Holmes is proud to give back to the Springfield community.

At HOLMES, we love to support our local events!  Fundraisers, concerts, art & music.  It all makes SPRINGFIELD a wonderful place to live and work. We want to support your efforts by providing you FREE posters to promote your performances and events. The website will be launched soon. Stay tuned to find out more about this opportunity!

Stay Positive and Persevere!

We have all been there. It’s so easy for business owners to fall prey to negative thinking. It seems more difficult to find the positive under lining in a situation when the negative thoughts can so easily fill your mind. It’s important to work on the skill of staying positive. Many entrepreneurs have found success in utilizing the failures they experienced to thrust them upward. Take Frederick W. Smith for example, the founder of Fed-Ex. It was quite a process for what started as an idea to provide overnight delivery service, he was met by opposition and setbacks all along his journey. Over time it exploded into the company that it is today. What would have happened if he gave up and listened to the negativity? Likely someone else would have came along after him with the very same idea.

Many times it all starts with an idea, a need, a way to help someone else. Try and remember what it was that started you on your career journey and find that passion once again to overcome any obstacle put before you….and look at those obstacles as challenges. If we can retrain our minds to think positive rather than negative we have a start on the path to greatness!  America needs to get back to what made us what we are….our optimism and ideals make this country great!

Here are some tips to retrain that negative voice in your head….

• Surround yourself with positive people. The ideas that can be shared between professionals is limitless!

• Make note of the positive things that have happened for you and keep that list in front of you. Recall what success felt like, so you stay motivated to feel it again.

• Find a symbol that keeps your eye on the goal and post it in your work space to serve as a constant reminder to stay positive in everything that you do.

• Focus on the opportunities that lie in front of you.  Too often we think only about what we can’t do or our own limitations we set for ourself. Instead make a list of the opportunities that you do have and set mini goals to try and achieve 1 of those at a time. One step forward is better than two steps back.

• Try to picture yourself succeeding again. Any success you have had can be a catalyst for another. Always try to envision what success will feel like if it happens again. This will help keep you focused on the positive images rather than negative ones we create in our minds of failure.

• Lastly…never ever give up! Sometimes you are one failure away from a success and how would you ever know if you gave up too soon.

Sometimes asking for help is a good thing!

It’s not always a terrible thing to look for help outside your organization. The fact is that you will only be as good as the people that surround you and who can’t use a little outsider influence sometimes. There are so many professionals out there that have made a career of helping others and often times you can achieve an end result faster by utilizing those resources. Why reinvent the wheel if you can learn from the trials and mistakes and successes of others.

Here at Holmes we have always been open minded to seek out professionals in our industry that will push us and challenge us to constantly strive to be better. Can you honestly look at your organization and say that you need to change NOTHING? If so, then most likely your not pushing yourself to be better.

Sometimes seeking help and advice from outsiders is a good thing!

Holmes adds talented Graphic Designer to our team of professionals!

Holmes has added a local talented Graphic Designer to our already great team of professionals. Andrew Sharpe holds an Associates Degree from Sinclair Community College in Visual Communications and a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design from Cedarville University.

Andy’s specialty is in creative conceptual design. He enjoys using creativity to problem solve by creating images and visual solutions to achieve an end goal.

We are very excited to have Andy on our team and are confident that he will enhance our menu of services with his creative talents and assist our clients with achieving their goals.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you better market your products or services.

We love it when a plan comes together!

It’s the call that can start to make you feel a little nervous. We had an out of state client call one of our representatives on a Friday at 1pm with an urgent need. They had a trade show event the next day on Saturday and needed a retractable banner for their display. We would need to design, produce and ship in a couple hours.

This is where Holmes can really shine. Sure…..in our business of manufacturing a product there is a process to creating and producing your marketing materials but we have the unique power to come through on short notice when you really need it. It’s just one of those strengths we have as a team. It requires great communication and for everyone to be flexible. We genuinely care about our clients and their success, so we greatly believe in the motto “whatever it takes”. On this hectic Friday, we received the call for the urgent need, we very quickly set a plan and we met the clients need, all in a couple of hours. We sure do love it when a plan comes together!

 

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.

 

Entrepreneur Magazine

10 Marketing Trends for 2011

As the global economy struggles to correct itself, and social-media marketing becomes a strategic imperative, small businesses will have exciting opportunities to expand in new directions this year.

The need for trust, value and brand transparency, among other trends from last year, are just as important today. But the current shift to geotargeting, mobile marketing and online reputation management require that small businesses modify their plans to surpass competitors.

Here are 10 marketing trends that small businesses should incorporate now to be positioned for success from the start.

1. Building reliable brand advocates. The idea that you need tens of thousands of Twitter followers, blog subscribers, LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends to build your business via social media is dead. Quality connections with those who are loyal to the business and the brand are far more helpful to spread your message than large groups of connections who disappear after the first interaction.
2. Excelling in one area rather than being all things to all people. This will be a year for small businesses to focus on their unique niches and position themselves as the definitive source for information, products and services related to the specific places in the markets where they operate.
3. Creating quality content as a viable marketing tool. Social media marketing and content marketing go hand-in-hand, and this is the year businesses will create useful content that adds value to the online conversation and to people’s lives. The Web is a cluttered place. Amazing content is essential to break through the noise.
4. Moving more marketing dollars to social media. Statistics show that large and small companies are shifting budget dollars to social media and other digital marketing initiatives and away from print and radio advertising. Consumers spend more time online than ever and to reach them and stay competitive, small businesses need to have a presence on the social Web.
5. Tracking brand reputations on the social Web in greater detail.Social media has given consumers a large platform to voice their opinions, and small-business owners are realizing the importance of actively monitoring their reputation on the Web. With dashboards and social media aggregators like Hootsuite and Spredfast, it’s easier than ever for small businesses to develop, nurture and track their stature online .
6. Increase in branded online experiences to meet diverse consumer needs. Simply having a Twitter account or Facebook page isn’t enough this year. Small businesses must surround consumers with branded online destinations such as a blog, LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel, Flickr profile and so on. Consumers can then pick and choose how they want to interact with your brand. Of course, quality trumps quantity, so extending a brand across the social Web must be done strategically to maximize opportunities without compromising content and communications.
7. Pursuing mobile marketing. There is absolutely no doubt this is the year of mobile marketing. While still in its infancy, it is the marketing imperative of the future. With mobile advertising, branded mobile apps and mobile marketing apps like Foursquare, consumers will expect businesses to have a mobile presence in 2011.
8. Geotargeting and localized marketing will become a top priority.Local discount websites like Groupon and local review sites like Yelp make it easy for consumers to find deals and reviews about businesses in their neighborhoods and beyond. Creating targeted, local marketing campaigns using these popular tools will become the norm this year.
9. Accepting that silo marketing is ineffective. Offline, online and mobile marketing initiatives create an opportunity to lead consumers from one message to another by integrating those strategies. You can drive a significantly higher return on investment by cross-promoting branded online destinations, discounts, contests and events.
10. Co-marketing to boost returns and lower marketing costs. The economy is still struggling, which means small businesses can benefit from economies of scale by partnering with complementary businesses to develop co-marketing programs in 2011. Promotional partnerships not only lead to reduced costs but also can lead to increased exposure to new audiences.

This year, all businesses will be experimenting with a variety of online, localized and mobile marketing initiatives. Remember, even if you’re not leveraging marketing trends and opportunities, your competitors are.