If you’re reading this, you probably want to grow your online customer base and boost your digital presence. Whether you’re selling products online or showcasing professional services, every small business can benefit from solid internet marketing strategies.
We’ve put together five proven digital marketing tactics, specifically tailored for UK small businesses, to help you stand out from competitors, reach more potential customers, and convert website visitors into loyal clients.
- Local SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Use local business profiles and directories to help customers find you
- Search Ads: Put your business in front of people who are actively searching for your product or service
- Content Marketing: Creating helpful, informative or entertaining content to position yourself as an expert and build a long-term following
- Email Marketing: Turn first-time buyers into repeat customers with smart email marketing
- Social Ads: Use engaging visuals and hyper-specific targeting to get your business noticed by potential customers
These strategies work best when combined, creating a comprehensive digital marketing engine that fuels your business growth. Focusing on these areas will help expand your online presence and get customers banging down your door.
2. Jump To The Top With Paid Search Ads
3. Build A Following With Content Marketing
4. Turn Customers Into Evangelists With Email Marketing
Conclusion: Start Getting Customers Today
1. Get Found With Local SEO
When people talk about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), they’re usually referring to the process of making your website easy to find on search engines like Google and Bing. But there’s a whole other side to SEO that gets less attention: making your business visible on maps and local directories.
A digital marketing strategy focused on optimising your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches on Google and other search engines.
Map Profiles
If you’re a local service business, or have any kind of physical location like a shop, office, or restaurant, then services like Google Maps and Apple Maps are a massive source of potential customers.
The first thing to do is set up profiles on Google My Business and Apple Business Connect. It is completely free and allows you to control the information displayed on Google and Apple Maps about your business—you can post contact information, opening hours, photos, menus, and other important information.
Next you want to get as much positive content on your profiles as possible. Regularly adding new content and posts keeps your profile fresh and up to date. Encouraging happy customers to leave reviews will probably have the highest impact on your profile; the more positive reviews you can get, the more trustworthy your profile will be. Don’t forget to respond to reviews, regardless of whether they’re positive or critical—it shows you’re engaged and care about your customers’ experience.
Directory Listings
Directories are sites that list other businesses and services; they’re one of the first places customers go when they need a specific kind of service. If you’re not present on popular and relevant UK directories, you could be missing out on many potential customers.
Exactly which directories are relevant will depend on your business; if you’re a plumber, then TripAdvisor doesn’t make much sense, but if you’re in the tourist trade, it might be essential. For more ideas about which directories are relevant for you and best practices for using them, check out our online marketing checklist.
It’s critical to ensure your profiles are complete and up to date—there’s nothing more infuriating than going out of your way to visit a shop only to find that they’re closed and didn’t update their opening hours online. Keeping a list of your profiles to update, and deactivating ones you don’t use, can help you stay organised.
2. Jump To The Top With Paid Search Ads
Traditional SEO helps drive “organic traffic” (i.e. free clicks) to your website; however, it can take months of effort to really get going. Not only do paid search ads allow you to start immediately getting valuable clicks to your website, they are also usually the first results on the page and they are paid for on a “Pay-Per-Click” basis meaning they can be very cost effective.
Search accounted for two in five pounds spent on advertising in the UK in 2024 1, which tells you how important it is for UK businesses.
But search ads are not as easy as they might seem; if your keywords are generic, your headlines vague, and your campaigns are badly configured, then your performance will be low and it can feel like you’re wasting money.
Pay-Per-Click advertising is a digital marketing model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, essentially buying visits to your site rather than paying to show the advert.
Start Small and Specific
You don’t need a huge budget to get started with search ads; as little as £10 a day can be enough to start seeing results for UK small businesses, and you can easily scale up your spending later. Your ideal starting budget should be enough to get 10 clicks a day—exactly what that number is depends on which keywords you’re bidding on.
To make that budget work for you, it’s important to ensure you’re bidding on the right keywords. A classic mistake is to bid on broad, generic, or highly competitive keywords—these will quickly eat up your budget with irrelevant searches or unaffordable clicks.
Start with a short list of highly specific “long-tail” keywords that only someone looking for your service is likely to use. Focus on words and phrases with clear and specific commercial intent. For example, the keyword “haircuts” could be related to finding a barber nearby, or it could be trying to find the latest celebrity haircut trends. If you compare that to “men’s barbers in Kidderminster”, the intent behind that search is much clearer and is highly relevant if you are a barber in Kidderminster.
