Running a successful marketing campaign is contingent upon several factors. This includes realistic goal setting, organization, communication, execution, and keeping track of metrics. In the past, there were limited tools and resources to aid in a marketing campaign. These tools were primitive and many lacked efficiency. Fortunately, cloud apps have changed the marketing landscape and are ideal for business owners looking to streamline their marketing campaigns and their progress.

Let’s discuss the benefits of cloud apps and some of the best ones available for streamlining marketing campaigns.

Use Cloud Apps to Streamline Marketing Campaigns

Data Storage

Perhaps the most beneficial part of cloud apps is their ability to safely and securely store data. Whether you’re using spreadsheets, documents or forms, information can be conveniently saved and accessed whenever necessary. Since this data is in the cloud and not saved onto a computer, disc or USB, there are no worries about it being lost or destroyed.

Even if your computer has a meltdown, all data from your marketing campaign could easily be retrieved online. In an uncertain world where there’s always the potential for curveballs and human error, cloud apps offer marketers a peace of mind that critical data will never be lost.

It’s also relatively secure because the cloud can only be accessed by authorized individuals with the username and password.

Convenience

If you’re coordinating multiple people into your marketing campaigns, it’s important that everyone can quickly access the information they need. For instance, one person may be in charge of SEO, another in charge of social media and another responsible for email marketing. Using a cloud app allows each person to log in and work on whichever aspect of the campaign they need to from any location that has Internet access.

This means that a small business can efficiently run its marketing campaign with employees across the country or even the world. Since many cloud apps are also available on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, this allows employees to complete tasks while they’re on the road and increase productivity.

Low Cost

Although big companies may have the funds to pay for elaborate software to run marketing campaigns, many small to mid-sized businesses are on a limited budget. Since many cloud apps are inexpensive or even free, they’re a great solution for staying on track without breaking the bank. Many cloud providers also operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, so there’s no need for long contracts and obligations. Besides this, updates and upgrades are usually part of the package, so there’s no need to pay additional fees.

Now that you understand what the inherent advantages of cloud apps are, let’s discuss some of the more popular products on the market.

Google Drive

This is the preferred choice of many marketers and business owners because it’s simple, effective and free. According to TechCrunch, Google Drive had over 10 million users as of mid 2012 and this number is likely to keep growing. It’s easy to use and allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, folders, forms, drawings and presentations. The interface has a minimalist aesthetic with a clean, white background.

Projects can be stored according to title, the last date they were modified, opened or edited for efficient organization. Unlike some more complicated apps, this platform is also highly intuitive and the basics can be learned by most people very quickly. This makes it practical and minimizes the learner’s curve. If you want to upload existing documents from your computer, it’s easy to do. Due to the large volume of free storage, it’s equipped to handle the data needs of most businesses.

My favorite part of Google Drive is the fact that it allows team members to collaborate simultaneously on the same document. This means the whole team can view and edit a spreadsheet together, improving collaboration and reducing headaches.

Many people also use Google Calendar, which is perfect for keeping track of deadlines and keeping things on schedule. It will also notify you via email when a project is due or of other important information.

HootSuite

When it comes to running a social media marketing campaign, this is one of the most popular and effective platforms. It allows you to manage profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Mixi and even Myspace. In a nutshell, HootSuite makes it easy to monitor user engagement and track the progress of a social media campaign.

For Facebook, you can monitor feeds and coordinate posts with greater ease. On Twitter, it’s simple to schedule tweets, track how many mentions a profile receives, favorite tweets, etc. Integrating HootSuite with Google+ makes it possible to monitor circles, comments and user activity. It also provides more control over publishing to maximize the impact of a campaign.

This platform incorporates a highly sophisticated analytics program to help marketers uncover information about their demographic. Data can be broken down by geographical location, language and posting source to gain insights. By integrating various social media profiles with this app, it will produce comprehensive analytics reports that can be broken down daily, weekly or bi-weekly. This makes it easy to spot trends and make the adjustments to better optimize a campaign.

Evernote

If you have a lot on your plate and are always coming up with ideas, this app can be very helpful. It can be accessed via computer, tablet or smartphone and allows you to store a variety of media. During a brainstorming session, you can conveniently make notes to view later. You can save images, important websites, files, snapshots and documents from one central location. Once data is saved, it can conveniently be retrieved on any compatible device regardless of where you’re at.

