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

**James Dooley and Kasra Dash – Nottingham (2026) – Clean Transcript** **James Dooley:** If you're a business based in **Nottingham** and looking to grow in **2026**, but you're uncertain what digital marketing strategy you should be doing, today I'm joined with **Kasra** and we're going to talk through all the different digital marketing strategies that you could be doing to help your business grow in Nottingham. But before we get started, Kasra, what bit of advice would you give to a Nottingham-based company with regards to digital marketing? Should they be doing **AI SEO** or **GEO** (what some people are calling it)? Should they be doing **LLM optimisation** or should it be **SEO**? Should it be **PPC**? Before even looking to spend any money on those different types of marketing strategies, what advice would you give to a business owner based in Nottingham? --- **Kasra Dash:** So, Nottingham-based businesses — the biggest issue that we have seen when a Nottingham-based business has actually contacted us is they do not have a predictable system in place. And what I mean by that is they just do not have any **KPIs**. They might be spending money on Facebook ads, PPC, SEO, and they're just sporadically spending as and when. What you want is a predictable system — a KPI set — to say: * “Okay, I’m spending X amount.” * “How much am I getting from £2,000 worth of spend?” * “Am I getting 10 leads? 25 leads? 30 leads?” From those leads: * How many of those leads are actually contactable? * How many of those leads are actually interested in your service? So out of, let’s say, the 10 leads that you’ve generated: * Is it five leads that pick up the phone? * Is it two leads that pick up the phone? What is that rate? And then from that: How many of those that do actually pick up the phone, or do reply to your emails, are actually turning into customers for your business — paying customers? Once you have that set of KPIs in place, then digital marketing becomes easy, because then you can pick and choose: * Which channels you want to spend money on * Which channels you want to double down on * Which channels you want to spend less money on Because myself and James are going to talk about a lot of different channels — that’s not to say that you need to spend money on all of them. You might decide, “Okay, I’m going to pick one or two of these channels.” So James, talking about the channels, let’s get into it. What’s the first digital marketing channel that you would recommend to Nottingham-based businesses? --- **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. 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 becomes very, very important. So I’d say that's the first thing that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies. --- **James Dooley:** My next strategy is going to be **AI visibility**. More and more companies are actually looking into this. So what does **ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity** say about your brand or about your business? * Is it positive? * Is it negative? And also trying to figure out what it says about your competitors as well — and obviously trying to improve that. 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 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 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. The biggest pro is that once it is actually ranking, you’re 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 listings. For me, you need to be **omni-channel** and **omnipresent**. 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. 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 you could be doing as well. There’s different strategies on there, but ideally you want good quality content, build 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. --- **James Dooley:** Yeah. And then the next one, which ties back to what you were saying before, is **organic social media**. Organic social media is more of a numbers game. Try to create good content that your audience would actually view. I see this time and time again where brands have 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, guides, before and afters — content like that — people will see you on socials, click through 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 — but it is very much a numbers game. You want to be consistently uploading — maybe not every day, but at least three or four times a week.

--- **Kasra Dash:** Yeah, for sure. On the subject of social media, **paid social ads** as well is massive. I’m a massive advocate of the “dollar a day” strategy people talk about. So if you are going to be taking the time to be posting regularly for organic social media, just spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting it. So boosting case studies, any awards that you’ve won as well for reputation. You can also be running **retargeting ads** — if anyone’s clicked through to your website, you can be running retargeting, which is paid social as well. Different places like Meta — Facebook and Instagram — you’ve got Twitter, YouTube, 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. --- **James Dooley:** Yeah. The next one is a love/hate relationship — **PPC** — Google AdWords or doing it on Bing. That’s basically the sponsored results. So if you search for a service, it’s above local SEO. We’ve spoken to so many business owners that have either spent 10, 15, 20,000 and they’ve not had a single result… or they’ve had a few leads and they’ve not been quality. And you’ve got other guys that have spent hundreds of thousands and they’re like, “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to my business.” The reason people absolutely love it or absolutely hate it is probably down to how it’s been set up. There’s so many nuances to PPC, like: * A proactive negative keyword list * Banned IPs (competitors clicking your ads = click fraud) * A high-converting landing page * KPI’ing your sales team so PPC leads get contacted fast If you’re not on the ball with PPC, it’s probably not going to work. However, if you’ve got a well-refined sales team, a good landing page, an up-to-date negative keyword list, and you’re using click fraud software — at that point it can perform well. But again, just know the pros and cons to PPC. --- **Kasra Dash:** Yeah, for sure. There’s certainly pros and cons. There’s benefits of using it to get instant leads, but the amount of people that we speak to that have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries is pretty scary. While we’re on the subject of paid — we spoke about paid social ads, now PPC — 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 ChatGPT are looking to roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity, and other LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. If you’re one of the early adopters, you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. So it’s something to look out for — paid AI listings and ads in 2026. --- **James Dooley:** Next on the list — and this is a little bit out of control — you do have forums you can get your brand mentioned in, like Reddit and Quora. That comes down to where your customers are — are they raving and shouting about you? If they are, that’s a very good resource of getting other people recommending you. So asking for reviews, asking them to recommend you to friends — that can generate a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well. --- **Kasra Dash:** Yeah, for sure. And the add-on benefits to places like Reddit is it’s getting cited so much now in the AI overviews. So when you spoke earlier about AI visibility, if you can get a positive conversation going — people talking about your products/services and leaving reviews — it can indirectly or directly help you with AI visibility. And then the last one for me is **tradesman websites** — like Checkatrade, Bark — or teaming up with a third-party lead generation company. Something I’d say with all of these practices is: make sure you understand your KPIs and your ROAS (return on ad spend). Track how much time and effort is being put into running organic social media or paid ads — everything should have KPIs in place. And it’s the same with tradesman websites like Checkatrade, Bark, Rated People, MyBuilder — these could be amazing platforms to generate leads and get a positive return on investment. If you do, you should continue using them. There are lead generation companies out there as well that could generate quite a lot of leads — using organic SEO, PPC, or social media ads — but if they are getting you a positive return on investment, I’m all for it.

But I just want to repeat one more time: **Fat Rank and Promo SEO** — they do lead generation and they guarantee a return on investment. It’s a commission-based or performance-based lead generation service.

So make sure you head on over there, fill in the form. That could 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 — you should be diversifying. 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. --- **James Dooley:** Thank you very much, Kasra.