Long-tail keyword examples for UK businesses:
- “emergency plumber near me tonight”
- “wedding photographer Cotswolds prices”
- “accountant for small business Manchester”
- “dog grooming services Birmingham reviews”
When you’re working with small budgets, it’s important to use it effectively by focusing on keywords that can really deliver value for your business.
Write Good, Relevant Ads
The second key part of a good search campaign is the ads themselves: the headlines, descriptions, and extensions that are shown when your keyword is triggered.
There are lots of different approaches to building great ads. A few good tips to get started are:
- Be direct: It can be tempting to use complicated language or slick and salesy phrases, but often a direct approach is better, especially when you’re just getting started
- Be relevant: Batch up related keywords into ad groups and then make ads specific to that group. Highly relevant ads typically perform much better than generic ones
- Experiment: You can add up to 15 headlines to a single Google Search ad, so try different approaches to see what works best
- Use CTAs: Dedicate at least 2-3 headlines to a ‘call to action’ (CTA), for example “Buy Now” or “Download Free Pricing Guide”; these provide clear instruction for the user that can improve your response rate
- Use extensions: Google has a variety of different extensions you can add to your ads that help make them larger, more relevant, and more appealing
A Call-To-Action is a prompt that tells the user what action you want them to take, such as “Buy Now”, “Get Quote”, or “Learn More”.
Proper Campaign Configuration
Setting up your campaign properly can be technical and difficult, but it can also make or break your performance. We won’t go into too much detail here as it would be a very long (and boring) article; we’ll just cover a few of the most important points.
Effective Targeting
If you have a high street shop in Birmingham, the chance that someone living in Inverness is going to visit you is much less than if they lived in Wolverhampton. Making sure your targeting is set up properly can save you a huge amount of money on clicks that were never going to convert into paying customers.
Location is an obvious example, but audiences, devices, time of day, and a whole host of other attributes can be used to focus your campaign on the most profitable searches.
Conversion Tracking
Setting up conversion tracking on your website allows you to measure when users take specific actions on your site that are valuable to you, for example making a purchase or filling out a contact form. This information can be used by Google to link those actions back to your marketing, meaning you can see what is and isn’t working for you—it’s one of the things that makes digital advertising so effective.
If you’re not properly tracking conversions, then you’re missing out on critical information about the impact of your marketing. We cannot stress how vital this is, and it’s why we include it for free as part of our service.
Understand Learning Phases
Google Ads is a powerful optimisation machine; in the background it is calculating and correlating between thousands of data points to try and achieve the best possible results. When you first set up your campaign, and when you make major updates like changing the bidding strategy, it will be put into a ‘learning’ phase. During this period, the system needs some time to calibrate towards its new goal; you might see spikes in the amounts being spent and big swings in your results.
It’s important not to panic—your performance and spending should settle down over time. It’s also important not to make major changes too often, otherwise your campaign will just be continually trying to calibrate itself without ever actually getting there. Learning phases typically last about 7-14 days, but you really want to wait at least 60-90 days before making major changes.
If all this sounds overwhelming, then we can help! Digital Gurus specialises in marketing for small businesses; we’re experts at using your marketing budget effectively to give you the best possible return on your investment.
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3. Build A Following With Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about drawing people in with something that is genuinely helpful—it’s all about the “value exchange”: you give your viewer something of value, and in return they give you their attention (and hopefully, down the line, their money).
A smart content marketing strategy can keep delivering value long after you hit publish. A well-crafted blog post can bring in readers for months or even years, and a practical video tutorial might be shared across platforms again and again.
A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
Solve Customer Problems
The best content starts with understanding what your customers actually need. Pay attention to the questions your customers ask—these queries often reveal the kind of information your audience is searching for. You can also use services like Answer The Public or Google Trends to explore what questions people are asking around a topic.
Here are list of ideas for content, with relevant examples for UK small businesses.
