Solved: First Marketing Strategy for Bristol Business (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's a tough spot to be in, starting a new business and trying to figure out where to put your money to get customers in the door. It's really easy to waste a lot of cash on advertising that goes nowhere, especially when you're just starting out. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap. Honestly, for a local business, the strategy is fairly straightforward, but most people get it backwards.

The main thing is you want to be a fisherman with a net in a river full of fish, not trying to convince people in the desert they're thirsty. That means starting with channels where people are actively looking for a solution to a problem you can solve, right now, in Bristol. We'll walk through how to do that.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their postcode...

Right, first things first. The biggest mistake I see new businesses make is thinking their target audience is a demographic. It's not. "Homeowners in Bristol aged 30-55" is a completely useless piece of information for marketing. It tells you nothing about *why* someone would ever give you their hard-earned money.

You need to stop thinking about who your customer *is* and start obsessing over the problem they have. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-or-life-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real.

• If you're a plumber, your customer isn't "a person in BS8." Your customer is the person standing in an inch of water at 2 AM, frantically searching on their phone for a "24 hour emergency plumber in Bristol" because a pipe's just burst and they're terrified of the damage it's causing. That's the nightmare.
• If you're a personal trainer, your customer isn't "someone who wants to get fit." It's the person who just booked a holiday, tried on their swimsuit, and felt a wave of panic and unhappiness. Their nightmare is feeling self-conscious and not enjoying a holiday they've spent a fortune on.
• If you're an accountant for small businesses, the nightmare isn't "needing to do a tax return." It's the fear of a brown envelope from HMRC, the stress of not knowing if you have enough cash to make payroll next month, and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by finances.

Once you define this nightmare with crystal clarity, everything else becomes easier. Your ad copy writes itself. You know exactly what keywords they'll be typing into Google. You know what your offer needs to be to solve their immediate pain. Before you spend a single pound on ads, you have to do this work. If you don't, you have no business advertising, because your message will be generic and invisible.

I'd say you need to fix your offer before you spend a penny...

Now that you know your customer's pain, your offer needs to be the immediate painkiller. This brings us to the second biggest failure point I see: the offer itself. Most websites for local businesses have a button that says "Contact Us." This is possibly the weakest, most arrogant Call to Action you can have.

It presumes your potential customer, who is in a state of panic or urgency, wants to send a message into the void and wait for a reply. It's high friction and low value. Your offer's only job is to provide a moment of undeniable value and make it incredibly easy for them to take the next step. It has to feel like a safe, simple choice.

Instead of "Contact Us," you need something that promises a specific outcome:

• For a tradesperson: "Get a Free, No-Obligation Quote in 24 Hours." This manages expectations on time and removes the fear of being pressured into a sale.
• For a consultant or professional service: "Book a Free 15-Minute Strategy Call." This is a low-commitment way for them to get a taste of your expertise and see if you're a good fit.
• For a local shop or service like a hairdresser: "Claim Your 'First Visit' 20% Discount." This gives a tangible incentive to overcome the inertia of trying somewhere new.

Your website must be rebuilt around this single, clear offer. When someone lands on your homepage, it should be immediately obvious what you do, what problem you solve, and what they need to do next. You'll need to build trust too. This means having clear photos of you/your work, genuine reviews or testimonials from other Bristol locals, and your full contact details (address, phone number) clearly visible. If your website looks unprofessional or untrustworthy, you could have the best ads in the world and you still wouldn't get any customers. People will click, take one look, and leave. It's a hole in your bucket you need to plug before you start pouring water (money) into it.

You probably should start with Google, not Facebook...

Okay, with the foundations of your customer 'nightmare' and your offer sorted, we can talk about platforms. Every new business owner is tempted by Facebook and Instagram ads. They see big brands doing it, it seems easy to set up, and they think they can reach everyone in Bristol. This is almost always the wrong first move.

You need to understand the difference between demand capture and demand generation.

• Demand Capture (Google Search): This is about finding people who are *already* looking for what you sell. They have the problem, they're aware of it, and they're actively searching for a solution. This is where you want to start. It's the lowest hanging fruit.
• Demand Generation (Social Media): This is about interrupting people while they're looking at pictures of their friends' holidays to try and make them interested in your business. You are trying to *create* demand. This is much harder, much more expensive, and takes a lot longer to work.

When you're new, you don't have the budget or the brand recognition to effectively generate demand. You need sales now. That's why your first performance marketing strategy should be 100% focused on Google Ads. Specifically, Google Search Ads and maybe Google Local Service Ads (if you're an eligible service provider).

