I’ve written about this before, but it merits mentioning again. The marketplace is C-R-O-W-D-E-D. Your customers and prospects are being bombarded with a continuous stream of competing marketing messages. What is a marketer to do? How do you make sure your messages are heard?

Believe it or not, some companies are successfully penetrating the noise. Their messages are being heard and responded to. What you want to do during times like these is stake out a territory – a position – which your company alone is uniquely qualified to occupy.

The result is an effective positioning that sets your company and products apart from the competition. This competitive advantage gives rise to the clarity and focus necessary to outperform rivals.

Demand Metric is teaming up with MarketingExperiments to launch a new eWorkshop on May 19th about positioning. It aims to provide you with tools and practical guidance to discover and/or refine company and product positioning.

During the eWorkshop they’ll address:

1. What Positioning is and why it is important
2. The role Positioning plays in product launches
3. How to develop a Competitive Product Position Map
4. How to develop Product Positioning and a Product Positioning statement
5. How to leverage your positioning statement in all marketing communications to achieve greater message consistency and effectiveness

Plus, when you register you’ll receive instant access to the Premium Tool-Kit which includes:

· Competitive Analysis Tool
· Competitive Product Positioning Tool
· Market Research Report Template
· Product Positioning Tool
· Value Proposition Worksheet
· BONUS REPORT: Market Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning

The tools and training you receive will help you understand the value of positioning your company and its products, and equip you to lead a positioning planning process for your organization. Find out More>>

If you decide to register, let us know what you thought of the training in the comments.

Anybody notice how noisy it’s gotten?  I mean, all of a sudden I’m being flooded by a constant flow of press releases and social media releases and sooo-much-PR… it seems endless.

It’s as if, in a mad dash to be heard, companies are cranking out more and more releases every day — whether it’s newsworthy stuff or not — just hoping, even praying they’ll get picked up.  Working harder to accomplish less is never the smart business choice.  Better to have a few effective campaigns under your belt than a dozen forgettable attempts.

What does your communication strategy look like?  Do you even have a strategy?  Or are you like many busy marketers out there firing off standalone tactics?  The good news (If I can call it that) is that your competition’s probably in the same boat that you’re in — so what we’ve got here is an opportunity.  A chance to get ahead of the pack and sharpen your skills at the same time.

From figuring out the goals for each campaign — to allocating the appropriate amount of resources and time — you need a plan to be effective.  And believe me, the answer isn’t to write a press-release about everything just to cover your bases.  It’s a lot like crying wolf — after a while your audience tunes out.  You need to know what’s newsworthy in order to keep them engaged and listening.

If you’re not sure where to start, there’s an eWorkshop with Demand Metric and MarketingExperiments on April 28th that’s worth checking out.  In addition to the hour-long training, you get tools and templates to use for developing your media relations strategy.

I started using the tools and played around with the templates today (My company’s producing the event) – as a package, they’re powerful indeed.  During a webinar rehearsal a couple weeks back Brian Solis, Principal at Future-Works, said that “Influence is the ability to inspire action and measure it” — Optimizing my media relations strategy seems like an excellent starting point.

What do you think has caused the uptick in press releases?  Do you think it’s a result of reduced marketing budgets and thus an over-reliance on traditional media strategies?  Let us hear your theories in the comments.

—————————————————

Webinars as a platform for training and education are quickly becoming mainstream.  More and more companies are recognizing the value they deliver in the form of qualified leads as well as for generating new subsets of prospects.

This is the first in a series of articles about webinars as a business tool.  It does you no good to have the greatest product in the world or the best presentation in the world if nobody shows up to listen to what you have to say.  Here’s a formula to help you forecast how many registrants and attendees you can expect when you set out to plan your next web event.  It’s a good idea to work your way backwards through the funnel to assess your needs.  Just how many people do you have to invite (or atleast expose to your invitation) to ensure a “good” (relative to your individual requirements) turnout?

Size of Audience (# of people you invite) x Number of contacts (# of times you invite them) = Total Contacts
—————————————
Total Contacts x Typical Response Rate = # of Registrants
—————————————

Registrants x .4 (40% is the typical attendee to registrant ratio) = Total Attendance
—————————————

Let’s say you have a database of 5,000 subscribers, you send them 1 invitation and a response rate of 2% – Let’s apply the formula:

5000 subscribers x 1 invitation = 5,000 contacts
5,000 contacts  x .02 response rate = 100 registrants
100 registrants x .4 attendance ratio = 40 attendees

Applying this formula to your own situation will help you plan your marketing efforts to ensure a successful event.  Have I missed anything?  Let me know how you forecast attendance if you do it differently.

——————————————————————