Fix My Digital Marketing

The no-BS small business service you’ve been waiting for!

For the majority of brick-and-mortar small business owners, digital marketing ends up being a shocking waste of time and money. You find yourself posting new content, running ads, making payments, while weeks and months go by. You aren’t really adding new customers or making more sales, but you go on. It’s like being caught in a diabolical trap, and you want to escape.

The Consultant Trap: You hire an agency or a freelancer to do your digital marketing for you or to give you a plan. You’re all in at first, with pretty high hopes. Then weeks and months go by, your monthly fees add up, and you still aren’t seeing a steady increase in business or any other clear results. You’re told, “It takes time.”

The DIY Trap: You try to save cash and stay in control by learning the ropes in-house. You watch how-tos, maybe take a course, then hop on the content creation hamster wheel. You were told that discipline and putting in the hours was the way to a payday. Weeks and months go by and you don’t see a sustained sales bump, while you’re burning through a mountain of time.

The Subscription Trap: Digital marketing is packed with recurring payments. Pay, pay, pay. A basic WordPress website has a monthly hosting fee, and maybe a premium theme and a paid plugin or two. Free apps lock one useful feature—do an annoying workaround or fork over the annual fee. Every regular payment you make, including for consultants and freelancers, is another form of subscription.

The Algorithm Trap: Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram guide attention by showing and hiding content depending on the user, limiting where posts appear, and burying non-paid promo attempts. And the rules are continuously adjusted. These days, creating social posts that will reach potential new customers is practically impossible. Yet so many do.

The Choices Trap: The Yoast SEO plugin, used on millions of websites, has 30 distinct features in the free edition, and over 40 more in the premium version. Watch 10 YouTube how-tos on making video shorts, and get 10 different sets of equipment and software recommendations. Should you be on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and blogging on your website? The choices are endless.

The FOMO Trap: When you see “everyone else” doing something that you’re not doing, fear of missing out can be a strong motivator. Everyone can’t be wrong. And of course, being present online is a business basic. So you head straight into all of the other traps.

What these traps have in common is the sheer amount of choice and conflicting opinions they throw at you. Even the number of traps goes on, like the Jargon Trap where you get buried in technical terms—PPC, CTA, ROAS, GA4, MER, organic traffic, conversion rate—that sound simple when explained, but together turn into a baffling fog that obscures what exactly is going on. Or the Brand-Building Trap, where short-term sales results don’t matter, you’re using beautiful photos to build an image for the future that will activate at some point and cause new customers to walk in months later. Hm.

On top of that, AI-in-everything has created a carpet of bland sameness in advice and in content that people don’t trust. Which products and services to use, which features you really need, how to not become AI slop—it’s like trying to defend yourself from a cloud of hungry mosquitoes.

When you have no idea of what actually works and what to avoid, digital marketing ends up being a dense, headache-inducing puzzle that you really don’t want to have to figure out.

There is a simple solution

Faced with this wall of information and choices, the temptation is to throw your hands up, ignore the digital world entirely, and just focus on the day-to-day of local brick-and-mortar business. That can easily feel like the right move.

But completely opting out usually leaves hard cash on the table. What if you are missing out on 500 seasonal customers every year who’d walk right in if you had properly set up your Google profile? That isn’t a fair price for avoiding the hassle. The right small changes can make a huge difference.

The simple solution is to find out how you came to be so trapped. The path you followed in can be your way out. If you can get back to where you started, you can avoid making the same choices.

Complication starts the moment you let your business get lumped into a one-size-fits-all “local business” category. Everything that works for a bakery won’t work for a plumber. You don’t need the right TikTok strategy. You need to know whether TikTok is a complete waste of your time (in most cases, it is).

Confusing “local business” with YOUR local business is where choices multiply, and it becomes nearly impossible to figure out what to do on your own. Local businesses obviously aren’t all the same, and their digital marketing shouldn’t be either, yet you keep getting the same “local business” solutions.