Seasonal Content
Seasonal content can work particularly well as it tackles timely issues; it’s especially good if you have the same topics come up year after year:
- Plumbers: “How To Prevent Frozen Pipes In Winter”
- Gardening Centres: “Starting Seeds Indoors This February”
- Toy Shops: “This Year’s Must-Have Kids’ Toys”
Problem-Solving Guides
Problem-solving guides can help establish your expertise and gain trust. Once people hit a problem they can’t solve, they’ll know exactly where to go:
- Tech Support: “How To Solve Wi-Fi Connectivity Problems”
- Mechanics: “What To Check If Your Car Won’t Start”
- Pet Groomer: “How To Stop Your Dog’s Coat From Matting”
Planning Guides
Planning a project can be a great stage to get someone’s attention, especially if there’s an obvious service you can provide associated with the project:
- Builders: “How To Plan And Cost Your Loft Extension”
- Gym: “How To Start Exercising Again In Middle Age”
- Accountants: “Small Business Tax Prep Checklist For April”
Local Guides
Local businesses often have a unique advantage of knowing their community better than anyone. Something that can be helpful for locals and visitors alike:
- Estate Agent: “The Best Neighbourhoods To Live In [Your City]”
- Fitness Instructor: “5 Outdoor Running Trails In [Your Area]”
- Bookshop: “Top 5 Upcoming Book Signings In [Your Town]”
If you’re stuck for ideas, then LLM chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can be a great place to get the ball rolling with ideas. Just make sure you add your own unique spin on whatever content you’re creating.
Reuse Content Across Platforms
Creating fresh content for every platform can quickly become overwhelming (ask us how we know!), but the good news is that you don’t have to. Old content doesn’t have to be consigned to history once you’ve made it—you can give it a new lease of life and save yourself time in the process.
If you have a regular content series that is working well for you, then consider how you might be able to transform that into a new series somewhere else. For example, maybe you post a new seasonal recipe from your restaurant on your website every month—why not take that and film yourself cooking the dish for a series of short videos on YouTube or Instagram?
Or, if you have a smash-hit video guide on YouTube, you can quite easily turn it into a great blog article for your website using the video transcript and some stills from the video. Alternatively, you can cut it into shorter clips to post on social media.
Keep It Manageable And Be Consistent
Consistency is really important for a successful content strategy, but it also has to be manageable. If you set an unrealistic goal, you’ll either spend all your time promoting your business rather than running it, or you’ll quickly burn out and give up.
You don’t have to post every day on every platform, but it’s important to have regular activity to keep your presence fresh and up to date. Create a schedule to regularly create and post new content—this helps keep you organised and accountable. Try to schedule content based on how complex it is to produce, and if possible tie your different pieces of content together.
For example, you could post a new photo once a week on Instagram, a short video of a new product once a fortnight on YouTube and Instagram, and write a blog post once a month about all the hot new products you’ve just featured.
4. Turn Customers Into Evangelists With Email Marketing
When it comes to remarketing to existing customers, email has a couple of unique characteristics that make it stand out: first, you are talking directly to someone without being subject to algorithms or ad budgets; second, these are people who have given permission to contact them. Used correctly, this can help nurture your existing customers into dedicated, repeat buyers who will evangelise your product.
A form of direct marketing that uses email to promote your business’s products or services, build relationships with potential customers or clients, and keep current customers informed about your brand.
Build And Organise Your List
For this strategy, it’s important that your email list consists only of people who have actively opted in to receiving your emails. In anywhere subject to GDPR (including the UK), this is also a legal requirement. We recommend three main ways of gathering contacts:
- Get existing customers to sign up when they create an account or make a purchase online
- Using a newsletter signup form on your website
- Using a “lead magnet” to encourage new leads outside your website (e.g. on social media). This involves offering a valuable piece of content in exchange for their email address
Make sure that you record important attributes about your customers so that you can tailor your messaging. You should record where the lead came from, whether they are a customer, and any important information about them. For example, if someone regularly buys your vegan meal kit, they’re unlikely to be interested in your ‘meat-explosion summer BBQ’ package.
A marketing term for a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details, typically an email address.
Write Emails Worth Opening
The average ‘open rate’ for email marketing campaigns in the UK is about 23%.2 That means most marketing emails are never opened, so it’s important that the emails you send are worth opening. You need both a subject line that is compelling and tells the recipient exactly what they’re going to receive, and you need content that is worth reading once they’ve opened it.
It’s better to send out less frequent messages that have great content, rather than deluge someone with low-quality clickbait that will quickly get you the worst email designation of all: spam.
