Marketing Spring Cleaning
It’s springtime in Chicago! The tulips are up, the trees are leafing out and a fresh crop of startup accelerator teams are blooming. No matter what the season, it’s always fun to work with accomplished, innovative startup teams and this year has been no exception. We’re especially excited about:
  • Techstars’ Lifeweb360, an eCommerce tool that helps loved ones create rich digital memorials after someone passes
  • Techstars’ Apricotton, an eCommerce apparel company that creates bras that grow with developing girls
  • Global New Venture Challenge’s Team Atomium, a women’s health company that has developed a better menstrual cup.
 
Plus, a special shout out to all participants in the University of Chicago’s 2023 College New Venture Challenge who were collectively the most prepared group of pitch teams we’ve ever seen.
 
Keeping with the springtime theme, this issue focuses on tools to help you clean up your marketing and accelerate its efficiency. Get started with maximizing your marketing efforts by conducting a marketing audit. It’s a great way to look objectively at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it to determine if your marketing is measuring up.

There’s also a feature on ChatGPT, the marketing time-saver that seemingly everyone, even the cast of South Park, is talking about. We couldn’t resist sharing our take on it.
 
If you’re looking to boost your marketing game this spring, read on!
Cleanup in Aisle One: Marketing Audits
A marketing audit is a great way to assess the health of your current marketing efforts against two separate benchmarks: 1) Your industry peers and 2) Best practices.
 
While a mini audit is a part of most Argentum projects, sometimes clients initially just want a deeper understanding of how their marketing measures up and options for evolving their marketing efforts.
 
For example, last summer we conducted a marketing audit for a client in the infrastructure space and assessed their strategy, process, content, and team.
 
The company’s leaders wanted to better understand things like:
  • The marketing team’s executional skills
  • How their marketing compared to competitors
  • What a roadmap for stronger marketing could look like
Freshen Up Your Marketing with ChatGPT*
Since that fateful day in early December when I first heard about ChatGPT from a cutting-edge colleague, the topic has exploded. It feels like every day, everywhere we turn, there’s a new article, interview or conversation about the technology. There's even a new South Park episode about it!

Two days after that first conversation, I heard my favorite description of the tool on NPR when Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor, described ChatGPT as “an over-eager omniscient intern who sometimes lies to you.”
 
In the four months since, I’ve been reading articles, discussing it with colleagues and, of course, experimenting. Read this roundup of the most practical and insightful articles and interviews I’ve seen to-date.
 
*Bonus: How I used ChatGPT to help generate this article's title: 
1. I fed the entire article into ChatGPT
2. Asked ChatGPT to suggest some titles
3. The initial results relied too heavily on the roundup articles' titles
4. Asked ChatGPT to suggest some titles with a spring-cleaning theme
5. My favorite was “Freshen Up Your Writing with ChatGPT: A Spring Cleaning Guide”
6. Substituted “Marketing” for “Writing” and deleted the second half
Thank you!
We appreciate your continued referrals and are always excited to meet new businesses that might need our supplemental marketing strategy services.

To learn more about Argentum, visit our website, and feel free to share this newsletter with anyone who might find it useful!

Best,
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