Susan Silver, Author at Argentum Strategy

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...

The Making of a New Logo

Argentum will be launching its new website and logo later this month. In the interim, I thought it’d be fun to give a sneak peek at our new logo and the logic behind it.My hypothesis has always been that the Argentum Strategy Group logo was derived from the atomic structure of silver. There are a few reasons I suspect this:1. The...

Startups: 5 Easy Creative Partner Hiring Tips

Reaching out to friends and colleagues for creative resource recommendations is a great starting point for any agency search, whether you’re a start up or not. But unlike larger, more established companies, startups don’t often have the resources to hire an agency, so a friend’s positive recommendation might very well be the only assessment...

Top Five Agency Pitch Mistakes

Many of my clients ask me to help them identify and hire agency partners like creative agencies, digital firms, media buying agencies and web design companies. I’ve developed a process that makes efficient use of my clients’ and the contending agencies’ time, and it typically culminates in individual 60-minute meetings between...