We recommend focusing on topics related to informing your customers about things they actively want to know about. This might be changes to your business, industry, or offering—the key is for it to be information they will be glad to receive. For example:
- For B2B services, important industry news and expert analysis can be a valuable source of information for your clients
- Seasonal products and services, especially those that have a time limitation can work well, such as Valentine’s Day specific gifts
- Information about new product lines can be an easy buy-in for an existing customer, especially around anything collectible or sought-after
- Telling them about time-limited events, for example if you’re attending a local UK trade show or asking them to vote for you in an award nomination
Writing good emails is undoubtedly difficult, but if you focus on telling people about things they actively might want to know about, you will have a clear focal point to build your message around.
Use Exclusive Offers
Perhaps the easiest sales to make are to existing customers who are happy with your service, and who come back again and again. Email is a great place to engage those customers, and turn them into evangelists.
We recommend creating offers which use two key things: exclusivity and urgency. People like to feel special, and your best customers should be special to you; giving them an exclusive offer that is only available to them makes them feel special and it’s a powerful incentive to consider a new purchase. This is especially true when we combine it with urgency by making the offer time-limited, because it means they need to engage now or lose that exclusive benefit.
For example, you could offer:
- An exclusive discount code that is just for existing customers and is valid only for the next week
- Special access to a new product before it’s available to anyone else in two weeks’ time
- First chance to buy tickets for your new event, before they go on sale to the general public in 48 hours
These types of offers nurture your customers and give them something of real value that is a strong incentive to come back again and again. Just be careful not to overdo it—if your exclusive offers come too often, they will lose value and you will train your customers to wait for them before purchasing.
5. Social Ads
About 80% of the UK is on social media, that’s something like 55 million people; it’s a powerful tool for finding new customers and prospects. That kind of audience, combined with the fantastic targeting options available, means social is an essential marketing tool for small businesses. Plus, like with search ads, you can get started for less than you might think.
The practice of placing advertisements on social networking platforms to reach potential customers through highly targeted campaigns based on user demographics, interests, and behaviours.
Choose Your Platform
There are many social media platforms out there, and as a small business you can’t expect to dominate them all. We’re just going to focus on three here (or two, depending on how you count).
LinkedIn: If you are a B2B business, then you need to consider LinkedIn. It has over 34 million UK users, and it’s where business professionals go to network and find business services. LinkedIn can be very expensive, so you will need a higher budget to use it effectively, but the quality of leads you can get is potentially very high.
Meta (Instagram & Facebook): Great for B2C, and surprisingly good for B2B, the 38 million Facebook and 33 million Instagram users in the UK make it a key channel for small businesses. Meta has possibly the best targeting options in all of digital advertising, so with the right approach you can get excellent value for money.
Build Your Ads
Many of the principles we’ve discussed around search ads also apply to creating ads for social media; it should be clear what your product or service is, your message should be relevant to the audience you’re targeting, and you should use strong calls to action to drive engagement.
One of the big differences with social media is the ability to use compelling visual assets: especially images and video. Wherever possible, use high-quality images of your products combined with solid graphic design to make your ads visually appealing. You can hire freelancers to help you with this through platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, or use design tools like Canva which is beloved by marketers for its sleek templates that come pre-formatted for social media.
If you’re fluent in social media content creation, you can also try more “advertorial” approaches such as videos that are shot more like normal user-generated content than a “traditional” advert.
Another valuable approach is to experiment with native lead forms; these are forms a user can submit within the social media application itself (rather than on your website). These often auto-fill with information, making them easy to fill out, and can generate cost-effective leads (though the quality of those leads can vary).
Focus Your Targeting
The real value of social media advertising is the targeting. LinkedIn allows you to target by job title, company size, company industry, and even company revenue—which means you can very precisely focus your ad campaign on professionals who might be interested in your service.
Similarly, Meta allows you to target a huge range of attributes across demographic, interest and behavioural audience groups. Want to target newly-engaged dog owners in Llandudno, or coffee-drinking hipsters in Hackney? You probably can!
The problem with this for small businesses is knowing where to start. Exactly as with search ads, efficiency is key for small businesses on social media. You don’t have money to waste, so you need to ensure you are precisely and effectively targeting your audience.