It’s made to look complicated, when it’s actually not

Literally millions of small business owners fall into this “digital marketing for local business” trap of traps because at first it can seem hard to pin down your specific type of business. A lawyer, a landscaper, a baker, a clothing boutique—isn’t that just different titles for the same ad?

Nope. In the crazy online attention economy, it’s a brutal fight to get noticed. There’s no neat Craigslist to organize it all, with coffee shops over here, and car dealerships over there. Screens are being swiped left and right, people find endless places to hang out online, and huge corporations and their agencies go to insane extremes to get people’s attention. Social platforms steer views to the same thing at the same time so they can sell chunks of attention to the highest bidder. It’s a digital world built on the physics of herding cats.

But when you look at it from just your one point of view, a particular brick-and-mortar business in a specific location, with your customers physically spread out right around you, it suddenly gets way simpler. Using multi-million dollar mass corporate methods aimed at securing small slices of humongous pies doesn’t work at a tight local scale. Local works by picking the exact channels you need, not by blasting away.

Take a plumbing company with a 24/7 emergency service. An ongoing series of funny TikTok plumbing skits may get a lot of followers and likes, but is really unlikely to help promote the service. Maybe one in a hundred thousand remembers the plumber from TikTok when their basement is flooding; they go straight to Google, and check the profiles and maps for a number to call.

On the flip side, a prominent Google profile and maps listing won’t do much for a customer looking to invest thousands of dollars in a major overhaul of their home plumbing system. They need specific information, a professional portfolio, testimonials—which you’d hope to find on a crisp, professional website that you can click or tap through with ease.

The same business, two completely different customer needs and behaviors. One benefits from high Google visibility, not a multi-page website or social media posts; the other needs an in-depth source of company information. Neither needs a TikTok strategy or a monthly email newsletter.

Where you fit

The trick to finding your perfect setup is to look at your business through the customer’s eyes. Local independent businesses fit into basic business categories based on what buyers are thinking about when they’re looking for a particular product or service. Is it a luxury or a necessity, an emergency or purely for enjoyment, expensive or relatively cheap? What it is changes the buyer’s approach.

Just about all local brick-and-mortar businesses are covered by only four categories. This is entirely about what the customer is thinking at the moment they need you, not how your business is described. A single business can easily fit in one, two or more categories depending on what’s being bought.

Emergency Rescue: The thinking here is, get this fixed right now! Speed, reliability, and competence are top of mind. Think of a 24/7 locksmith, roadside towing, or a mobile diesel mechanic. But also, where can I find a last-minute replacement for a destroyed wedding cake, or top up the beer during an all-night party? All things urgent.

Local Lifestyle: This applies wherever people express their taste and trust. “Buying local” has become practically a badge of honor. A restaurant, craft brewery, local bookkeeping or law firm, clothing boutique, or a lumber yard specializing in exotic hardwoods—anywhere the customer is making a thoughtful local personal choice.

Big Ticket Purchase: Spending large amounts of money almost always involves careful consideration. A new appliance, a new car, cedar decking, steel roofing for a new outbuilding, a fancy restaurant dinner for eight: big ticket is relative to the buyer, who wants to be sure they’re getting the best quality and value for their hard-earned dollars. They’ll research their options.

Strictly Convenience: This is where the path of least resistance rules. When a purchase is about routine necessities, location, availability (store hours!), and in-and-out service are top of mind, whether it’s a dry cleaner, a car wash, a feed depot, a corner store, an oil change, whatever we need to buy with the least effort possible.

You can test these out in your own mind. Clearly, each of these four broad categories has entirely different digital marketing requirements. Foodie photos posted to social may boost a lifestyle business like an authentic Thai restaurant, but won’t help in an emergency or if convenience is the attraction (unless the Thai resto also offers last-minute catering or a 15-minute takeout menu).

Here too, it’s not one size fits all. Something that works great for a particular owner and business will fail for most others. Funny ads from a not-so-funny person aren’t equal. A gripping monthly newsletter will score big with an email list filled with prime prospects, and fail without one. It’s pretty much common sense.

When you want to get creative and experiment in your own style, starting from a common sense baseline—a reliable no-extras anchor point—will keep you from spiraling.

