These are 10 easy steps to follow and help create opportunity and success for your business.

Owners and businesses are always looking for ways to market themselves and get their name out. Social networking is an easy and fast way to get your business name out to the public.  When marketing is continuous and targeted business gets easier.  If prospects have a positive view of your wares and reputation before you call or they start shopping, you’re that much closer to nailing a sale.  Here are 10 cheap and successful ways to market your business.

1. Take steps to make customers feel special. Customers respond to being recognized, especially in these rush-rush, get-the-lowest-price times.  Take time to recognize and appreciate your customers.

 2. Create business cards that prospects keep. Most business cards are tossed within hours of a meeting. Instead of having your card tossed, create one that recipients actually will use — say, a good-looking notepad with your contact info and tagline on every page. The business card notepad is referred to almost daily, kept for 30 days or so and carries a high remembrance factor.

3. Stop servicing break-even customers. If this idea makes you gasp, think harder. You're falling for the fallacy of increasing sales instead of boosting profits. If you stop marketing to unprofitable customers, you have more time and resources for customers who actually grow your business. More than likely, 20% of your customer base is contributing 150% to 200% of total annualized profit (TAP); 70% is breaking even; and 10% is costing you 50% to 100% of TAP. Take a detailed look at your customer profitability data and then direct premium services and marketing to customers who count.

4. Develop an electronic mailing list and send old-fashioned letters. Most businesses have harnessed the power of e-newsletters — and you definitely should be sending out one, too. It's very cost-effective. But exactly because e-mail marketing is now nearly ubiquitous, you can quickly stand out by occasionally sending personal, surface mail letters to customers and prospects. Just make sure the letter delivers something customers want to read, whether an analysis of recent events in your field, premium offers or a sweetener personalized for the recipient: a discount on their next purchase of whatever he last purchased, for instance. This mailing has to have value to those that read it, so it reflects the value of what you offer.

5. Boost your profile at trade shows and conferences. You can quickly create signage, glossy postcards with your contact information, product news inserts or an event mini Web site.

6. Combine business with pleasure — and charity. Spearhead an event, party or conference for a cause you care about. That puts you in the position of getting to know lots of people, and shows off your small business leadership skills. This is a great networking task.

7. Create a destination. Bookstore chain Barnes & Noble has its coffee bars. Furnishings giant Ikea offers child-care centers and cafeterias. Why? So customers gravitate to the stores to enjoy an experience, to hang out for a while. Sunday morning at Barnes & Noble becomes a pleasant weekend routine, rather than a shopping errand. Steal this idea. This tip isn't limited to offline destinations, either. Using pay-per-click advertising, you can cheaply drive traffic to a one-time news event or specialty offerings.

8. Become an online expert. This is the "free sample" approach to bringing in business. Research active e-mail discussion lists and online bulletin boards that is relevant to your business and audience. Join several and start posting expert advice to solve problems or answer questions. You may need to keep this up for a bit. But the rewards come back in paying clients and referrals. 

9. Court local media. Editorial features convey more credibility with prospective clients than paid advertising does. To get coverage from the local media, whether from the town newspaper, from TV or radio stations, or from trade journals, you need a fresh, timely story. It's usually worthwhile to hire an experienced publicist to position the stories, target appropriate media representative and write and send press releases. Usually, you can work on a short-term or contingency basis.

10. Finally, don't let customers simply slip away. Make an effort to reel them back in. It costs a lot less to retain a disgruntled or inactive customer than to acquire a new one. If you haven't heard from a customer in awhile, send a personalized e-mail inquiring whether all is well. For a customer who suffered a bad experience, pick up the phone, acknowledging the unpleasantness and ask if there's anything you can do. A discount can't hurt either. Being kind to customers is the smartest low-cost marketing you can do.

These are 10 easy steps to follow and help create opportunity and success for your business.

The 3 Pillars of relationship marketing for e-marketing

1st pillar - customer relationship management (CRM)

Target, acquire, transact, service, retain, and build lon-term relationships with customers.

2nd pillar - customer experience management (CEM)

This represents the discipline, methodology, and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction, and transaction with a company, product, or service.

