For most small businesses and a surprising number of medium sized businesses, marketing is a family secret kept in the attic.  Ask them about what they do marketing wise and eyes go downcast, a foot reaches out to kick a pebble, they look up a little ashamed and say; “we really don’t do any.”

Often I dig a little deeper and find out they are doing marketing, they’re paying $500 a month to the old search engine, the king that has recently died, the Yellow Pages (calling your company AAA-Plumbing was the old way to get Search Engine Optimized).

Here’s a piece of advice that I make no money on (so hopefully you can trust it more).  Take that $500 worth of spray and pray (you pay your $500 and you take what you gets, pray there’s ROI), and spend it with Google, the new king, for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) AdWords campaign.  With PPC you pay only if someone reads your ad and clicks on it to visit your site.  This is a first in the history of marketing and I’ll be so bold as to say that never in the history of capitalism has the bar been so low, so easy, and so cheap to do real and effective marketing.

And the best part? You can tell Google where you want the ads to run geographically, you can even tell Google when to run the ads, and you can tell Google where to direct visitors who have clicked on it (so you can have an extra special message or offer on hand to greet them).  Wait, there’s an even better part, research has shown that you’ll get about as many free click-throughs from AdWords as the ones you pay for; seems people like to cut and paste the web page address they find in ads into a new window.

Of course, the ton of leads a properly set up AdWords campaign produces can be a problem in itself for small companies with sales infrastructures developed for only a few new leads a week.   That being said, there are marketing tools out there, like AcitveConversion, that can handle this wonderful problem and work with your existing process to manage the influx of new leads.