Collaborating on projects and sharing notes with employees is simple, which helps capitalize on new ideas while they’re still fresh. Evernote also has a feature that allows you to search for whatever you’re looking for via tags. Consequently, it can hasten any project and eliminates having to manually search for information. Basically, this cloud app is ideal for small marketing teams that need to quickly share information and boost productivity.

Regardless of the location of team members, everyone can work alongside one another to accomplish the most tasks with the least amount of effort. Since everything is stored online, there’s no need to worry about broken computers or losing valuable information.

Asana

When communication between employees is critical and there are tight deadlines, this app can come in handy. Asana is all about productivity and ensuring that each team member completes their tasks on time. Through Asana and email notifications, time sensitive information can be sent and received quickly. Individual employees can receive tasks, which can be prioritized according to importance.

Since you can view other team members’ tasks and priorities, this can reduce wasted time spent at meetings and more time can be dedicated to actually getting marketing done. If you’re behind on a certain project, you will know before it’s too late and you can take the necessary steps to get back on track. Like many other apps, Asana can be used on a variety of mobile devices for streamlined access to information. Basically, this app is intended to improve communication and boost productivity.

Cloud Apps Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Use Cloud Apps to Streamline Your Marketing Campaign appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Apple products, including the iconic iPhone, may not be the first choice for many small business owners and entrepreneurs because of the price tag. But that could change if the legendary tech company were to offer a line of new iPhones at what even some in the industry consider the unbelievably low price of $99 MSRP.

Actually, the speculation that Apple could release a cheaper version of the iPhone as early as this summer has circulated for months.

Budget iPhone Could be Coming

This week Reuters reported Apple is considering a budget iPhone in a plastic casing that might come in a variety of colors. The report says a cost as low as $99 has been discussed but not yet finalized.

The article quotes several sources including some in the tech giant’s supply chain in Asia, but Apple has yet to comment.

Back in April, website 9 to 5 Mac went a bit wild speculating about possible colors for a cheaper plastic iPhone line.

The site started with colors used for a line of iPods already on the market and asked 3D modeler Ferry Passchier to create a gallery of 10 possibilities.

Competition Tends to Drive Down Price

Apple is under pressure to offer lower price and greater variety in a smartphone and tablet market where it faces increased competition from many rivals.

Analysts say the company especially needs cheaper products to compete in emerging markets like China and India.

We’ve reported before about budget mobile products targeted specifically at emerging markets, some not even being offered in the U.S. But there is no indication whether a cheaper plastic iPhone would be limited to these markets.

Sources say the cheaper phone could be available later this year or as late as 2014.

Image: Apple

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Ten or 15 years ago, managing your information technology was simpler in one sense.  A company decided on its computing environment -– its designated operating system, devices and software –- and that’s what employees used.  Period.

But then along came the BYOD trend.  BYOD, which stands for “Bring Your Own (computing) Device” to work, has swept America in the past five years.  Employees got used to using technology in their personal lives – so much so that that they didn’t want to give it up when at work.

We all seem to want the flexibility to work from home and while on business travel, using devices we individually feel comfortable with.  And of course we all want to use the coolest new mobile devices rather than staid company-issued laptops or desktop computers.

If your business is like ours, you’re now under pressure to allow employees to use their own smartphones, tablets and laptops for work.   A study last year found that 95% of large companies surveyed allow employees to use employee-owned devices for work.  It’s now become ingrained in the workplace.

The BYOD trend has benefits, to be sure.  It makes for happier employees.  They can be more productive while working outside the office.

BYOD Trend Challenges for Small Businesses

But the BYOD trend also poses extra challenges for businesses:

Control - One obvious thing is that it is harder to control your IT environment.  With companies relying more on technology to conduct business, there’s simply more to manage to make sure everything works as seamlessly as possible.  Top that off with employees using a variety of devices and operating systems … and complexity multiples.

Personal vs. Work - Then you have the morphing of personal activities with work activities when people use a single device for both.  The question becomes how to partition them. How do you keep personal email separate from work email in a way that employees don’t resent, and that protects both the company and the employee?

Mobility - Your team may work from different locations, such as their homes, or they may simply do more work while out in the field or on business trips. They will be using mobile devices and that brings added challenges. Mobile security is one of them – and that can be as simple an issue as a tablet getting lost.  One honeypot study found that when mobile devices where intentionally lost, in almost all cases the data was accessed, either for illicit purposes or simply to discover the owner.  If a mobility-related incident resulted in losses, the average was almost $250,000.