3rd pillar - customer collaboration management (CCM)

This is a philosophy and business strategy, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value.

"If you have an unhappy customer on the internet, he doesn't tell his six friends, he tells his 6,000 friends." Jeff Bezos, President, Amazon.com

__

Engaging the community while staying budget-oriented

There  are  well  over  150  million  other  pages,  groups, events,  etc.  to  choose  from.   Online  community  building  has  proven  to  be  an  exceptional  marketing  tool.

There are certain principles to building your own online communities. 

1.  Observe - Visit social media hangouts for Web users on the topics of interest in the industry of the company that wants to start a a social media community.  The automobile brand, Saturn, had branch managers which led the way by tracking conversations among users and industry analusts at other blogs and similar web sites to form the largest active community.

2.  Recruit - Find internet users who want to talk about the industry and recruit them for joining the new social media property.

3.  Evaluate platforms - Decide whether the format should be a blog, vertical search site (reputation aggregator), pure online community, or social work.

4.  Engage - Plan ways to get community members to talk and upload content.

5.  Measure - Identify metrics that will measure the success of the effort.  For example, number of comments posted to the blog.

6.  Promote - Plan ways to advertise and build a buzz in the social media and with reputation aggregators.

7.  Improve - Use the metrics to continuously improve the community.

The HELM Group can assist your company in acquiring the marketing component  only reached by a social community.

Who's afraid of the big bad Facebook?

The times of letters and mailers are gone! The times of email are gone, what is the next step? How will you stay ahead of the curve? Facebook, yes believe it or not Facebook is the place where consumers live at. They have learned that sending emails to many different people can be time consuming, so why not post a status and share this all at one time. The brick and mortar stores are losing ground to the internet highway and you need to be one of the pit stops. Did you know that 25% of the top 100 online retailers do not have a Facebook page, but 91% plan to have one? Knowing that 51% of Facebook users will buy and 60% will recommend products and like their pages, corporations are still waiting to set up a page. Is this because they are not computer savvy? Maybe they just don’t understand how easy it is to set one up. Here at The HELM Group, we are here to make things easy. We have provided a “how to” video to get you started. If you still need help, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Instructional video on how to set up a business page

What makes a great website sell itself?

There are some things to keep in mind when designing a website for consumers; segmentation and targeting, differentiation, and positioning. If you really want a business to succeed, you will have to appeal to a certain target market and design around the market segments. The following is a brief explanation on how we will help your company achieve its goals.

                                                      



Segmentation:

First we will help you perform a market segmentation which is breaking down consumers into a similar pool based on characteristics (gender, price, location, etc). Second, we would help you determine your market segment and then target your market, which is selecting a market segment that is attractive to your company. We can do this through a niche, which is targeting one segment and developing around that segment, or as individualized targeting which aims to a small group of people.

Differentiation:

Now that we compiled all the market segments for you, what do you do with the information? We start the differentiation process which is separating your services from your competitors; it’s what you do to your product. We will determine if you need product differentiation (specialized product), service differentiation (specialized service), personnel differentiation (exceptional employees), channel differentiation (focusing only on one channel of service), or image differentiation (Google vs AOL).

Positioning:

This is how your company designs an image in the minds of the market segment chosen. We will help you determine what attribute to use: product or service (the newest books), technology (all books online), benefits (try it before you buy it), user (all college texts available), competitive (our books are cheaper then campusbookrentals.com), or integrator (a full range of college, fiction, non-fiction books).

Watch this video to get a taste of our talent, we will show you not only how to establish your market, but how to organize your site as well:

Example from The HELM Group

Do you bowl with a curtain in front of the pins?

Have you ever been bowling with the curtain in front of the pins? Just kept throwing the ball down there and waiting until the end of the game to see your score? Then why would you not track your online traffic? How do you know your blog is getting digs or your Facebook account is driving any traffic? There are simple ways to track the performance of your social media sites and here at The Helm Group, we will help you install and track your sites. Why do you say you really need to track them when things are fine? You are leaving money on the table by not analyzing your sites. You should always have multiple plans going at the same time and see which one outperforms the other or which one drives more referrals. Tracking your sites is the easiest and most powerful tool to any business. What do you gain by tracking? How about the ability to see how many unique visitors you have; the cost per visitor; how many page views per customer; how many customers came back; which application drove them to the site; and how much time they spent playing a game, watching a video or listening to music.

