Why Most Businesses in Manchester Struggle With Digital Marketing in 2026 And How to Fix It

James Dooley: If you're a business based in Manchester in the northwest of England and you're looking to grow in 2026, then what digital marketing strategy should you be doubling down on? There's so many people within the communities that's talking about AI SEO trying to get the brand or the company name listed within chat G, chat GPT or listed in Gemini, which is the AI overviews within Google. But is that going to get you a return on investment? Is that going to turn into more sales for your business specifically in 2026? If you're a Manchester based business and you're looking to grow today, I'm joined with Kasra. And what bit of advice would you give to a Manchester business owner before they started to spend any sort of money on marketing?

Kasra Dash: So, Manchester based businesses, the number one issue that I see with Manchester business owners is they end up spending money on a variety of different channels and they don't know which channel is actually generating them the leads or the highest converting or the highest quality leads. You want to be able to pinpoint that as a business owner. So, what I would recommend is go out and set up a KPI sheet. That KPI sheet should have a few things. How much money I'm spending on each channel, how many leads is actually being generated by those channels, whether it's Facebook ads, social media, AI, whatever the case is. And of those leads, how many of those leads are actually picking up the phone? Are they contactable leads or is it Mickey Mouse that's filling out the contact form? And then out of those leads that do pick up, how many of those are actually converting into actual paying customers for your company? Once you have these numbers, what you might end up finding is you might be spending, let's say, £6,000 a month on SEO, but it's your lead generation company or it's your SEO channel that's actually generating you the leads. So, in that case, you might say, well actually, I'm going to lower the spend. I might not switch it off completely. I might lower the spend to £1,000 a month on PPC, and I might end up spending more money with my lead generation or my SEO agency instead. And that way it's way more predictable to actually generate high quality leads every single month. So James, let's get into the digital marketing channels. What's the first channel that you would recommend?

James Dooley: So step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making certain that you're looking good online, you've got a strong reputation. I think everything needs to start, the foundations need to start with a positive kind of brand SERP of who you are and what you do. So a SERP stands for search engine results page and getting that branding right across the board then can lead on to other things of what you can be doing. It will improve your conversion rate on paid ads or social media. Any leads that you're getting, the conversion rate would be good if at the 11th hour they're going to decide who you're going to go with. Branding I think becomes very very important. So I say that's the first thing that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies. My next strategy is going to be AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are actually looking into this. So what does chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity say about your brand or about your business? Is it a positive thing or is it a negative thing? And also trying to figure out what it says about your competitors as well. And obviously trying to improve that is really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some people call it GEO, some people call it LLM optimisation, but this is going to be a big thing in 2026 and also in the years to come as well.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, I think that's a huge strategy that people need to be looking at with regards to artificial intelligence. More and more people are obviously using AI. The next one for me is filling in the form at Fat Rank or Promo SEO, which do a commission based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. I think it's important to be looking at your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but also if you can use some freelancers and outsource some as well, you’ve got that diversification of leads. So head on over to fatrank.com, fill in the form and see whether they can help you with a no risk supply of enquiries. Promo SEO also do a very similar performance based lead generation service as well that you might want to fill in the form with there and just double check whether you can go and get a third party lead generation company to top up and start generating you some leads for your business to grow in 2026.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then next on the list is Google Business Profiles. So Google Map listings. This is like local SEO where you basically just try and get more reviews. You build out your Google Business Profile in your local area. Now there's pros and cons to this. I think the biggest pro is that once it is actually ranking, you are going to be consistently generating leads. However, to get from nowhere, like let's say you do not have a Google Maps listing at all, to get it ranking into position number one, the issue you've got with that is there might be, let's say, a 60 or 100 review deficit. And to obviously get those reviews, you need leads. So it's one of those things. It's like the chicken and the egg. I for one just think it's good for personal branding or for branding of your company. So always try and get the Google Maps listing, but you should always know the pros and cons to it as well.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, for certain. If you're in a local area, you want to try and get those local maps listing. For me, you need to be omni channel and omni present. I think the next part is SEO in general. So organic SEO. Can you be building up your website to try and get your website ranking better? If you are in a local area, you might want to do your service with the area of where you cover. So like plumbing in Manchester, create a page for that. Hopefully then share that on the Google Business Profile of what you mentioned. But trying to get organic rankings, the amount of search volume that people are out there searching for different services of what you do, or it could be some blog posts that you could be doing as well. There's different strategies on there that you can be doing, but ideally, you want good quality content, build up topical authority, and try and get some third party backlinks to power up the site to get those organic SEO rankings. I think that's another big part that you need to be doing as part of your digital marketing strategies in 2026. Yeah. And then the next one, which kind of ties back to what you were saying before, James, is obviously organic social media. Now, organic social media, I think it's more of a numbers game. So, try to create good content that your audience would actually view. Like, I see this time and time again where I look at brands and they've just published maybe four or five posts on their Instagram profile and they've not been active for three years. That's not going to drive you sales. But if you can do how tos, if you can do guides, maybe you can do before and afters. If you can do content like that, that way people will see you on socials and they will actually click to figure out more about you, fill in the contact form. The caveat to organic social media, yes, it's free to do. It's not like PPC for example, but it is very much a numbers game. So, you want to be consistently uploading, maybe not every day, but at least three or four times a week.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. On the subject of social media, paid social ads as well is massive. I'm a massive advocate of the kind of the dollar a day strategy of what people talk about. So, if you are going to be taking the time to be posting every day like you mentioned there for organic social media, just spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting it. So getting case studies, any awards that you've won as well for reputation and starting boosting that. You can also be running retargeting ads. So if anyone's clicked through to your website, you can be running retargeting which is paid social as well. Different places like Meta, so whether that's Facebook and Instagram, you've got Twitter, you've got YouTube, you can be running Pinterest, you can even run places like Reddit as well for paid ads. And I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. The next one is probably a love hate relationship. It is PPC, right? Google AdWords or doing it on Bing, wherever. That's basically the sponsored results. So if you search for a service, it's above local SEO. Now, both myself and James have spoken to so many business owners that are either they've spent 10, 15, 20,000 on it and they've not had a single result or they might have had a few leads and it's just not been of quality. Or you've got other guys that have spent hundreds of thousands on it and they're like, it's the best thing that's ever happened to my business. Now, the reason why people either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it is probably down to how it's been set up. There's so many different nuances to PPC. For example, having a really proactive negative keyword list, making certain that you have a set of banned IPs, like for example your competitors could be clicking on your ads and that's deemed as what's called click fraud. Making certain that you've got a high converting landing page, making certain that you KPI your sales team. So when a PPC lead comes in, that is one of the first priorities that they actually take when it comes to contacting the lead. There's all of these different nuances and if you're not on the ball with PPC, it's probably not going to work for your business. However, if you've got a really good well refined sales team, you've got a really good landing page, you've got a well kept, up to date negative keyword list, you are using click fraud software, at that point it will actually probably perform well for you. But again, just know the pros and cons to PPC.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. There's certainly pros and cons. There's benefits of using it to get instant leads, but like you said, the amount of people that we speak to that have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries and stuff that's come through as part of the digital marketing is pretty scary. While we're on the subject of paid, obviously we spoke about paid social ads and now you've spoke there about PPC with Google or Bing. I'm going to throw in the mix paid ads on AI platforms. It's not fully rolled out as we're doing this video, but I know that Chat GPT are looking to try and roll out Chat GPT ads. Claude, Perplexity, other kind of LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. I think if you're one of the early adopters and innovators to get on there, I think you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. So, it's something to look out for of doing paid AI listings and ads. I think that could be something to look out for in 2026.

