You’ve probably tried advertising your business before. Maybe you boosted a Facebook post, stuck a leaflet through some letterboxes, or sponsored the under-12s football team. Some of it felt like it worked. Most of it, you’re not sure. And nobody could tell you which bit actually brought in new customers.
That’s the reality for most local businesses. Not that advertising doesn’t work, but that they’re doing it without any way of knowing what’s working and what’s just making noise.
Research from Rakuten Marketing found that businesses waste an average of 26% of their advertising budgets on ineffective channels. For small businesses managing their own campaigns, a WordStream study put the waste figure at 25% of paid search budgets alone, mostly because nobody was actively managing the campaigns after setting them up.
A quarter of your budget. Gone. Not because advertising is broken, but because the approach is.
So before we get into where you should advertise, we need to start with a more useful question.
The Question Most Business Owners Get Wrong
When people ask “how should I advertise my local business?” they almost always mean “which platform should I use?” Facebook? Google? The local paper? A leaflet drop?
That’s the wrong question. It’s like asking “what car should I buy?” before you’ve decided whether you need to carry five passengers or just yourself. The channel only matters once you’ve answered two more fundamental questions: who are you trying to reach, and what are they doing when you reach them?
Professor Byron Sharp’s research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that brands grow through two things. Mental availability (are people thinking of you when they need what you sell?) and physical availability (can they find you easily when they decide to buy?). This sounds academic, but it’s actually the most practical framework any local business can use.
Think of it this way. If someone in your area needs a plumber right now, they’ll search Google or ask a friend. If your business shows up in that search, or if your name is the one their friend mentions, you win. That’s physical availability (being findable) and mental availability (being memorable) working together.
Every advertising decision you make should serve one of those two jobs. Either making you easier to find, or making you harder to forget.
Your Options, Properly Assessed
Here’s where most advice goes wrong. You’ll read a blog post that lists fifteen advertising channels and tells you to “pick the ones that work best for your business.” That’s useless. So let me be honest about what each option is actually good at, and what it wastes money on.
Leaflets and flyers
Cheap to produce, easy to distribute, and almost entirely unmeasurable. You’ll never know how many people looked at your leaflet and walked into your shop versus how many people binned it with the takeaway menus. Research suggests print triggers a stronger emotional response than digital ads, and 77% of people remember a print ad compared to 46% for digital. But remembering an ad and acting on it are very different things. Leaflets build a small amount of mental availability (people see your name) but they’re terrible at driving traceable action.
Best for: Very local, very simple offers (a new restaurant opening, a seasonal sale) where you just need people nearby to know you exist.
Worst for: Anything where you need to measure results or build a sustained campaign.
Local press and radio
Trust is high. According to one study, 82% of people trust print ads, and radio delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any channel. The problem is that local press readership has collapsed. The audience is smaller than it was ten years ago, and it skews older. Radio is better but still difficult to track.
Best for: Building credibility and mental availability with an older demographic. Works well alongside digital campaigns.
Worst for: Reaching anyone under 40, or tracking whether it actually drove sales.
Social media (organic)
This is where most local businesses start, and where most local businesses get stuck. You post three times a week for a month, nothing happens, and you conclude that social media doesn’t work. But the problem isn’t social media. It’s that organic reach on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is now so low that your posts are reaching a tiny fraction of your followers. You’re essentially putting effort into a channel that’s actively throttling your visibility unless you pay.
Best for: Staying in touch with existing customers. Sharing updates that only your current audience needs to see. Building a bit of personality.
Worst for: Reaching new customers. Growing your audience. Driving footfall. If you’re relying on organic social media to bring in new business, you’ll be waiting a very long time.
Social media (paid)
This is a different story entirely. Paid social lets you target people by location, interest, behaviour, and demographics. 58% of consumers first discover new businesses on social media, and 63% make plans to visit a business after a positive interaction with them online. The targeting makes it efficient. The creative makes it memorable. And unlike organic, you can actually reach people who don’t already know you.
Best for: Building mental availability. Making people in your area aware that you exist, that you’re good, and that you’re worth checking out. Particularly strong for visual businesses (restaurants, salons, gyms, retail).
Worst for: Capturing people who are actively searching for what you sell right now. Someone scrolling Instagram isn’t looking for a plumber. They might need one next week, and your ad might stick in their mind, but it’s not the same as catching someone mid-search.
Google (search ads and maps)
Here’s where the data gets remarkable. 76% of people who search “near me” on their phone visit a business within 24 hours. 28% of those searches lead to a purchase. And 46% of all Google searches have local intent, which translates to roughly 1.6 billion searches per day where someone is looking for something nearby.