There are multiple individual tracking applications or even a large scale social media dashboard. One of the most simple to use is Google Analytics, by simply adding a unique code to the site, you can receive data at your finger tips to grab all the above information mentioned in the previous paragraph. You will know how the site is performing and look at it daily.

Want to expand to a more diverse application that takes all your social media sites and combines them into one report? Time is of the essence in marketing and seeing how all your sites are reacting can be the difference between generating a profit or loss. Using a social media dashboard like Unilyzer will show you all sites at one time and how they perform against each other, how many new customers, returning customers and how many hit the dreaded “back” button. Want to see how you are performing daily, weekly or monthly for up to a year? Want to see the trends of your sites? We can help you use these simple tools with easy graphics so that one does not become overwhelmed with all this information. We can explain what the bounce rate is or the stickyness and why you should worry about these. At The HELM Group, we will always steer you in the right direction!

Using a sales promotion to take advantage of online marketing.

Who doesn’t love:

A.)   Free food

or

B.)    A little friendly competition

Put the two together and you have an online marketing masterpiece! It’s as simple as introduce a new competition on tweeter to see who can get the most retweets and they win some free food. The pure genius portion of this is that they are spreading your product around the world and all you have to do is give up a little portion of your product. With the emergence of Twitter, it’s a simple few key strokes on behalf of the students and a multitude of marketing for your company. Dorito’s put this to the test with their Doritos Locos contest. The participants only had to make a tweet including #doritoslocostacos and #contest, that’s it! Whoever had the most retweeted won a visit from their Taco Bell truck for some free tacos. Yes, must online companies do not have trucks going state to state, but offer a new product or service, but the key is to get the word out.

taco-bell-throws-tweet-doritos-locos-taco

H.E.L.M. Understands College Marketing and College Students like NO other company

H.E.L.M. creates "BUZZ."

• We will ease the ability to locally advertise and use school papers to your advantage.
• We will interact with student customers online at social networking sites like Facebook, or at student-focused Web sites like Student.com and SparkNotes, which have student message boards. 
• We will help you assess if it would be effective to  purchase online ads with sites like Campus Hook and STA Travel, which have an entirely student audience.
• We turn campuses into ads using companies such as New Age Marketing, a marketing firm that focuses on the student market and has a dedicated “Campus Postering” service.
• We use companies like BzzAgent to help you put your product in front of students who will talk about it.   THIS IS THE "BUZZ !!"
• THIS IS ALL JUST THE BEGINNING  -- THE REWARD IS AROUND THE CORNER

IS THIS FOCUSED MARKETING WORTH THE EFFORT ??  

YES  --  look:

Reasons students are worth a slice of your marketing budget:

•      College students eventually become educated, brand-loyal consumers.
•      The college market is geographically stable.
•      More than 15 million U.S. college students spend more than $200 billion annually.
•      Consisting almost exclusively of 18- to 24-year-olds, the college demographic is age stable.
•      Marketing to college students is cost-effective because they respond more favorably to grassroots messaging than to flashy ads.
•      College students are trendsetters, often focused more deeply on their friends and family—and their cash—than on their studies. So even when they’re not making purchases, they’re influencing them
•       College students are “trial receptive,” meaning that they are open to new ideas and have yet to develop strong brand affiliations; as such, they are an ideal market for companies that want to color outside the lines.

WE know where the kids are....

and... where they are not...

H.E.L.M. understands that because they grew up in an ad-saturated world, college students are harder to reach with traditional advertising. They are more likely to respond to word of mouth, including recommendations from their friends.  H.E.L.M. also understands that while the college market is incredibly stable and static, individual student consumers are moving targets, changing both attitudes and addresses frequently.        

H.E.L.M. has all the bases covered !!!

     ._____________________________________________