At the moment about 44% of all mobile phones are smartphones; a massive coup considering the smartphone market was invented less than 5 years ago in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. This rate of growth is accelerating and encompasses all age brackets and demographics. Aside from the hundreds of millions of active smartphones in the world today, tens of millions of mobile tablets have been sold in less than 2 years.

The writing’s on the wall and it’s clear- mobile devices are the wave of the future. Even normally conservative Microsoft believes mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are the future of computing, which is why the company’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system looks a lot more like a mobile platform than a PC platform. As mobile developers continue to improve their products and integrate them deeper and deeper into our lives, the majority of people that turn to these devices to meet their browsing needs will similarly increase.

Like it or not, you shouldn’t be surprised if the majority of your website’s visitors browsed over to your digital home on a mobile device. Isn’t it worth making sure they receive a warm, appealing welcome when they arrive?

How many potential clients or customers could a newspaper ad possibly reach? It is almost a given that it wouldn’t be nearly as many as social media’s far-reaching. The interests of the social media surfers and bloggers are as varied as the businesses in the world. It is the fastest way to get out the most information to the largest audience possible. So, why not use it to increase your own business. It is a product of progress and should be explored like all other innovations.

You may not have the time or inclination to spend the necessary hours on twitter or Facebook to spread your message or make new contacts. There are companies who specialize in just such tasks. They have been doing this for quite some time and have employees which have the expertise it takes to really make a difference for your company. Outsourcing the jobs that are vital to your business’ growth but for which you just don’t have enough time, may be the best option for you. You would be joining a large number of growing businesses that have taken the opportunity to move forward with modern and innovative techniques.

If you decide to outsource your marketing needs, the company you choose should be familiar with engaging Facebook and twitter to use these sites to their greatest potential. Facebook is so detailed in their client and customer demographics that it has proven to be an excellent advertising stage. Because Facebook collects much information about its members, advertising can almost be tailored directly to certain potential consumer groups. Not only can these groups be targeted, they themselves will communicate their thoughts and opinions about what you sell or offer. Like a row of standing dominoes, the network will connect from one to the next and so on. You can get this continuous flow of advertising by hiring the outsourcing company that has you in mind.

Yet Facebook provides another, perhaps even more powerful, advertising advantage. With Facebook ads you’re increasingly able to integrate your marketing messages directly into the timelines and newsfeeds of your most qualified prospects. Facebook is deeply focused on figuring out how, exactly, to best integrate advertisements to make them appear as natural, as fluid, and as appealing as status updates from friends.

Right now one of the top ways Facebook is accomplishing this ambition is through their nascent “sponsored stories” feature that mines individual’s Facebook activities to produce endorsements for products and services that are then shown to their networks. This form of totally integrated marketing is still young, but it’s expected to increase in sophistication and effectiveness as Facebook’s mobile app grows in popularity. Consider the following facts:

• Facebook derives nearly 100% of its revenue from advertising.
• Facebook mobile doesn’t utilize its traditional text-and-image based advertising.
• More and more Facebook users are migrating to using their mobile platform almost exclusively.

If Facebook is going to survive as a profitable company into the mobile age it needs to figure out how to integrate advertisements into their service with increased success- and that’s good news for you and your business!

You’ve no doubt seen these codes and wondered “what can QR Codes do for MY organization?”

The main benefit QR Codes offer businesses is the ability to close the gap between physical products and digital information. QR Codes are being printed on everything, from product packaging to fast food wrappers to fliers and posters. Furthermore QR Codes can be quickly and easily scanned by increasingly ubiquitous mobile devices, which means anyone with a smartphone can see your special code and connect instantly to additional information, instructional videos or special offers for your product, service or business.

The real genius of QR Codes lies in their ability to effectively attach multimedia elements to your physical products or advertisements, expanding the capabilities of your marketing efforts to new, multi-layered levels previously impossible.By destroying the walls of interaction and demolishing the barriers between the physical and the digital, QR Codes can provide your organization the ability to connect with your customers and tie together all of your marketing efforts like never before.

Mobile devices are quickly emerging as the primary method people use to find what they’re looking for in the “real world.” If an individual is looking for the best slice of pizza in a two block radius they’re not going to ask a passersby, they’re going to use a mobile app. If an individual is trying to choose between two products or services they’re going to browse a comparison website to find reviews of their options.

By practicing mobile marketing you will insure two things:

1. Your business will show up in mobile searches for your product or services offered.
2. Your business will have a POSITIVE presence on mobile platforms, one whose message brings you new clients and encourages old clients to become repeat customers.

These days you can neither afford to ignore mobile marketing, or to perform it incorrectly. You could spend hours a day attempting to monitor and perfect your mobile marketing, or you could work with a professional firm that specializes in this increasingly crucial element of customer attraction and client retention.

Google Places is a simple service offered by the search giant. When you sign up for Google Places your organization will find itself represented on Google Maps, and on the dedicated Google Places service, with a small yellow price tag. This price tag image helps your business stand out from the crowd and encourages users to click on it. Signing up for a Google Places tag is one of the fastest ways to generate visibility and interest among potential clients looking for what you offer, even if you neither rank high in the search engines nor show up at the top of a Google Maps search for your local services.

A  Google Places tag is more than a simply mention of your business, which is why we offer extensive services to optimize this potentially lucrative area of online marketing. We will make sure your Google Places tags offer powerful incentives to your potential customers (such as coupons or videos). We will also track your Google Places tag performance to make sure you’re providing the best performing information and offers to your potential clients, so your organization nets the greatest benefits from this valuable service.

