The owner is the buyer
There is no procurement process and no committee. The person deciding is the person whose money it is, and they judge the decision every month. Clarity matters more than sophistication.
Owner-led
Marketing for small businesses, prioritised properly
Small business owners buy marketing personally, out of money they can feel, and have usually been burned once. The question on a first call is never what could you do. It is what would you do first, and why. A small business needs the two or three things that would move enquiries, in the right order, by someone who will say when the third one is not worth doing yet.
Free, written by a person, yours to keep either way.
- 2,410 conversions at £19.21 each Google Ads
- 7,965 organic visits per month SEO
Certified across the platforms we buy on. 150+ businesses, 7 years.
Buying marketing as this kind of business.
The budget is real money
It is not a line in a departmental plan. Every month of spend that produces nothing is felt directly. That is why prioritisation matters more here than anywhere else.
Nobody internally will implement anything
There is no marketing manager to action a recommendation. Advice that arrives as a document and needs someone to execute it sits unactioned. Work has to be done, not specified.
Priorities, in this order.
The order matters more than the list. Doing the right things in the wrong sequence is how budgets get spent with nothing to show.
- Do the one thing that produces enquiries first, and prove it before widening scope.
- Report in enquiries and jobs, never in impressions.
- Implement rather than recommend, because there is nobody else to do it.
- Keep the commitment short enough that leaving is easy if it is not working.
Common mistakes
What goes wrong, repeatedly.
Buying traffic before fixing the page
More visitors through a page that does not convert only increases the size of the leak. Conversion work first is almost always the cheaper order for a small business.
Spreading a small budget across four channels
A budget that would work on one channel produces nothing meaningful spread across four. Pick the one where your buyers already are and win there first.
Judging search work in six weeks
Paid moves fast. Search does not. Cancelling search work at week six is paying for the setup and leaving before the return, which is the worst possible outcome financially.
What the report leads with.
If the first number in a marketing report is impressions, the report does not want to lead with leads.
- Enquiries per month
- Cost per enquiry
- Jobs or customers won from marketing
- Which channel produced each one
Numbers from comparable accounts.
Google Ads
2,410
conversions at £19.21 each
£46.3K spend at a £0.57 average cost per click.
SEO
7,965
organic visits per month
Grown from a low baseline.
Real accounts, anonymised by client agreement. Currency as recorded in the account. Movement varies by market, budget and starting position.
Questions
Questions from businesses like yours.
01 What is the minimum a small business should spend on marketing?
Less than the cost of one customer is not enough to learn anything from. Beyond that it depends on your market and margin. The free review gives you a real answer rather than a number invented on a call, and if the honest answer is that paid search will not work at your budget, that gets said, along with what will.
02 We tried an agency before and it did not work. Why is this different?
You should be sceptical. The specific difference worth checking is what the reporting leads with. If the last report opened with impressions or traffic, you were buying the number that is easiest to move. Ask for a report here and count how many lines are about enquiries.
03 Do we have to sign a long contract?
There is no lock-in. You can leave any month with thirty days notice. Search gets three months before it is judged, because it cannot be judged fairly in less, and that is advice rather than a contract.
04 What would you do first for a small business?
Fix the tracking so a call or a form is recorded, then the page the traffic already lands on, then the one channel where your buyers already are. On paid ads there is no retainer at all: you pay per qualified lead, which is the version of this that fits a budget you can feel.
What we would most likely run
Conversion Rate Optimization for Lead-Gen Sites | Mavix
Before you buy more traffic, give the traffic you have a reason to act. We fix the form, the promise, the proof and what happens next, then measure the change.
Google Ads Agency Paid Per Qualified Lead | Mavix
Starting or rebuilding Google Ads? A straight answer on whether the searches exist, what a click costs you, and an account aimed at enquiries you would take.
SEO Services Built Around Enquiries, Not Traffic | Mavix
SEO for businesses that want calls, not a traffic chart. We find the searches with money behind them, fix the pages that should win them, and report enquiries.
Next step
Send the site. We will tell you what is wrong.
Free, written by a person, and yours to keep whether you hire us or not.