A missing piece

There’s one more piece that really makes sense of the local difference and is usually totally missing: how you want potential customers to see your particular business. It’s pretty basic. Think of it as a one-sentence business description. It’s real word-of-mouth, what a satisfied customer might say to a friend. In a local market, it’s what distinguishes you from any competition down the road and gives you that little edge to stand out.

A person may want an emergency dentist now, but they also want a competent, reliable one, not an alcoholic in the middle of the night. When marketing to people, letting them know who you are makes a critical difference in how you’re remembered.

Are you “that little bakery on Orchard St. that might bake cakes” or a “cheerful, love-to-bake-since-a-child, seasoned food industry veteran operating a labor-of-love, fresh daily, top quality ingredients indie bakery, with all the traditional staples and exciting new treats”?
Are you “that plumbing van with the big yellow logo” or an “extremely dedicated, energetic young plumber, with 10 years of experience on big home and commercial projects, and totally up for 24/7 emergency calls”?

A one-sentence business description isn’t a fantasy beer commercial projection of how you’d like to be seen, it’s a critical reminder to make sure your marketing is always lined up with your reputation and how you want your customers to see you. It’s what you write on your website, how you reply to reviews in your Google profile, how you answer inquiries—it runs through everything (and faking it likely won’t end well).

Once you’ve recognized the traps and seen how your exact business only needs certain types of marketing, and are putting the same personalized business image in everything you do, all that’s left is a ruthless culling of what you don’t need or really can’t afford in order to set yourself free.

Plot meets budget

Even when digital marketing is looking pretty clear, choices aren’t done with you yet. It would be great if you had unlimited Facebook advertising for life, and a pro photographer following you around waiting for instructions. You probably don’t, so you have to make spending choices for your time and money. And these decisions are the “secret” to making local digital marketing work.

The most valuable tool you can have is a way to evaluate every single marketing decision to see if it’s likely worth it. FixMy uses three simple questions to see whether everything from multi-page websites, to newsletters, to every type of social post is a thumbs up or thumbs down:

What exactly are you doing and for how long?
Is there a clear budget?
Can you measure the results?

Are you going to spend no more than 90 minutes weekly on a newsletter to your 1K customer list, with a photo and a single paragraph description of a product of the week, plus a “mention this for 10% off” offer (and keep track of the real time spent: was it only an hour last week; did it just spiral to three hours this time)? Are you going to tally the redeemed offers every week by applying a promo code in your POS or jotting it down in a notebook by the cash, do this for three months, and see whether the response was worth the effort. That sounds like a pretty good plan!

Once you have clear commitments and budget, and can actually measure the results, all the rest becomes straightforward. With every thought-out decision you make, things become even clearer. You realize you don’t need more marketing. You just need the exact right foundation for your specific business position. Work is involved, but how much is up to you, and that’s what having a successful business is. It all makes sense when you’re looking at it from the right angle, it just takes a little practice to get used to applying it.

This is where Fix My Digital Marketing steps in.

A one-time, flat-rate, no-BS service

FixMy is a one-time service for a single fixed fee. We evaluate where you are at now, make specific recommendations, and hand you a jargon-free, absolutely detailed path forward. There are no recurring charges, no surprise bills, and no upsells. You get all the no-BS information and step-by-step how-tos you need to put your digital marketing in order, in one package, by doing only the things that can directly benefit your specific business.

Of course, if you don’t act on anything, nothing will happen. But our job at FixMy is to present it in the most actionable way possible. Not tons of reading. Not complicated theoretical explanations. Instead, intuitive communication: “Do this, in order for this to happen, and this is why.” No homework, gets right too it.

The FixMy has two services, Total Reset ($399) and Strictly Convenience ($149).

Total Reset

Top to bottom audit. Cut the dead weight. Start on a clear path forward.

For a flat fee of $399, Total Reset figures out what business categories you fit in, and how well your current digital assets are serving them. We visit every one of your online locations to check out the content and feedback. We consider your digital presence alongside your business survey. We deliver a comprehensive evaluation and blueprint. No explainers, no filler, just detailed, fully-reasoned, step-by-step action items.

