How to sort fakers from the real deal?

We have an e-commerce and real-world business. The customers love our product, we are respected by those who know us in the industry. We are in both B2B and B2C (but perhaps for the purposes of this discussion I'll just keep it to B2C)

But after five years we are still small fry. Most of our business is word of mouth and organic from our social media.

Last year we blew a LOT of money (for us) on two different Marketing agencies to try to boost us up to the next level, both of whom pretty much failed outright. To be fair to them, our budget is small and we didn't have heaps of time (or data such as email lists) for them to get the system really honed in. But essentially we got almost no new income from it.

We have been fooled by this before, one was a smallish but very slick looking marketing company, the other was a couple who seemed quite well known in the blogging, digital marketing sphere locally. The first were hopeless, the second weren't terrible, but spent so much time and money on fluff before they got to anything like increasing our exposure, that we ran out of time and money. Despite our protests.

So now we are in dire straights because although the business is pretty much the same as it was last year, we have now blown our buffer and stock money. Times are tight.

We don't have the time, energy or headspace to learn all this stuff ourselves though. We are smart, but unless you've got those three things, forget about it.

I've been reading as much as I can on Social Ads as well as SEO, but really need a helping hand.

First issue is our low budget and short timeframes.

Second issue is the plethora of scams, idiots, wannabes etc out there. How on Earth do you find someone within your budget who is also good and fast at what they do? Without knowing someone who can recommend someone they have used, how do I know the good from the bad?

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