Security - Small businesses in general face more IT security challenges than ever before.  According to one study, companies with fewer than 250 employees were the focus of 31 percent of all cyber attacks last year.  And with so many different devices, and so many of them being mobile devices, security concerns are multiplying.

So, What Can You Do?

A lot, actually.  The most important thing is:  do not turn a blind eye to BYOD devices.

Recognize that the IT environment is very different today.  It calls for new policies, employee education, adoption of up-to-date best practices, and last but not least, implementing device management tools and other technology solutions designed for a BYOD environment.

Here are 5 steps to take to operate in a BYOD environment:

1 .  Require Notification

The whole idea behind the BYOD trend is giving greater freedom to employees. However, there are ways to achieve a sense of freedom, without abdicating control altogether.   For one thing, make it a policy that all devices have to be “registered with” or brought to the attention of your  IT administrator or any outside firm that assists you with IT, so that device management solutions can be enabled.  Some employers exert more control by creating a list of  ”approved BYOD devices.”  While this poses some restrictions on employees, at least it meets them halfway.  You have to know who is using what.

2.  Adopt Best Practices

For instance, require mobile devices to be secured with a password-protected screen lock when not in use.  Also, require employees to notify the company immediately in the event a mobile device is lost or stolen.  These and other best practices will help protect your business.

3.  Create a Policy

With freedom comes responsibility. Create a written BYOD policy for employees. This could be in the form of a memo, incorporated into the employee handbook, and/or placed on the company intranet.  Make employees aware of what is acceptable, and what’s not.

4.  Educate Employees

Take the time to educate employees about the challenges and risks.  You’ll get more cooperation if they understand the “why” behind rules.  A lunch and learn session or simply bringing up the topic in staff meetings can go a long way.

5.  Implement a mobile device management solution

This is probably one of the most crucial things you can do.  A mobility management solution gives you a way to manage multiple devices and applications, from a central dashboard.  It enables you to view the “big IT picture” and treat BYOD devices as integral points in your IT systems – not something separate or unrelated.

Look for one that offers robust security and that protects important company data.  Security certainly will be at the top of the list.  But you also want the ability to monitor and manage mobile devices.

Beyond that, some mobility management solutions can help you manage expenses, too, through consolidated reporting.  You can manage different devices and different plans through a single dashboard.

Advanced security specifically for mobile devices, such as capabilities for remote wipe of data in the event a mobile device is lost, and data encryption, can create peace of mind.

Data archiving solutions can also add to convenience. They help you meet disaster recovery and legal archiving requirements, and further secure your IT assets.

Bottom line:  there is a lot you can do to allow employees the freedom and flexibility to use devices they prefer.  You don’t have to sacrifice protection of your business assets or create an unwieldy logistical situation in doing it.

Shutterstock: BYOD Message, Mobile, BYOD at Work

The post 5 Ways to Avoid BYOD Nightmares appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Is your small business ready to hire or does it have any immediate hiring plans? If not, you’re in line with the majority of small and midsized companies in the U.S., according to the latest Sage SMB Hiring Outlook Survey from Sage North America.

According to Sage, 25 percent of SMBs overall say they either have hired or will hire in 2013, while 47 percent expect staffing to stay the same. Only 7 percent have cut or plan to cut staff this year. The rest still weren’t sure of their hiring plans.

The survey polled businesses with 99 or fewer employees. Companies with more than 20 employees were significantly more likely to have already hired or have hiring plans. Thirty-four percent of companies of this size had hired or plan to hire, while 34 percent planned to keep staffing levels the same. In comparison, just 18 percent of companies with fewer than 20 employees had hired or plan to hire, while 55 percent plan to keep staffing levels the same.

However, size wasn’t the biggest factor in whether a company has hired or will hire this year. Increased demand for its products or services was the primary influencer, cited by 81 percent of companies that are hiring. Larger companies (with 20 or more employees) were also more likely to be hiring because they felt optimistic about the economy—36 percent cited an improved economic outlook as a reason they were hiring.

The biggest reason companies aren’t hiring?

Not surprisingly, it’s lack of demand for their products or services (40 percent), followed closely by economic uncertainty (39 percent), non-healthcare-related costs of doing business (26 percent) and continued uncertainty in Washington (20 percent).

Prior Sage surveys reported taxes and regulations hampered SMB growth, but this survey shows that although both taxes and regulations are factors in hiring, they aren’t top factors for not hiring. Small business owners are a sensible lot, and what’s happening in their own companies—not factors outside their control—is the primary driver for their choices.

There’s also some heartening news among the companies that have hired or plan to hire this year: A whopping 82 percent plan to bring on full-time employees, while 29 percent plan to hire part-timers, 19 percent plan to hire seasonal workers and 10 percent plan to hire contract workers.

As small business owners know, hiring full-time employees is a leap of faith since full-timers typically cost more than other types of employees in terms of training, benefits and wages. Plus, few entrepreneurs relish bringing on full-time workers only to lay them off again—so business owners are typically feeling pretty confident before they bring on new full-time staff.

The prevalence of business owners who are committed to full-time hiring means a significant percentage of entrepreneurs are feeling optimistic about their futures—and that’s good news.

Hiring Photo via Shutterstock

The post How Do Your Business’s Hiring Plans Stack Up? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Last year we published a list of 20 Social Media Monitoring Tools. One of the more popular tools on that list is Hootsuite. Today we give you a deep dive into Hootsuite:  what it is and how it can make you more productive with social media.

If you are looking for a tool that lets you manage all of your social media accounts and presence in a single place, and collaborate as a team on them, then Hootsuite should be at the top of your list to investigate.

Hootsuite is a Web-based tool (although it also can be used on popular mobile devices- see screenshot above).

You take a few minutes to set up a Hootsuite account;  then connect your various social media profiles.  After this one-time setup, you will be able to use it.  Here are 4 essential functions that Hootsuite performs:

1. Manage Your Social Accounts in One Place

You do this from the Hootsuite dashboard, without visiting each site separately or using a multitude of different mobile apps.  This includes replying to others, retweeting, “liking,” sharing and responding to private messages, and otherwise carrying out activity on your social accounts.

The activities that you can perform vary by social media platform. You won’t be able to do every single thing for your Facebook Page, for instance. But we’ve found that we can do 90% of our day-to-day social activities from within Hootsuite.

You can manage Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google Plus, MySpace, WordPress and Mixi — individual profiles and business pages.

2. Schedule Updates

The built-in calendar is one of the most important features. Use it to schedule posts to your social accounts.  In other words, you can keep your accounts active. More importantly, you can be efficient by scheduling all your social updates at one time for, say scheduling once a day or once a week. In other words, you can “batch” your work. Then you aren’t constantly interrupting other activities to update social accounts throughout the day or week.

There’s also an auto-schedule feature that will automatically schedule your tweets and updates to go out at optimal times.

Running a marketing campaign and have a lot of updates to make over a period of say, two weeks?  You can actually upload a CSV spreadsheet for all the messages.

If you prefer “set it and forget it” automation, you can add RSS feeds to automatically update social accounts every time a new article goes out from your company blog, for example.  You can set it to post one item at a time (recommended) or more.  You can direct it to check for new items in the feed and post them, once per hour or up to once per day.

3. Communicate and Collaborate as a Team

You can assign tasks, such as responding to a tweet or a private direct message, to a team member, as seen above.  No emails or separate instant message instructions needed. Assignments are right there within the Hootsuite dashboard.

Also, because multiple users can use Hootsuite, everyone can “see” what activity is completed or hasn’t been done yet.  Again, no communicating via email or messaging programs to find out if someone followed up on that Twitter customer complaint yet, or not.   How many users you can have depends on which product level and upgrades you have purchased.

4. Get Analytics and Reports

Fragmented results here and there don’t do much to help you analyze and understand how well social media is working — or not.  For that, you really need to see a bird’s eye view of activity over a period of time, and be able to compare it.

Many social media platforms now offer analytics.  But who has time to run and grab those analytics from Facebook Insights, or a multitude of other social sites?  Hootsuite’s built-in analytics and reports  give this kind ability to track your progress and understand what’s working best, in one place.

Best of all, you can get weekly reports emailed to you.  These are extremely helpful.  For instance, here at Small Business Trends we review the analytics reports in staff meetings from time to time.

What I Like About Hootsuite

The company keeps investing in enhancements to its platform.  Hootsuite just keeps getting better.  And that’s not always true with products.

Here are two aspects that are particularly impressive:

Integration / Interoperability With Other Marketing Applications

You’re not limited to managing just the 8 social media platforms Hootsuite currently covers. You can extend capabilities to other social media sites and even other programs, by adding “apps” from the Hootsuite Apps Directory.

For instance, you’ll find apps for social sites such as Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, Scoop.it, YouTube and several more (see screenshot below).

Then there are apps that offer some level of integration or interoperability with popular marketing and CRM programs that businesses use.  There are apps for ConstantContact, Nimble, HubSpot, Salesforce, ZenDesk and more.  What exactly the apps allow you to do with Hootsuite varies by app.  For a description of one such app, see our write-up about the Batchbook and Hootsuite integration.

Most apps are free.  Some, like the app for Salesforce, require an additional monthly fee. But even the paid premium apps are relatively inexpensive. Apps usually cost less than $5 per month per premium app.

I like the fact that Hoosuite has been open to allowing these kinds of apps, through its developer program.  It makes Hootsuite more useful as a central dashboard and management tool.

Different Pricing Levels to Meet Different Needs

Another positive aspect of Hoosuite is that it offers different pricing and feature levels.

There’s a free level, for a single user to update 5 social profiles.  This is good for a really small startup or sole proprietor.  It’s also a risk-free way to try out Hoosuite.

The Pro version, currently $8.99  a month  – the price recently went up — can be used with a small team of two users.  Additional users can be added for a fee.  The added users can vary — anywhere from $10 to $15 for the third user, and $15 to $30 each additional after that.  It all depends on whether you are under the “new” pricing or old.

Note that some of the features in this review may only be available at the Pro level.

With Pro you can manage an unlimited number of social profiles.  You receive an enhanced analytics report, and can choose an unlimited number of apps.  There’s a 30-day free trial of this version, too.  The Pro version is what most small businesses likely will use.

The Enterprise version is for, well, large enterprises.  Pricing is not even available on the site for Enterprise.  The Enterprise version adds advanced features, such as advanced security, geo-targeting, advanced customer support. It also adds Hootsuite University, an online training program for social media and learning to use Hootsuite.

There’s a discount of 10% for annual billing instead of monthly, for some savings.

What I’d Like to See Hootsuite Do Differently

While I like the different levels of Hootsuite, some small businesses may consider it expensive to purchase certain add-ons ala carte.  The cost can really add up.

Hootsuite University is one such add-on I’ve heard people kvetch about.  Ala carte it’s $21 per month.  Small business teams really could benefit from training. But the pricing model poses a challenge.  Small business owners I’ve heard from are concerned that once you sign up for a monthly fee, if team members don’t use it, you could find your organization a year later paying for a service that’s rarely been used – just because somebody forgot to cancel it.  A one-time fee per user would solve that issue.

Another pricing issue is the limitations and expense of using vanity URL shorteners for brand enhancement of your links shared.  For instance, at Small Business Trends we’ve started using our own URL shortener of http://SBT.me.    Hootsuite allows custom URLs — but only if you sign up for Owly Pro.  That costs $49.99 per month.

Small businesses will be very cost sensitive about social media tools. Just 39% of small businesses say they get ROI from social media. Of those the majority isolate the dollar value to under $1,000 per year.

Still, at the base price of under ten bucks a month, Hootsuite Pro delivers excellent value. The base price should be affordable by most small businesses.  Just be careful about those add-ons!

At Small Business Trends we are paid customers of Hootsuite. We did not get any special consideration for this review.

More About Hootsuite

As mentioned, Hootsuite is a Web-based based app, and can be used from most modern browsers.  There are extensions (“hootlets” or “hootbars”) for Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Hootsuite offers mobile apps so that you can manage your social presence from an iPhone, Android devices and the iPad.

HootSuite Media, Inc. was founded in 2008 by Ryan Holmes, who is also the company CEO. Its headquarters is located in Vancouver, BC, Canada.  It has over 6 million users, who send 3 million messages a day through the dashboard.

Overall, Hootsuite is the gold standard today for managing your social media accounts.  It offers a strong affordable mix for small business users.

The post Review of Hootsuite: Manage Social Media From A Single Dashboard appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The following day, it drops to 25%. A week later, it whittles down to just 10%. And this is if your presentation is good.