When you run a "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign on Facebook, you are literally telling the algorithm "find me the cheapest people to show this ad to." The algorithm, being very clever, goes and finds people inside your audience who never click on anything and certainly never buy anything. Their attention is cheap for a reason. You're actively paying to reach the worst possible audience. The best brand awareness you can have as a small business is a happy customer. You get that through sales, not impressions.

With Google Search, you are putting your business directly in front of someone at the exact moment they are looking for help. The person typing "emergency electrician bristol" into their phone doesn't need to be convinced they have a problem. They are desperate for a solution. Your job is simply to be the best, most trustworthy-looking solution in the search results.

You'll need the right keywords to avoid wasting money...

Just running Google Ads isn't enough. You can still waste a fortune by bidding on the wrong keywords. The key is user intent. You need to target keywords that signal someone is looking to buy or hire, not just learn. These are called commercial intent keywords.

Let's use a local Bristol-based gardening service as an example:

• Bad Keywords (Informational Intent): "how to prune roses", "best time to plant tulips", "types of lawnmower". People searching for these are in DIY mode, they aren't looking to hire you. Bidding on these is a complete waste of money.
• Good Keywords (Commercial Intent): "gardening services bristol", "lawn mowing service near me", "hedge trimming clifton", "garden tidy up redland price". The language here is totally different. They're looking for a service, often with a location attached. These are the keywords you want.

You also need to make agressive use of negative keywords. These are terms you tell Google *not* to show your ads for. For any local business, your first negative keywords should be "jobs", "careers", "training", "course", "free", "diy", "how to". This immediately filters out a huge amount of irrelevant traffic from people looking for work or trying to do it themselves.

Think about what your ideal customer would type in their moment of need. It will almost always include three things: the service they need, a word indicating they want to buy (like 'price', 'quote', 'service', 'company'), and often their location ('bristol', or a specific area like 'bedminster' or 'knowle').

We'll need to look at your ad copy to make it compelling...

Once you've got your keywords, you need to write an ad that makes someone click on *your* link instead of the three others on the page. You do this by using the "Problem-Agitate-Solve" framework, which ties directly back to the customer nightmare we talked about.

Let's write an example for a fictional Bristol-based home cleaning company, "Bristol Sparkle Cleaners." Their ideal customer's nightmare is being a busy professional who's too tired to clean, feels embarrassed when guests come over, and just wants their weekend back.

See how that works? It doesn't just say "we clean houses." It hits on the emotional reasons someone hires a cleaner. It builds trust ("vetted & insured", "5-Star Rated") and makes the next step seem incredibly easy ("Book... in 60s", "instant online quote"). This is how you stand out.

I'd say you need a realistic budget and expectations...

This is where many new business owners get a shock. Proper advertising isn't cheap. But you should think of it as an investment, not a cost. To do this properly, you need to budget enough to get statistically significant data. If you only spend £5 a day, you might get one or two clicks and you'll learn absolutely nothing. It's like trying to judge a restaurant based on one grain of rice.

For most local services in the UK, you should expect a lead (someone filling out your form or calling you) to cost anywhere from £10 to £50. It can be more in very competitive industries like law or finance, and it can be less for lower-value services. One of our best consumer services campaigns was for a home cleaning company, and they got leads for around £5 each, which was fantastic. But we also have an HVAC client in a competitive area paying around $60 per lead. Both are happy because the value of a new customer is high enough to make it profitable.

I usually recommend a starting ad spend of at least £1,000 to £2,000 per month. This gives you enough budget to get hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads, which is enough data for us to see which keywords are working, which ads are performing best, and to start optimising to bring your cost per lead down. Anything less and you are basically flying blind.

You need to know your numbers. If a new customer is worth £500 to you, and you convert 1 in 4 leads into a customer, then you can afford to pay up to £125 per lead and still break even. Knowing this means you won't panic if your first few leads cost £40 each. You'll know you're still well within a profitable range.

This is the main advice I have for you:

There's a lot to take in here, I know. It's not as simple as just "turning on some ads." To be succesful, you have to approach it strategically. I've broken down the main steps for you in the table below. This is the exact process we'd follow if we were building your first campaign.

Going through these steps in order is how you build a performance marketing campaign that actually performs. It's methodical and it's based on a real understanding of your customer, not just guesswork.

Doing all of this yourself is definately possible, but it's a steep learning curve. There are a lot of ways to lose money in Google Ads if you're not careful. The main advantage of working with an expert or an agency is that we've already made the costly mistakes on other people's budgets. We know the pitfalls, we can set things up correctly from day one, and we can start optimising based on years of experience, which usually gets you to profitability much faster.

This is obviously just an initial overview. A proper strategy would require a deeper look at your specific business, your margins, and your competition in Bristol. If you'd like to go through your specific situation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session where we can do just that.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh