Marketing for a small local business: what to do first, and what can wait

Most marketing advice was written for someone selling nationally, online, to strangers. If you're a café, a plumber, a physio or a framer, and your customers come from a few miles away, it wasn't written for you. Your order is different: be findable where people already look, earn reviews, go back to past customers, get known by your neighbours, and only then pay for ads.

A small local business has a smaller audience and one big advantage. The people you want are close by, a lot of them already know someone who has used you, and the places they look are few and mostly free. So the order matters more than the tactics. Do the cheap, durable things first and pay for attention last.

1. Be findable where people already look

When someone nearby searches for what you sell, Google says they'll get local results on Google Maps and Search. What shows up there for you is your Google Business Profile. It's free, Google says there's no way to pay for a better position in it, and a complete, accurate profile is more likely to show up at all.

If you do one thing from this page, do that one. Then copy the same name, address, phone number and hours onto Bing and the other listings, word for word, because everywhere that describes you should agree. Our local SEO checklist covers the rest, including the website pages that name the towns you actually serve.

2. Earn reviews, and answer them

Reviews are what people read when they're choosing between the three businesses on the map. Ask every customer, at the same point, such as when the job's done, with a link straight to the form. Don't offer anything in return, and don't ask only the ones you expect to be kind: both are against Google's rules, and UK law has its own rules on asking only happy customers for reviews.

Reply to every review, briefly, in your own words. A calm reply to a bad one gets read by everyone who comes after it.

3. Go back to people who already know you

Past customers are the easiest people to ask for the next job, or for a recommendation, and a useful email twice a year keeps you in mind.

There are rules, though. As the Information Commissioner's Office explains it, you can only send marketing emails to individuals (and sole traders count as individuals here) if they've agreed to them, or if they're existing customers who bought something similar from you and were given an easy way to opt out, both when you took their details and in every email since. That existing-customer rule, often called the soft opt-in, doesn't stretch to bought-in lists or to people who have never bought from you. The ICO says its guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, so check the page before you plan a campaign.

In practice, that means taking email addresses when you take the job, saying there and then that you'll send occasional news and how to stop it, and putting an unsubscribe link in every email.

4. Be known by the people around you

Local businesses send each other a lot of work. The plumber recommends the electrician, the café sends people to the framer. None of that happens unless your neighbours can describe what you do in one sentence, which is why explaining what you do in one sentence pays off locally before it pays off anywhere else.

Three places to start:

• One local business group, attended properly. Before you join, it helps to know what a local business community actually does and how to choose which networks are worth your time.
• A partner who shares your customers. Think of a wedding florist and a caterer, or a gym and a physio. The work is in finding the right brand partners and approaching them well.
• The town's own calendar. Markets, fairs and late openings put people on the street on dates you already know, and being open and findable on those days costs you almost nothing. Surbiton's farmers' market shows how the shops around one use it.

5. Then, and only then, pay for attention

Paid ads work best when there's somewhere good for the clicks to land: a complete profile, reviews worth reading, a page that answers the question the customer typed. Once those are in place, both big platforms can aim at a local area. Google Ads lets you target by location, and you choose between people who are physically in an area and people who have merely shown an interest in it, which isn't the same thing. Meta and Google do quite different jobs, so weigh up Meta ads vs Google Ads before you choose. And whether search ads will pay is a sum you can do before spending anything: whether Google Ads are worth it walks you through it.

Leaflets, local magazines and sponsorship can all work, but they're harder to measure. If you try one, give it its own phone number, code or landing page, so you can tell afterwards whether it did anything at all.

An older version of this advice is still readable, and I've written about what I got wrong about online marketing in 2018, including the one reason I'd now reverse.

Making it a plan

Five steps is too many to start at once. Pick the gap that matters most, which is usually the first one you haven't done. Give it an owner and a date, and decide which number will tell you whether it worked. Our one-page marketing plan has a template for exactly that, and how much to spend on marketing works a budget out from your own figures rather than a percentage.

Being small and local is also the one thing a bigger competitor can't copy, and that holds online as well as on the high street.

What nobody can tell you yet

• Which channel works best. We found no reliable UK figures comparing how small local businesses win customers across these channels, and it varies enormously by trade. The order above comes from cost and from what each step makes possible, not from a measured ranking.
• Word of mouth. It's widely believed to be the biggest source of work for local firms, and it may well be, but we haven't found a sound UK study measuring it. Your own records are the better guide: ask every new customer how they heard of you, and write it down.
• Email rules after 2025. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 changes parts of the privacy rules, and the ICO says its guidance is under review. What's above is its guidance as published on 28 September 2026.

If you're near us, our pages for Surrey and South West London and for Somerset list what's local.

If you'd like a hand, our 90-day marketing plan builds the plan with you, channel by channel and in the right order, for a fixed £2,500.