With over 350 PowerPoint presentations given each second across the globe, how does one go about making theirs  stand out from all the others? This infographic by Slideshop provides ten valuable techniques on how you can make your presentation stand out from the crowd.

[Click here for full size version]

The post Presentations: How to Make Your Message Stick appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you’ve been curious about the new Twitter advertising platform, you may have a good reason to try it out soon. But you’ll have to be a small business customer using one of Chase Bank’s financial products first. Twitter announced a partnership with Chase Bank last week aimed at trying to encourage use of its little more than a year-old advertising service.

Twitter advertising was launched on an invitation-only basis to select users in March of 2012 and was opened to all U.S. users in April of this year. The new program would award $1 million worth of free Twitter advertising credits in $100 increments to “eligible” Chase small business customers.

As part of the partnership between Twitter and Chase, the bank’s estimated four million plus small business customers, including those using Chase’s Business Banking, Ink from Chase credit card and Chase Paymentech (a system for merchants to accept credit cards on mobile devices, will get other benefits too. Some of those will include access to research, best practices and workshops about using Twitter to grow a business. No word yet on how many of these customers will be eligible for the free small business advertising credits, but Twitter has promised more details early this fall.

The popular social site will also be sharing customized content through a new @ChaseSmallBiz Twitter account.

On the official Twitter blog, Russ Laraway, head of small business for Twitter, wrote:

Our goal is to help small businesses build better customer engagement, increase sales using direct response techniques, and engage more followers with compelling content. We’ll be posting videos, infographics, white papers and a how-to guide developed by Chase and Twitter to help small businesses learn more about the value of Twitter.

This isn’t the first time that Twitter offered advertising credits underwritten by a sponsor.  Another program was rolled out in 2012.

Bottom line: the advertising credits from Chase won’t be available for several months yet. Stay tuned and we will update you when they are rolled out to small businesses.

Twitter Photo via Shutterstock

The post Twitter Announces $1 Million in Ad Credits for Chase Small Business Customers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I’ll start out by saying that I love the Dolphin browser on my Samsung S3 (courtesy of the fine folks at the no-contract cell phone team at Ting for Business who provided me with a long term loaner phone). I tried Chrome and other default browsers, but they were marginal at best. As a completely free browser, Dolphin delivers for Android, iPhone and iPad. You can even download extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari which will allow you to sync stuff with your mobile device.

It is hard to take a photo of your phone when that’s your only camera. So I’m using a press kit photo from the company’s website.

What I Really Like:

• Has gesture and voice control. For gesture, you click in the lower corner of the screen. You create your own custom scribbles or sketches or shapes to serve as shortcuts to specific websites. You click and draw that gesture to get to the site. For voice, called Sonar, you shake the handset and up pops a microphone icon. Start speaking and it takes you there. Sort of like Apple’s Siri or Google Now.
• Evernote add-on that lets me clip pages to my Evernote account.
• They have a battery saver app to help you conserve battery usage on your smartphone. I guess it is in their best interest to ensure you have plenty of battery for surfing the Web.

What I Would Like to See:

• Something that lets me know there is a history list to the left and an apps list to the right of the main browser window. Essentially, you have to grab the far side of your window and slide left or right to find these admin type areas. Useful to know, but I happened upon it.
• I honestly don’t have anything else. I think it is one of the best browsers on the market.

If you are on a mobile phone and find yourself waiting for websites to load, test out a different browser like Dolphin. Again, it is a free browser and you can get it for your Android-powered phone, the iPhone and iPad.

The post Speed Up Your Mobile Browsing with Dolphin appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you sell directly to U.S. customers or provide marketing services to clients who do, pay attention. A recent report says a growing mobile market is already generating billions in U.S. sales. And businesses are also spending billions to market to customers via mobile channels.

The Mobile Marketing Association, a global trade association for the mobile marketing industry, says those numbers are only going to increase.

Consider that last year mobile marketing generated an estimated $139 billion in U.S. sales. This figure takes into account both business to business and business to consumer sales.

The association claims the “MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study” released last month, is the first comprehensive study of U.S. economic performance across the mobile marketing industry.

Huge Growth Projected

Most impressive is that this amount is expected to grow by more than half during the next two years. The report says sales generated through mobile marketing will top $400 billion by 2015, an amazing 52 percent rise.