These aren’t people browsing. These are people with their wallet in their hand, looking for a business to spend money with. And if your business doesn’t show up, someone else’s does.
Google search ads and a properly set up Google Business Profile are the single most efficient way to capture people who are already looking for what you sell. This is physical availability in its purest form. Being there at the exact moment someone needs you.
Best for: Capturing high-intent local searchers. Driving measurable footfall and enquiries. Every pound spent can be tracked back to a result.
Worst for: Building awareness among people who aren’t currently searching. Google catches demand. It doesn’t create it.
Sponsorships and events
Sponsoring the local football team or having a stall at the farmer’s market is community marketing. It builds goodwill, puts your name in front of people, and signals that you’re part of the neighbourhood. It’s mental availability work. People see your name enough times, in enough contexts, that when they do need what you sell, you’re the first name that comes to mind.
Best for: Long-term brand building in a tight geographic area. Building trust and familiarity.
Worst for: Generating short-term results. If you need more customers this month, a sponsorship deal won’t get you there.
The Opportunity Most Local Businesses Are Missing
I’ve mentioned the “near me” statistics already, but they’re worth dwelling on because the gap between the opportunity and what most businesses are doing about it is enormous.
98% of consumers search online to find local businesses. That’s essentially everyone. And yet 58% of businesses aren’t giving local search the attention it deserves. More than half of local businesses are essentially invisible at the exact moment their potential customers are looking for them.
This is like owning a shop on the high street and leaving the shutters down during opening hours.
The businesses that show up in local search results, with a complete Google Business Profile, decent reviews, and a presence in the ad placements, are hoovering up the customers that their competitors are too lazy or too uninformed to catch.
The Biggest Mistake You Can Make
It’s not choosing the wrong channel. It’s stopping before your advertising has time to work.
Byron Sharp’s research on advertising effectiveness is unambiguous on this point. Stop-start advertising, where you run a campaign for a few weeks, pause it, then start something new, is the single most common way businesses waste their budgets. Modern advertising systems learn as they run. They need data to optimise. Every time you restart, you throw away everything the system learned.
This is especially true for paid digital campaigns, where automated bidding needs a minimum volume of conversions before it can work properly. If you’re getting five enquiries a week, you need ten weeks of consistent running before the system knows what it’s doing.
The businesses that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that pick an approach and commit to it long enough to see results. Consistency beats creativity every time.
What Actually Works for Local Businesses
If I had to strip this down to the three things that matter most, they’d be these.
Be findable when people search. This means having a properly completed Google Business Profile, showing up in local search results (either through ads or organic visibility), and making it easy for someone to find your phone number, your address, and your opening hours. If 76% of “near me” searches lead to a store visit, you need to be part of that 76%.
Be memorable before they search. 95% of people aren’t ready to buy at any given moment. But when they are ready, you want your business to be the first name that comes to mind. That’s what consistent advertising does. Not selling, just staying present. Whether that’s through paid social, community involvement, or even a well-placed ad in the local newsletter, the job is the same: make sure people know you exist before they need you.
Be trusted when they find you. Nielsen’s global study found that 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing. And 93% say online reviews affect their buying decisions. So your reviews matter. Your reputation matters. The experience your existing customers have matters, because it directly determines whether new customers will choose you.
These three things, findability, memorability, and trust, map directly onto Byron Sharp’s framework. Physical availability (can people find you?), mental availability (do people think of you?), and social proof (do people trust you?). Get those right, and the specific channels you use matter far less than you think.
You Don’t Need to Do Everything
Here’s the relief in all of this. You don’t need to be on every platform, in every publication, at every event. That’s how budgets get burned.
What you need is clarity about what job each channel is doing. Is it making you findable (catching people who are already searching)? Is it making you memorable (staying in people’s minds for when they do need you)? Or is it building trust (proving that you’re good at what you do)?
Once you know the job, you can pick the right tool. And once you’ve picked it, the hardest part is the bit most businesses get wrong: sticking with it long enough for it to work.
If you’re wondering where to start, start with the highest-intent channel available. That’s search. The people typing “[your service] near me” into Google are the closest thing to a guaranteed customer that exists in marketing. Capture them first. Then build from there.
For a broader look at how local store marketing works as a whole, including offline and digital approaches, I’ve covered the full picture separately. And if you want to understand what a new customer should actually cost before you start spending, that’s worth reading too.
