We work with a lot of small business owners from all over the country in a wide variety of industries. As different as all of these clients are, one thing is the same when we meet them: they’re all just a little bit terrified.

We get it; marketing for your small business can be scary. A lot of the tools out there that claim to make everything easier for you were actually developed for enterprise-level businesses, and they charge enterprise-level prices. How is a small business owner to compete with so many things already working against them? Let’s take a look.

Social Marketing That Doesn’t Go Viral

Every day, you see some brand or another going viral on TikTok or Instagram and wonder how you could ever get your product or service in front of that many eyes.

The truth is, for the right price, you can. But you’re working with a budget here. What if, instead of spending all your social marketing cash on one big splash, you work with an agency who understands that steady growth, search optimization, and a cohesive brand message is more powerful than any one viral post?

There’s a reason all of our social marketing clients enjoy a higher-than-average engagement rate for all platforms, and it’s not because they’ve created the latest TikTok dance craze. And by “higher than average,” we mean that many of our clients have engagement rates greater than 10%, while the average is 1% to 3%, depending on the industry.

SEO Still Done by Humans?!

Thousands of businesses report their website traffic is down, with many pointing to AI overviews as the culprit. AI search results often answer the question right there on the search engine results page, meaning no one needs to click through to the website anymore.

If the search engines are using AI, then it makes sense for brands to use AI for their SEO, right? Fight fire with fire.

Well, no. We’re actually talking about apples and oranges here. AI search uses AI to crawl the internet and summarize what is there, but the results are often prone to hallucinations, or false information. This is doubly true if a brand has used AI to create content without checking that the published information is accurate, since AI can also “hallucinate” information that doesn’t readily exist to pull from.

These are just a few reasons we still use human brainpower for SEO. Yet another is that AI solutions are often prohibitively expensive.

Google may share AI overviews (and we have seen several of our clients show up in these AI overviews), but they also still prioritize websites with helpful content. No matter what the latest algorithm update might be, the outcome is that websites with great content still get clicks.

How do we know?  Since the last update, one of our clients has experienced over a 500% increase in traffic. Another 74%, and yet another is up 15%. All from people-powered SEO, provided by an agency partnership that chooses the “hard” way because it’s still more accurate and affordable.

Website Hosting and Security Costs

One of the most horrifying things we see when helping small businesses with digital marketing is the cost of their hosting and website security. Yes, both are important, and depending on the size of the website and the type of business, hosting and security can be expensive. But many of our clients were paying enterprise-level prices for the absolute minimum hosting and security necessary.

There are two big reasons that your business website security might be scary: first, of course is the idea that someone might gain control of your website and therefore your brand reputation, and second is the thought of the price you have to pay to keep it protected.

When your website is built by Little Red Writing and Be the Page SEO, you don’t need to fear either of these things. We absolutely will not charge more than the minimum amount necessary to keep your website online and safe. Our tools are the same many agencies use for the enterprise-level hosting and security, but we don’t tack on huge “monitoring” and “updating” fees.

Online. Safe. Affordable. That’s not scary at all, is it?

Losing Control of Your Assets

Too many marketing agencies out there claim some form of ownership of their clients’ marketing assets. This could be a “proprietary” theme used to build a website, “proprietary” software used to track leads—some even claim all the emails hosted on their server belong to them and not the small business paying for that hosting.

When you work with us, it all belongs to you. If we build your website, it remains exactly that: your website. If we host your website, it’s still yours. When we create a brand kit, everything within is yours. If we help you create social media profiles for your business, those profiles are still yours, whether we work with you for a few months or for twenty years.

See? When you work with the right agency, digital marketing for your small business doesn’t have to be scary. Sure, a healthy amount of concern is what keeps you sharp and focused on success, but you don’t need to close your eyes or look away when the scary parts happen, like you do when watching Halloween or Friday the 13th.

Together, we can face the scary world of small business marketing with eyes wide open.