There are many different approaches for how to do this, but here’s a good one to start with. Note this is specific to Meta, but actually the process on LinkedIn is very similar.
- Set up a single campaign with a small daily budget—we recommend £10 to start but you can do less
- Like with search, it’s important to ensure you are tracking your conversion events properly to ensure you can accurately measure your ads performance
- Create one ad set under the campaign, set it to target manual placements and then select just the placements under “Feeds” category
- Within that ad set, upload your creatives. We recommend starting with 3 different single image ads which try different styles, approaches and messaging. You can try galleries and videos too, but it’s good to start simple
- Duplicate that ad set (including the creatives) twice, so you now have 3 ad sets with copies of the same creative under them
- Now add targeting to each ad set. Experiment with three different approaches, one per ad set—for example you could try one with some interests, one with behavioural segments, and finally one with another approach such as job titles, or page followers
This is a great approach when you’re just starting out because it allows you to very quickly test a variety of approaches all at once and narrow them down quickly to what is working. Some of those creatives and ad sets will perform better than others—as soon as it becomes obvious, start turning off the lowest performing creatives. We recommend having at least 100-200 impressions per ad before you do this.
You should now have a much clearer idea about what combination of creative and targeting work for your business. From here you can keep experimenting by duplicating your best performing ad set, then changing one or two variables (e.g. a new creative, or a new interest segment) and seeing what performs better. This is a simple and effective technique for establishing a social media marketing presence.
If all this sounds overwhelming, then we can help! Digital Gurus specialises in marketing for small businesses; we’re experts at using your marketing budget effectively to give you the best possible return on your investment.
Sign up for free or
Conclusion: Start Getting Customers Today
Digital marketing isn’t easy, but it is absolutely possible for small businesses with limited budgets to use it effectively and, most importantly, profitably.
- Local SEO helps customers find you on digital maps and directory listings
- Search Ads put your business forward as the solution to your customers’ needs
- Content Marketing helps build a long-term presence and following online
- Email Marketing is great for remarketing to existing customers, turning them into evangelists for your business
- Social Ads leverage engaging visuals and hyper-specific targeting for cost-effective results
Whether used alone, or together, these strategies can form the basis of a marketing machine for your business that delivers real revenue from a modest investment.
How Digital Gurus Can Help
Our goal is to make marketing your small business as simple as ordering a takeaway. We understand how complicated and confusing it can be, how many weird acronyms are used, and how rarely those lofty marketing promises seem to come true.
Our approach is to make it simple:
- Sign up to our online platform—it’s completely free to sign up. You just need to be a UK-based business with a website
- Use our simple, streamlined order flow that guides you through defining your needs, goals and budgets
- That’s it, that’s all you have to do. We take care of everything else; installing conversion tracking on your site, setting up your campaigns, optimising, reporting, and much more
We cover Google Search and (very, very soon) social media, with minimum spends starting at just £10 a day. So why not sign up now or
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much should a UK small business spend on digital marketing?
A: Ideally, start with enough budget to get 10 clicks a day through whichever channel you’re using. The exact price of this will vary depending on your industry and targeting. A good place to start is £10 a day and adjust from there.
Q: How long does it take to see results from digital marketing?
A: Paid advertising can start showing results within days, though you really want at least 30 days to judge effectiveness. SEO and content marketing typically take 3-6 months to gain traction. Email marketing can show immediate results if you have an existing list.
Q: Which digital marketing strategy should UK small businesses prioritise?
A: Start with Google My Business (local SEO), it’s fast and free to set up. Then add paid search and social media advertising for immediate results whilst building content/SEO strategies over the long term.
Q: Should a small business use PPC or SEO?
A. The correct answer is actually both. SEO is “free” in that you don’t pay for the clicks (though you might pay for services), but it takes time and effort to start showing results. PPC allows you to both get immediate traffic to your website, and to focus on high value searches that are likely to yield commercial results.
Q: Do I need social media profiles and a website?
A. Yes. Your website is your corner of the internet, it’s where you can really define how your business looks to customers. It’s also required for any kind of SEO strategy and for many advertising channels including Search Ads. For Social Media Marketing you need a profile on the network you want to advertise on. Theoretically you can do some limited advertising with just a social media profile, but we strongly recommend a website to unlock its full potential.
