in some way for more than 20 years, I have seen a whole lot of marketing job specs in my time. Without a doubt the VP of Marketing job spec that GiveForward post last week is the best I have ever seen. And it’s not just my opinion. I posted the job to my LinkedIn network and have never seen...

Top 10 Entrepreneurial Research Mistakes, Part 1: Which Methodology to Use?

Being an entrepreneur sometimes feels like you’re playing the guitar while you’ve got a tambourine on top of your head, a harmonica in your mouth, and cymbals between your knees. It therefore follows that there are many things that entrepreneurial companies of all sizes take a crack at doing themselves, even if they’ve never...

Defining Your Competitive Set

At the core of every positioning statement is the reason a product/service/brand is different and better than its competitors. Because of this, how you choose to define your competitive set is a critical piece of developing a compelling positioning statement. Here’s a quick 3-minute video of how to strategically approach defining your own...

Easy Customer Research

Last week I met with a potential B2B client who has been fortunate to have her product accepted by a major distributor in her category. Phone calls and new orders have begun to come in, which is very exciting! However when I asked her how most people were finding her, she did not know the answer. So I suggested the most basic, most inexpensive...

All Aboard! Sharing Positioning With Non-Marketers

Whenever I teach a positioning class or kick off a positioning workshop, one of the first things I say is that positioning statements are generally internal-use-only documents. This is not because they contain secrets – any marketing communication you create will reflect your positioning. Rather, it’s because positioning statements...

Cage Match: Positioning v. Elevator Pitch

A while back, we taught a workshop for the Accelerator participants at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship about positioning statements and marketing plans. In the attached video segment, you can see how we helped the entrepreneurs differentiate between positioning and an elevator pitch, and to understand when and...

Jamming at Content Jam

Last week I had the opportunity to present at #ContentJam, Chicago’s premier content marketing conference. It was fun to tailor my positioning how to’s to a very specific marketing audience, and I was able to put one of my favorite examples, cheaplubes.com, to especially effective use. You can see the example certainly made an impact...

Ready to Start Spending on Marketing?

Last month I wrote about a lunch I had with Ankur Gopal, an entrepreneur whose B2B technology company, Interapt, is growing rapidly. He asked me two great questions: 1. TIMING: How will he know when it’s the right time in his business’ life cycle to bring in Argentum or a similar strategic marketing resource? 2. BUDGETS: Should he...

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.