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

James Dooley: If you have a company based in the West Midlands and you are looking to grow in 2026, but you are uncertain which digital marketing strategies you should be using, should you be trying to team up with a West Midlands SEO agency or looking to do PPC with a different marketing company based in the West Midlands? Today, I am going to go through all the different types of digital marketing strategies that you could be using to try to grow. But before spending a single penny, Kazra Dash, what advice would you give to a business owner who is based in the West Midlands?

Kazra Dash: The number one piece of advice that I would give to a West Midlands business owner is to go and set up some KPIs and track profitability. You want to make sure that every single penny you are spending is actually getting some form of return on investment. A lot of businesses end up spending a huge amount of money and they do not get any leads, or the lead quality is not that great. You want to have those KPIs in place first. So James Dooley, for West Midlands-based businesses, what is the first marketing strategy that you would recommend?

James Dooley: Step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making sure that you are looking good online and have a strong reputation. I think everything needs to start with the foundations. 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, and 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 are getting, the conversion rate would be better if, at the eleventh hour, they are deciding who they are going to go with. Branding becomes very, very important. So I would say that is the first thing that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies.

Kazra Dash: My next strategy is going to be 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 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, and 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.

James Dooley: Yes, I think that is a huge strategy that people need to be looking at with regard 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 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 as well, you have got that diversification of leads. So head on over to Fat Rank, 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 there as well, and just double check whether you can go and get a third-party lead generation company to top up and start generating some leads for your business to grow in 2026.

Kazra Dash: Yes. Then next on the list is Google Business Profiles, so Google Maps 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 are pros and cons to this. I think the biggest advantage is that once it is actually ranking, you are going to be consistently generating leads. However, to get from nowhere, let us say you do not have a Google Maps listing at all, to getting it ranked into position number one, the issue you have got is that there might be, let us say, a 60 or 100 review deficit, and to obviously get those reviews, you need leads. So it is one of those things. It is like the chicken and the egg. I think it is good for personal branding or for the branding of your company. So always try and get the Google Maps listing, but you should always know the pros and cons of it as well.

James Dooley: Yes, 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 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 that you cover. So, like plumbing in Manchester, create a page for that. Hopefully then share that on the Google Business Profile that you mentioned. Trying to get organic rankings matters because of the amount of search volume from people who are out there searching for different services that you offer, or it could be some blog posts that you could be doing as well. There are 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 is another big part that you need to be doing as part of your digital marketing strategies in 2026.

Kazra Dash: Yes. Then the next one, which kind of ties back to what you were saying before, James Dooley, is obviously organic social media. Now, organic social media is more of a numbers game. So try to create good content that your audience would actually view. I see this time and time again where I look at brands and they have just published maybe four or five posts on their Instagram profile and they have not been active for three years. That is 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, people will see you on social media and they will actually click to figure 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: Yes, for sure. On the subject of social media, paid social ads as well are massive. I am a massive advocate of the dollar-a-day strategy that 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 spend a few pounds on those posts and boost them. So get case studies, any awards that you have won as well for reputation, and start boosting that. You can also be running retargeting ads. So if anyone has clicked through to your website, you can be running retargeting, which is paid social as well. Different places like Meta, whether that is Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest all offer opportunities, and you can even run places like Reddit as well for paid ads. I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kazra Dash: Yes. The next one is probably a love-hate relationship, and that is PPC. Google AdWords or doing it on Bing, wherever. That is basically the sponsored results. So if you search for a service, it is above local SEO. James Dooley and I have both spoken to so many business owners who have either spent £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 on it and not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads and they have just not been of quality. Or you have got other people who have spent hundreds of thousands on it and they say it is the best thing that has ever happened to their business. The reason why 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 really proactive negative keyword list, making sure that you have a set of banned IPs, because your competitors could be clicking on your ads and that is deemed to be click fraud. Making sure that you have got a high-converting landing page. Making sure 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 are all of these different nuances, and if you are not on the ball with PPC, it is probably not going to work for your business. However, if you have got a really good, well-refined sales team, you have got a really good landing page, you have got a well-kept, up-to-date negative keyword list, and 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 of PPC.

James Dooley: Yes, 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 the results come through as part of their digital marketing 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 into the mix paid ads on AI platforms. It is not fully rolled out as we are doing this video, but I know that ChatGPT is looking to try and 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 look out for in 2026.

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

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. One of the add-on benefits of places like Reddit is that it is 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 amount of people talking about the products and services that you offer and some reviews on there, it is indirectly then going to help you, or directly actually is going to help you, with AI visibility. Then the last one for me is tradesman websites. So things like Checkatrade, Bark, or teaming up with a third-party lead generation company. Something I would say with all of these practices, which Kazra Dash touched on earlier, is making sure 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, let us 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 Checkatrade, Bark, Rated People and MyBuilder. 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 are 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 those leads, but if they are getting you a positive return on investment, again, I am 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 is 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 out 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, Kazra Dash.