According to the 2012 IT in the Toilet report from integrated marketing agency 11mark, you probably have: 75 percent of Americans take their mobile devices into the bathroom with them, where 42 percent have read their email (including your marketing messages), 67 percent have read texts and over 50 percent of smartphone owners have used an app. Ten percent have even made an online purchase while in there! Are your operators standing by when they make that call? May sound crazy, but check out the stats. Maybe the most interesting thing about this study (besides that it was actually a study) is not that people take their cell phones into the bathroom—it’s already in your pocket, afterall—but that many people aren’t stopping what they were doing before they went in there.
Twenty percent of men and 13 percent of women make or take work-related calls; 26 percent and 15 percent, respectively, engage with work email; and 41 percent and 36 percent kept right on browsing the web. I’m thinking that if you had the time to take care of business while you were in there, that maybe you didn’t have to take care of “business” to begin with.
iPhone users were a bit less likely to use their phones in the bathroom than Android users (77 percent to 87 percent), but they were twice as likely to make a purchase while in there (20 percent to 10 percent). The bathroom shopping trend looks likely to increase with time as well. Only 2 percent of the Silent Generation (defined by this study as those born before 1946) had made a purchase from the water closet, compared to 6 percent of Baby Boomers (born between 1965 and 1976), 10 percent of Gen X (1965-1976) and 16 percent of Gen Y (1977-1993).
And, of course, there is the sobering realization that, while 90 percent of respondents at least washed their hands before leaving the bathroom, only 14 percent washed their phones. … What a dirty, dirty habit mobile has become.
Too Funny 
Sure, Google may be important but there are some 50 other key online locations where you must be dialed in today to get found by your target prospects—and it isn’t just a “set and forget” strategy. Once you get established in these places, you need to “stay fresh.” The Internet search engines and directories are like big grocery stores. There’s a “sell by” date on almost every piece of information out there and if you’re not delivering something new on a regular basis, you’re going to get knocked off the shelf by someone else who is.Marketing in general has not changed, only the vehicle. In the past, you may have placed an ad in a newspaper, yellow pages or had a commercial on t.v. or the radio. The face of this is changing and if we don’t change with it, we will no longer be found.The next ingredient is, once you get found, you must engage with your prospects on their terms—whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other social network, through a blog or even a podcast…It’s no longer just about having a Web site where people come to find your business—it’s about going where they are online and setting up a table in those locations where they hang out every day. However, it is important to find your niche and market that. If you are a Dentist n the Metro Denver area, you may be wasting your time marketing to folks in Fort Collins.