Kasra Dash: Next on the list, and this is kind of a little bit out of control, you do obviously have forums that you can get your brand mentioned in, like for example Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to the after fact. Where are your customers that you've been dealing with previously? Are they actually raving and shouting about you? If they are then that's a very good resource of getting other people recommending you. So if you can get that, again it's a little bit out of your control but asking for reviews, asking for them to recommend you to friends, to people, that can obviously generate you a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure. And the add on benefits to places like Reddit is that it's getting cited so much now in the AI overviews. So when you spoke there early on about AI visibility, if you can try to get a positive kind of lot of people talking about the products and services of what you do and some reviews on there, it's indirectly then going to help you or directly actually is going to help you with AI visibility. And then the last one for me is tradesman websites. So like Check a Trade, Bark or teaming up with a third party lead generation company. Something I would say with all of these practices, Kasra touched on earlier about making certain that you understand your KPIs and your return on ad spend. I think it's very important for business owners that are doing any sort of digital marketing to be tracking how much time and effort is being put into, let's say running organic social media or running paid ads. Everything should have KPIs put in place. And this is exactly the same then with tradesman websites like Check a Trade, Bark, Rated People, My Builder. These could all be amazing platforms to generate leads that could get you a positive return on investment. And if you do, you should continue to be using those platforms. There's certain lead generation companies out there as well that could generate you quite a lot of leads. They could be using organic SEO or PPC or social media ads to generate you those leads. If they are getting you a positive return on investment, again, I'm all for it as part of your digital marketing strategies. But I just want to repeat one more time with regards to Fat Rank and Promo SEO. They do lead generation and they guarantee a return on investment. It's a commission based lead generation service or performance based lead generation service. So, make sure you head on over there, fill in the form. That could just be one part of generating leads of many. You should be trying to generate your own. You should never have a single point of failure and you should be trying to get that diversification. But make sure you head on over to Promo SEO or Fat Rank lead generation service as part of your digital marketing efforts in 2026. Thank you very much, Kasra.