Video Library

Webinars

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Positioning: Laying the Foundation For Sales & Marketing Success

In this webinar, originally conducted for the 19,000 members of Vistage, Susan Silver explains the importance and value of creating a strong positioning statement for your business. She’ll help you describe your business in one sentence and refine your existing positioning statement if you already have one. You will also learn how to align your marketing and sales messaging so they are working hand in hand.

 Maximizing Your Marketing Budget

Learn how to use some simple free tools to build a more organized and strategic marketing budget for your business.

Key Takeaways From This Webinar
– How to build a realistic marketing plan that helps you grow your business
– The differences between strategies and tactics and why it matters
– How to tell if you’re spending too much money on the wrong things
– How to budget to use your limited dollars and staff resources better

This webinar will help you avoid spending a lot of time and money chasing tactics that don’t help you move the needle. So before you go hiring a blogger or building a Facebook campaign, watch this!

Quick Tips

Marketing Minute: Reasons to Believe

In the positioning statement, Reasons to Believe are the evidence that your Point of Difference is true. Without this proof, sometimes a valid Point of Difference can sound like complete hooey! Learn how to decide which Reasons to Believe work best to validate your Positioning Statement’s point of difference.

Why You Need A Marketing Plan

A lot of the companies we meet have not clearly defined their target customer. Some make the mistake of trying to appeal to everyone in the hopes of not leaving any potential revenue on the table. Other companies have a general sense of their target, but have never taken the time as a team to sit down, define, and gain consensus on the common characteristics of their best customers.

Marketing Plan Tips & Marketing Budget Tips

Originally taught as part of Marketing Boot Camp for the companies in the Booth School of Business’ Polsky Accelerator, this 5-minute video overview will teach you some marketing plan basics to get you started on building your own plan.

Positioning Statement vs. Elevator Pitch

In this video segment, we help the entrepreneurs in the Accelerator program at the University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship differentiate between positioning and an elevator pitch, and to understand when and how to use them.

View the slides used in this portion of the workshop here.

What is a Competitive Set?

During a workshop at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship, we helped the attendees think strategically about their company’s competitive set. This understanding is essential before a brand can successfully define how it is unique. Examples included two of our favorites, KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

Conducting Free Client Research

During a Research for Entrepreneurs workshop at Chicago’s 1871 Tech Incubator, we used lead tracking as an example of how companies can gather useful information over time for free.

Four Market Research Rules You Should Know

Whether you are developing a discussion guide for a 1:1 interview or conducting a SurveyMonkey survey, there are four market research rules you need to know to make the best of your research time and acquire the most comprehensive and useful data.

The Difference Between Strategies and Tactics

Many people seem to struggle with the difference between strategies and tactics. This segment provides an easy way to differentiate them. There are also some handy strategy examples from some of our clients’ marketing plans and a list of common earlier stage strategies.

Marketing Minute: Word of Mouth

Whether you’re a B2B, B2C or services company, word of mouth will always be your best source of business! Learn a little more about how to make it work for you.

Make Your Clients’ Lives Easier

Most companies say they excel at saving their clients time, but are all of your touchpoints really showing that you understand how to help them do that?

Marketing Tactics: Strategic Execution

Taking a few minutes to think about what you know or can infer about your customers’ behaviors can help you make the most of your marketing efforts.

Using Human Words: How to Describe Unmet Needs

Clearly articulating your customer’s unmet need is a great test of your ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. During a recent workshop with entrepreneurs at Chicago’s 1871, Chicago’s center for technology and entrepreneurship, I took a few minutes to talk about the importance of Unmet Need for your brand positioning, and how to most effectively articulate your product’s unmet need.

Four Easy Tools for Identifying Your Point of Difference

While defining a company’s Point of Difference is typically challenging, we’ve developed a variety of tools and exercises to help our clients and students explore what theirs might be. We talk about four of them in this video.

Throwdown: So You Think Your Service is Differentiating?

Whenever we teach Positioning, someone invariably wants their Point of Difference to be “Service.” Generally, this is way too generic to be genuinely differentiated. The exception to the rule, so far, is a remanufactured toner cartridge company we worked with a few years ago.