On the surface Facebook ads may appear a lot like many other forms of online ads out there. They feature an image and text, and when an individual clicks on them that individual will be directed to a website or online offer. In this manner Facebook ads work a lot like Google advertisements, with one crucial difference- you have a lot more control over who sees your Facebook ads compared with who sees your Google advertisements.

Sure, Google’s advertising platform offers its share of demographic variables to target, but Google has nothing on the level of specificity offered by Facebook. Every single element of a Facebook user’s profile, from their age, to their gender, to their location, to their hometown, to the musicians they like and the preferred activities they list, can all be fed into Facebook’s advertising platform. If you had the appropriate information you could target a Facebook ad to a single individual- a level of specificity and focus no other advertising platform currently offers.

The key to advertising lies in niching your ads and sharply focusing your market, and Facebook’s advertising platform accommodates both of these needs perfectly.

At a base level it’s better to have a fan page for your business on Facebook than to not have one. Even if you don’t have a lot of time and resources to pump into actively promoting your business and engaging your clients you should still have a “home base” on Facebook which provides important information on your business. Make sure you create this page using your business’ name, include a few short paragraphs explaining what your business is and what it offers your clients, and then include a link to your business’ website.

However, if you want to get the most out of your Facebook page you need to actively engage your followers. Post regular updates and information to your page’s wall, sporadically send out messages to all of your followers, and generally use Facebook to keep your followers up to date on your business’ most recent news and developments.

Deciding how often you should engage your followers on Facebook can be tricky. On the one hand you don’t want to put too much information out there and overwhelm your followers with posts, messages and updates. Doing so will lose you followers and cause your remaining followers to unsubscribe from your updates. On the other hand you want to update often enough to keep your followers engaged and to keep them on the lookout for your more recent nugget of information.

The key to updating enough to keep your followers hooked without updating so much you lose their interest lies in updating only when you have something valuable to say. Posting one piece of valuable information a day is a good benchmark to shoot for. This valuable information can be notice of a sale you are running or are about to run, a piece of behind-the-scenes information like an engaging or tantalizing photograph, or even a Facebook specific promotion your business is running. Offering these promotions exclusively to your Facebook followers is a good way to both build up your following on the social media site and to make sure those followers actively anticipate your updates.

Overall, remember that successfully promoting your business on Facebook is all about providing a continuous stream of value to your followers. There is a lot of noise on Facebook and you will simply be ignored unless you’re offering information and data which your followers want to hear. The best way to determine if you are providing value to your clients is simple- see if you’re receiving feedback on your posts. If people “like” your posts, if they comment on your posts, if they share your posts, than you can rest assured your message is getting across and you’re actively using Facebook for your business in a successful manner.

If you’re going to waste a lot of time on Twitter it’s going to happen one way- you’re going to log in to Twitter to post something for your business and then you’re going to get caught up in the timeline of updates posted by all the people you’re following. Twitter’s timeline provides an up-to-the-minute listing of every little message the people you’re following send out into the world. Reading just one update on this timeline is akin to eating just one potato chip out of the bag- it’s impossible. Reading just one tweet leads to reading the tweet below it, which leads to reading the tweet below that one, which leads to reading the next tweet… and so on until 15 minutes have passed without you even realizing or expecting it.

There are a couple ways you can prevent yourself from wasting time getting caught up in your Twitter timeline. The first thing you can do is not follow anyone else, which will essentially eliminate your timeline altogether and remove the biggest time sink associated with the platform. This is a very effective method of eliminating the problem altogether, but it’s not an effective way to grow your followers base on Twitter. There’s no need to follow every single person on Twitter who follows you, but subscribing to other people in your industry is an important act of goodwill and a powerful method of gaining followers of your own when you’re first starting out.

There is a more elegant solution to the timeline problem which lets you follow all the people you want. All you need to do is schedule your posts using an external program like Tweetdeck. A program like Tweetdeck lets you schedule as many posts as you want for as far as you want into the future. If you’re feeling ambitious you can schedule posts for the next few months all in one go, though scheduling too far in advance prevents you from remaining flexible and topical with the information you tweet.   Scheduling a week’s worth of posts at a time is a great compromise between providing your followers with up-to-the-minute information and approaching Twitter as a daily burden. Using a program like Tweetdeck once a week will also remove the temptation of looking over your Timeline more than once a week, eliminating the program’s threat as a potential timesink.

There are plenty of other little tips and tricks associated with using Twitter effectively for your business, but none of those will provide you with too much help if you don’t have a grasp on the basic principle of the platform- provide value without getting personally caught up in its never ending torrent of noise.

Why not use our “TOI Blueprint”. Using the Blueprint, you enter in the hours you are spending on your daily tasks and the income that you want to be making. The Blueprint will show you how much your time is worth and what can be easily outsourced. For example, your goal maybe to increase your income by $50,000 this year. However, you know you will need to free up a minimum of 10 hours per week. You actually have gone as far as making a list of the tasks that you will need to do to accomplish this goal. For example:

1. Send out weekly email to clients and prospects

2. Send out a monthly postcard with offers to a list of prospects to build your database

3. Create a series of one page websites with data capture that are optimized for search engines

4. Create and maintain Social Media channels to communicate to clients and prospects.

5. Attend 2 Networking meetings a month to look for affiliates who can refer business

So how will you accomplish this? The best way is to hire a virtual assistant (VA) for 20 – 40 hours per month. You can assign these and more remedial tasks so you will have the time to plan and delegate.

If you would like a copy of our Blueprint, feel free to email blevin@transformationalenterprises.com and we will send you this spreadsheet so you can do the calculations.