Most small business owners have hired someone for marketing, and most of them have a story about it going wrong. A logo that cost three times the original quote. A social media retainer with nothing measurable after six months. A “strategy session” that produced a forty-page PDF and no follow-through. The frustration is common, and it raises a question that more owners should ask before writing the first check: What does a marketing agency actually do for a small business?
Veronica Dunn, co-founder of One Eleven Creatives, a boutique marketing agency based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has a direct answer to that question. “Marketing either produces results, or it’s just noise,” Dunn has said. “If you can’t connect the work to a real outcome for the client, you’re decorating.”
One Eleven Creatives, co-founded with Sarah Newcomb in 2025, offers SEO, social media, and LinkedIn content management, Pinterest marketing, press and media placements, brand strategy, web design, and photography direction. The agency works with a deliberately limited number of clients at a time, a model built around quality over volume.
The Ambiguity Problem
Part of what makes enlisting a marketing agency confusing for small businesses is that the category is genuinely wide. The term covers everything from a solo freelancer scheduling Instagram posts to a full-service firm running paid media across multiple channels. The word “agency” tells a prospective client almost nothing about what they will actually receive.
What it should tell them, Newcomb has argued, is who will be doing the work. At many agencies, particularly mid-size and larger shops, a small business owner gets pitched by senior leadership and then handed off to junior staff for execution. The principals who won the business move on to the next prospect.
One Eleven Creatives built its model explicitly around eliminating that dynamic. Dunn and Newcomb lead every client engagement directly. There are no handoffs, no account coordinators acting as intermediaries between the client and the people making strategic decisions. The founders bring more than 20 combined years of agency experience to that structure, which means the senior-level thinking is not a sales tactic. It is the actual service.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
For most small businesses, what a marketing agency does falls into three functional areas, though few clients hear it explained in those terms.
The first is visibility: getting the business found. This includes search engine optimization, local SEO, press placements that generate authoritative backlinks, and channel-specific strategies like Pinterest, which operates as a search engine as much as a social platform. One Eleven Creatives has secured more than 40 media placements for clients across outlets, including Business Insider and CEO Weekly. Those placements are not just credibility moments. They are signals that search engines read and rank.
The second is credibility: what happens after someone finds the business. A LinkedIn profile, a website, a press mention, a well-structured brand narrative. These are the materials that convert attention into trust. Newcomb, who also works as a professional photographer, brings a visual discipline to this work that shapes how client brands are perceived across every channel it touches.
The third is consistency: showing up in the right places with the right message, reliably. Social media content, editorial calendars, channel-specific publishing rhythms. Businesses that build audiences do it over time, not in bursts. One Eleven Creatives built a fine artist’s Pinterest audience from zero to a global reach in under 90 days. That kind of result requires understanding the platform, knowing how content travels through it, and executing without cutting corners.
Why the Model Matters as Much as the Services
Dunn’s background includes serving as CMO at a Canadian technology consulting firm and running her own retail business in the Czech Republic, a shop she operated in a foreign market, in a language she was still learning, with buyers she had to understand from the ground up. That experience gave her a practical understanding of how buyers actually behave, independent of how marketers typically theorize about them.
“Marketing for a small business isn’t a branding exercise,” Dunn has explained. “The owner needs to know why something is being done and what it’s going to cost them if it doesn’t work.”
Newcomb, whose background spans public relations, agency account work, and freelance photography, brings a parallel discipline to how the work is communicated. Strategy, in her view, is only useful when it is specific enough to execute and honest enough to be held accountable. “No fluff, no generic playbooks, no vague deliverables” is the standard the agency applies to every engagement.
That orientation, practical accountability over polished presentations, is the core distinction One Eleven Creatives draws between its approach and how much of the agency industry operates. For small business owners trying to cut through the noise, the answer to what a marketing agency should do is plainer than the category usually makes it: move real numbers, be explainable by the people doing the work, and be held accountable when it doesn’t deliver.