You fill out a survey to give us a clear idea of your business, your management approach, and your marketing goals.
FixMy audits your entire digital footprint: website, Google Business Profile, social media accounts, email newsletter, and any other digital activity.

You receive:

A step-by-step list of keep-or-kill recommendations, with the reasons why, and a clean way to wrap up whatever is not needed.
A punch list of critical fixes, for small details like consistent contact information across all locations, severely overpriced hosting, issues with your domain name registration, the “little stuff” that that lead to waste and problems.
A one-sentence business description that you can use to make sure your messaging always supports what your business stands for.
A set of tools for moving forward, including the three-quick-questions decision-making process to run every decision through before you start spending, and a two-step method for handling online negative reviews.

Total Reset frees you from all digital marketing traps, lets you immediately end stressful, draining activities, and gives you a straightforward series of actions that take only a few minutes per step. It works like a good set of instructions on how to reach a hard-to-find place: “Turn left at the unmissable red building, continue until you see a single massive tree in a field, turn right…” You arrive at your destination.

Strictly Convenience

No time. No budget. No patience.

For a flat fee of $149, Strictly Convenience strips local digital marketing down to the foundation. The absolute minimum every business needs. We investigate your website and essential Google Business Profile, and deliver a custom set-and-forget setup that requires near zero maintenance.

You fill out a brief survey to give us a clear idea of your business and your management approach.
FixMy audits your website content, hosting, and registration, and your GBP claim and set-up.

You receive:

A step-by-step list of every critical fix, details like making sure your contact info is identical on your website and Google profile, that make your website and Google map presence work on their own.
If your website needs reducing, you get customized how-to information on all changes, including pages to be removed, minimum homepage content, and whether a contact form is needed.
Specifically for your Google profile, we provide a two-step method for handling negative reviews (you can use it for any review site).
If you have social media accounts or other digital marketing activities, we recommend how to cleanly wrap them up.
A collection of customer emails can be an incredibly valuable asset as a reliable, direct way to reach your customers for any reason, even if you don’t regularly use it. FixMy recommends whether it’s a good idea for you and if so, how to collect them.

Strictly Convenience is exactly what you need to have your digital presence working for you quietly in the background. If a question comes up, there’s the free FixMy members-only forum, where questions are answered daily.

Done For You (option)

If you read your report and simply don’t have the hours to do the work yourself, you can hire us to handle the execution. Our reports are designed from scratch to be a quick, straightforward, and painless DIY project that can be fit into the times you have available. But if you are going to farm the fixes out anyway, we’d rather that didn’t wind you up in more traps.

We will take the exact list from your report and quote you a flat, one-time project fee based on the labor required to execute it. Depending on how much you have going on, it could take as little as an hour, to a few hours. It’s strictly one time: we don’t offer ongoing monthly management, and we don’t do additional digital marketing work. We fix the setup quickly, with no padding, and get out of your way.

No AI slop

A FixMy report is the digital version of a top tier home or car inspection. We check EVERYTHING and consider that alongside your survey to arrive at recommendations. It is entirely human work. No automated tools to generate standard answers. No AI slop. Simply hours of thoughtful work to provide a report specifically for you.

Our pricing is entirely transparent. It’s based on an honest hourly rate for our time and a reasonable markup. We aren’t trying to finance a yacht or buy a second home off a single client; this is straightforward human labor for fair pay.

If either of these services seem “too much”—if you’re immediately thinking you’d rather have it all done for you—that’s fair. You can decide once you see how common sense and straightforward the fixes are, as digital marketing BS and confusion evaporate. Taking action is like changing a ceiling lightbulb: much better to grab a ladder and get it done, than call in an electrician.

Getting started

After you fill out the quick form below, we’ll assess your business. In a couple of days, we’ll email a preliminary report and recommend one of the services, with an invoice for a 50% deposit. If your business doesn’t seem to need much help at all, we’ll let you know and send some tips you might find useful, at no charge.