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

James Dooley: If you're a company based in Stockport and you're looking to grow in 2026, what digital marketing strategy should you be doubling down on to get more customers or more enquiries? Should you be looking to hire a local SEO agency based in Stockport, a PPC agency based in Stockport, or potentially team up with a lead generation company based in Stockport? Or should you be trying to get yourself into the AI overviews powered by Gemini, or into large language models like ChatGPT? These are all questions that we get asked quite a lot by business owners based in the Stockport area. But before we get started on what digital marketing strategies we should be using for Stockport based businesses, Kasra, what advice would you give?

Kasra Dash: For Stockport based business owners, one thing I would highly recommend is setting up a predictable system. You want to put KPIs in place before spending a single penny on any marketing channel. You need to know exactly how many leads you are getting and how much money you are spending. A few KPIs I would be looking at are, first of all, how much money am I spending on each channel? From that, how many leads are actually being generated per channel? You might be spending money on SEO and PPC, so how much have I spent on SEO and what has the return been from a lead generation point of view? How much have I spent on PPC and what has the return been from PPC, and how many leads have I generated from that? Then I would take a look at the contact rates of those leads. Are the leads actually picking up the phone? Are they high quality? Are they interested in your service? Then from the contacted leads, I would look at how many of those contacted leads have turned into paying customers, because we all know that leads are not the final end point you should be looking at. You should be looking at how many of those leads have actually turned into paying customers. That is the number one thing I would recommend for Stockport based businesses. Set up the KPIs before spending any money on any marketing channel. So James, going back to the marketing strategies, what would be your number one way of generating more business for Stockport based companies?

James Dooley: Step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making certain that you're looking good online and that you've got a strong reputation. I think everything needs to start there. The foundations need to start with a positive brand SERP of who you are and what you do. A SERP stands for search engine results page. Getting that branding right across the board can then lead on to other things that 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 will be better because at the eleventh hour, when they are deciding who to go with, branding becomes very important. So I would say that is the first thing people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies. My next strategy is AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are actually looking into this. So what do ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity say about your brand or your business? Is it a positive thing or is it a negative thing? Also, trying to figure out what these platforms say about your competitors and improving what they say about you is really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some call it GEO, and some 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: I think that is a huge strategy that people need to be looking at when it comes to artificial intelligence. More and more people are obviously using AI. The next one for me is filling in the form at FatRank or Promo SEO, which offer a commission based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. I think it is important to focus on your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but also if you can use some freelancers and outsource some work as well, then you have 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 offer a very similar performance based lead generation service that you might want to fill in the form for as well, and just double check whether you can get a third party lead generation company to top up and start generating you some leads for your business to grow in 2026. Next on the list is Google Business Profiles, so Google Map listings. This is like local SEO where you basically try to get more reviews and build out your Google Business Profile in your local area. There are 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, if you do not have a Google Maps listing at all and you want to get it into position number one, the issue is that there might be a sixty or hundred review deficit. To get those reviews, you need leads. So it is one of those chicken and egg situations. I think it is still good for personal branding or for company branding, so always try to get the Google Maps listing, but you should know the pros and cons as well.

James Dooley: For certain. If you are in a local area, you want to try and get those local map listings. For me, you need to be omnichannel and omnipresent. I think the next part is SEO in general, so organic SEO. Can you build up your website to try and get it ranking better? If you are in a local area, you might want to target your service with the areas that you cover. So, for example, plumbing in Manchester. Create a page for that and then hopefully share that on the Google Business Profile. Trying to get organic rankings matters because of the amount of search volume that is out there for different services that you offer. It could also be blog posts that you produce as well. There are different strategies you can use here, but ideally you want good quality content, you want to build topical authority and you want some third party backlinks to strengthen the site and help you get those organic SEO rankings. I think that is another big part of what you need to be doing as part of your digital marketing strategies in 2026.

Kasra Dash: The next one, which ties back to what you were saying before, James, is organic social media. Organic social media is more of a numbers game. Try to create good content that your audience would actually want to view. I see this time and time again where brands have only published four or five posts on their Instagram profile and then they have not been active for three years. That is not going to drive sales. But if you can do how to content, guides, and before and after posts, then people will see you on social media and they will actually click to find out more about you and fill in the contact form. The caveat to organic social media is that yes, it is free to do. It is 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: On the subject of social media, paid social ads are also massive. I am a big advocate of the small daily budget strategy that people talk about. So if you are going to be taking the time to post regularly like you mentioned there for organic social media, then spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting them makes sense. Use case studies and any awards that you have won as part of your reputation and start boosting that content. You can also run retargeting ads. So if anyone has clicked through to your website, you can run retargeting, which is paid social as well. On different places like Meta, whether that is Facebook or Instagram, plus Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and even Reddit, you can run paid ads. I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kasra Dash: The next one is probably a love hate relationship, and that is PPC. Google AdWords or Bing, wherever. That is basically the sponsored results. So if you search for a service, it appears above local SEO. Both James and I have spoken to many business owners who have spent ten, fifteen or twenty thousand pounds on it and not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads but the quality has not been good. Then you have other people who have spent hundreds of thousands on it and say it is the best thing that has ever happened to their business. The reason people either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it is probably down to how it has been set up. There are so many different nuances to PPC. For example, having a proactive negative keyword list, making certain that you have a set of banned IPs because competitors could be clicking on your ads, which is click fraud, making certain that you have a high converting landing page, and making certain that you KPI your sales team. So when a PPC lead comes in, that lead becomes one of the first priorities they deal with. There are all these different nuances. If you are not on the ball with PPC, it is probably not going to work for your business. However, if you have a really good and well refined sales team, a really good landing page, a well kept up to date negative keyword list, and you are using click fraud software, then it will probably perform well for you. But again, just know the pros and cons of PPC.

James Dooley: For sure. There are certainly pros and cons. There are benefits to using it to get instant leads, but like you said, the amount of people that we speak to who have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries and results they expected is pretty scary. While we are on the subject of paid, obviously we have spoken about paid social ads and now you have spoken there about PPC with Google or Bing. I am going to throw paid ads on AI platforms into the mix as well. It is not fully rolled out as we are recording this video, but I know that ChatGPT are looking to roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity and other kinds of LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. I think if you are one of the early adopters and innovators to get on there, you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. So it is something to look out for with paid AI listings and ads. I think that could be something to watch in 2026.

Kasra Dash: Next on the list, and this is a little bit out of your control, you do obviously have forums where you can get your brand mentioned, like Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to your previous customers. Are they actually raving about you? Are they recommending you? If they are, then that is a very good way of getting other people to recommend you as well. It is a little bit out of your control, but asking for reviews and asking customers to recommend you to friends and other people can obviously generate a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well.

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

Kasra Dash: Thank you very much, James.