But it’s not just sales that are increasing. The MMA study suggests the amount U.S. companies are willing to spend on mobile marketing is increasing too.

For example, in 2012 the study estimates retailers and marketers spent $6.7 billion to reach customers via mobile channels. That’s considerably less than the amount generated by mobile sales, but still represents a huge opportunity for businesses providing mobile marketing services.

The study projected that amount would also increase, reaching $19.8 billion by 2015.

Mobile advertising, mobile direct response or enhanced traditional media and mobile customer relationship management were all considered in that expenditure.

What it Means to You

While the MMA study was aimed at demonstrating the economic stimulus and job creation potential of mobile marketing, there is a clear message here for small businesses and entrepreneurs as well.

USA Today reported recently on how small businesses are already putting mobile marketing to work to generate additional sales.

We’ve reported previously on the importance of mobile technology to small business operations.

But the MMA study demonstrates the importance of mobile technology for growing your business too.

For many small businesses, this could include focusing on making sure you have a mobile friendly presence. It could also include focusing more attention on social media marketing, much of which is accessed via mobile devices by your customers.

You could also focus on developing mobile apps for your business. And, of course, if you provide marketing services to other business clients, it also means you should consider including mobile marketing services among your other offerings.

How is your business using mobile marketing to reach customers?

Mobile Photo via Shutterstock

The post Mobile Marketing Will Generate $400 Billion in Sales by 2015 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you are non-native-English-speaking man who runs a construction or real estate rental business, hires a tax preparer rather than doing his own taxes, and thinks that making money enhances social status, beware. Research by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) indicates that you are among the sole proprietors most likely to cheat on your personal income taxes.

Running your own business is one of the best ways to pay less in taxes than you owe, a recent New York Times article explained. The IRS knows this, of course, reporting that sole proprietors disclose only 43 percent of their income on their returns.

To figure out which taxpayers might be underpaying their taxes and be worthy of a second look from its auditors, the IRS’s computers assign a Discriminant Function System score (DIF) to each tax return filed. These scores use information from the IRS’s database of past tax filings to predict whether a taxpayer is likely to have under reported income.

Determining which sole proprietors might be underreporting income isn’t easy. Most business pay all that they owe. Even if the IRS reassigned everyone currently responsible for evaluating non-profit status applications for all politically conservative organizations (a little topical humor here), the agency would still lack the resources needed to audit all sole proprietors. For returns filed in 2011, the tax authority “only” audited 1.6 percent of individual returns with business income.

That’s why the IRS contracted with Russell Research to conduct a survey of sole proprietors in the first quarter of 2012. The investigators divided a representative sample of sole proprietors into the most and least “compliant” (IRS-speak for willing to pay all of the taxes they owe) on their DIF scores for their 2009 tax returns. They then compared the most and least compliant fifths on the basis of their answers to a range of survey questions.

The results, which were published in a study released earlier this year, provide insight into which sole proprietors are most likely to be tax cheats:

• Men were less likely than women to be “compliant.” While males made up 59 percent of the more compliant taxpayers, they composed 65 percent of the less compliant ones.
• Twice the fraction of sole proprietors who speak a language other than English at home were less compliant in paying taxes (14 percent versus 7 percent).
• Owners of companies with more employees were less compliant (average employment of 6.6 versus 3.6).
• Owners of professional, scientific and technical service businesses, health care and social assistance, and arts, entertainment and recreation businesses were more likely to be compliant than owners of construction, and real estate and rental and leasing businesses.
• Owners of businesses with lower sales tended to be more compliant (average sales of $47,000 versus $87,000).
• Owners of businesses with lower expenses tended to be more compliant (average expenses of $12,000 versus $50,000).
• Owners who complete their own tax returns tended to be more compliant (32 percent of the more compliant sole proprietors do their own taxes versus only 21 percent of the less compliant ones).
• People who indicated that they were more willing to take financial risks, and those who reported that overall status depends on finances, tended to be less compliant.
• People who were more cynical about the tax system, those who had more negative attitudes about the IRS, and those who were more skeptical about the value of government activity, tended to be less compliant.

Note to those of you at the IRS who read my posts: I abhor risk; am very positive about the government and the tax system; and think you are doing a fine job, despite recent news reports.

Just thought you’d want to know.

taxes Photo via Shutterstock

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