As the title suggests, this Hub will be all about marketing ideas that will boost sales today. Every small business owner is concerned about the state of our economy and it's impact on his or her income. But just as there are a great number of concerned small business owners out there, there are a great number who are enjoying unprecedented success right now.

What is it that these business owners are doing that the concerned, scared and worried ones aren't? The answer is that many of them have gotten smarter about marketing their small business.

Just as many small business owners are cutting back on their marketing efforts, the other guy is stepping his up and in doing so, filling a void left by the competition and in turn, eating his lunch.

A smart small business owner can easily step in and dominate his market right now. It is right there for the taking. By being a smarter marketer, you can join the ranks of the small business owner who is enjoying unprecedented success right now.

As small business owners, the life blood of our business comes from two places, keeping our current customers, and constsanlty attracting new customers. Focusing on one while neglecting the other, will eventually spell doom.

Here I want to focus on attracting new customers and clients. The way we generally get new customers is through advertising of one sort or another. Advertising comes in many forms. Billboards, TV commercials, radio ads etc. But for most small businesses today, advertising is generally centered around three areas: Yellow pages, Newspapers and Direct Mail.

The problem is however that with the exception of direct mail, these forms of advertising are and have been becoming less and less effective, to the point where they are simply costing you valuable marketing dollars.

The interenet has taken over. For the first time in history, more people are using interent search than yellow pages for local busiess needs. So even if they plan on doing business locally, they are using the internet first. Read This Report Which Proves It.

And forget about newspapers, they are losing customers faster than they can print the paper. The medium of the age is the internet. That is where your prospects are,, that is where they are searching for your products and that must be part of your over all marketing strategy.

Direct mail is still a viable marketing vehicle. It is still a great way to reach not only your current, clients, but also new ones. Direct mail works best with special offers and incentives and you should consider direct mail as a portion of your over all marketing plan.

As a small business owner myself, I can say from experience how we make our small business marketing decisions. Here it is: A advertising sales rep walks in and says "The deadline for our next issue is today, how big an ad do you want?"

With no thought of our message, no research of who we want our message to reach, no way of even knowing if the ads we place will have worked, we sign up. And in most cases, that money is wasted. And the cost is in not only the money spent on the ad, but on the sales we lost by not actually getting a new customer.

Advertising sales reps are out to make a living. But most of them do not know a thing about marketing and they know even less about marketing YOUR BUSINESS.

How many times have you heard an advertising sales rep tell you should run a branding campaign? For most small businesses, that is about the dumbest thing in the world. Small businesses need to advertise to get customers. We need a definite return on our advertising dollars and we need to know what that return is.

Let the Fortune 500 Companies waste their ad budgets on branding campaigns, You and I need to focus on profits.

So if I sum up the biggest small business marketing mistakes, it is that we do not have a clear message that we are trying to convey. We do not have strong offers in those messages. And we are not getting those messages to the people or prospects who are most likely to respond.

All this, however can be fixed and the results can be mind blowing.

As mentioned earlier, for the first time in history,more people are using the Internet instead of the yellow pages even if they plan on shopping locally. And that trend is continuing and the gap is getting wider by the day.

As a small business owner, you can no longer afford to ignore the Internet. If you do, your competition will eat you up alive. With the advent of Google's local search results, you can easily have your company displayed on page one of Google for your desired advertising terms.

Local search is automatic. The searcher doesn't even have to type in the name of the town, Automatically, businesses in the searchers area are displayed. For instance, if I were to type in "Barber" in Google, the search results will automatically show business results in my immediate geographic area.

This is powerful stuff. And if you play your cards right, you can dominate the local results as well as the rest of the search results on the first page of Google and other search engines.

What most small business marketing material lacks is selling power. Once I became aware of this major deficiency, my business turned around. Take a look at most yellow page ads, newspaper ads and websites. They are nothing more than glorified business cards. Really what do they say about you, your business and most importantly how your business can help the potential customer. Most small business advertisement are structured like the Following:

headline - JOE'S DRY CLEANERS

body - we do suits, shirt, pants etc.

call to action - here is our phone number

And every other ad is exactly the same. In case you didn't know it, your business name is not a selling point. No one cares what the name of your business is, so why is that the biggest thing on the page.

A better approach would be to have a huge problem solving headline such as.

headline - We Will Pick Up And Drop Off Your Dry Cleaning Free

body - Instead of wasting your valuable time going to and from the cleaners to pick up your laundry, you can focus on the other things etc etc.

Call To Action: Call Today And Have Your First Suit Cleaned Free, Plus Get  Free Lint Roller etc etc.

Now, if you were looking for a dry cleaner, who would you call?

The truth is, that in order to perform all the tasks that need to be done for effective small business marketing, it takes a lot of time. As a small business owner, you have several things to worry about besides figuring out how to get your business listed on the first page of Google. At my company, West Rock Digital Marketing we make life easy for you. Our cost effective approach to solving small businesses marketing needs is just the answer for those companies who want to increase sales and profit without spending a fortune.

We would be happy to perform a complimentary marketing analysis of your business to determine which areas are in need of improvement, as well as outline specific ways that you can increase profits now.

Feel free to contact us an see how our small business marketing skills can help bring your business to the next level.