James Dooley: If you're a company based in Oldham and looking to grow in 2026, but you're uncertain which digital marketing strategies you should be doubling down on to get more customers or more enquiries, today I'm going to talk through all the different channels and platforms that you could be using. Should you be teaming up with a local SEO agency based in Oldham or a PPC agency based in Oldham? Should you be trying to find a lead generation service that specialises in Oldham enquiries? These are all questions that we get asked quite a lot from business owners and entrepreneurs based in the Oldham and Greater Manchester area. But before we get started on what digital marketing strategies people should be using to grow their business in the local area, Kazra, what advice would you give before they start spending money on any digital marketing strategy?

Kasra Dash: For Oldham based businesses, going back to previous conversations we have had with Oldham based companies, the biggest issue we see is that they do not have a predictable system in place. Some companies are spending £10,000 on PPC and at the end of it they are saying they have not had any leads, or the leads they did generate were poor quality. You need to make sure you have a predictable system in place for issues like that so you are not burning money. The first thing I would be looking at is how much money has been spent on each digital marketing campaign. You might be spending money on PPC, Facebook ads and SEO. You need to work out exactly how much you are spending across all three. The next thing is how many leads are being generated by each of those channels separately. After that, you need to look at the contact rate. PPC might have great contact rates, whereas with Facebook you might not be able to contact the leads for two or three days, or you may not be able to reach them at all. They might have filled in the form and then forgotten about you. You need to understand what the contact rates of those leads are. The last thing, and probably the most important, is how many of those contacted leads are actually turning into paying customers. Leads generated and paying customers are two completely different things. You need to know how many of those leads have actually paid your business, how much money you have got back and what the return on spend looks like. If you have spent £1,000, have you lost money or made money? What has the profit margin been? Once you have that system in place, marketing becomes a lot more fun and a lot more predictable. You can then scale certain campaigns or channels up. If you are spending £2,000 a month on Facebook ads and getting really good results, you can push that to £4,000. So James, for Oldham based businesses, what would you recommend as the first marketing channel they should look at?

James Dooley: Step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making certain that you are looking good online and have a strong reputation. 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 are getting will convert better because at the eleventh hour, when people are deciding who to go with, branding becomes very important. I would say that is the first thing people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies.

James Dooley: My next strategy is AI visibility. More and more companies are looking into this. What does ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity say about your brand or your business? Is it a positive thing or a negative thing? You also need to figure out what it says about your competitors and then work on improving your own position. Some people call it AI SEO. Some people call it GEO. Some people call it LLM optimisation. Whatever you call it, 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, which offer a commission based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. It is important to focus on your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but if you can use freelancers and outsource some as well, then you have diversification of leads. 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. Just double check whether you can use a third party lead generation company to top up and start generating leads for your business to grow in 2026.

Kasra Dash: 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. The biggest pro is that once it is ranking, you are going to be consistently generating leads. However, if you are starting from nowhere and do not have a Google Maps listing ranking at all, the issue is that there might be a sixty or hundred review deficit compared with competitors. To get those reviews, you need leads. It is one of those chicken and egg situations. Personally, I think it is still good for personal branding or company branding, so always try to get the Google Maps listing right, but know the pros and cons as well.

James Dooley: For certain. If you are in a local area, you want to try to get those local map listings. For me, you need to be omnichannel and omnipresent. The next part is SEO in general, so organic SEO. Can you build up your website to get it ranking better? If you are in a local area, you might want to target your service with the area that you cover. For example, plumbing in Manchester. Create a page for that, then hopefully share that on the Google Business Profile. Try to get organic rankings because there is search volume out there for different services that you offer. It could also be blog posts that you do as well. There are different strategies you can use, but ideally you want good quality content, you want to build topical authority and you want some third party backlinks to power up the site and 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 or before and after posts, people will see you on socials and they will click through 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, unlike PPC for example, but it is very much a numbers game. You want to be uploading consistently, 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. If you are taking the time to post every day like you mentioned for organic social media, then just spend a few pounds on those posts and boost them. Use case studies and any awards that you have won as part of your reputation building and start boosting that. You can also run retargeting ads. If anyone has clicked through to your website, you can run retargeting, which is paid social as well. Platforms like Meta, so Facebook and Instagram, plus Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and even Reddit can all work for 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 doing it on Bing, wherever. These are the sponsored results that sit above local SEO. James and I have spoken to so many business owners who have spent £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 on it and not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads but the quality was poor. On the other side, you have 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 really proactive negative keyword list, making certain that you have a set of banned IPs because competitors could be clicking on your ads, which is what is called click fraud. You also need a high converting landing page and you need to KPI your sales team so that when a PPC lead comes in, it is one of the first priorities they deal with. There are all 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 a really good, well refined sales team, a strong landing page, a well kept and up to date negative keyword list, and you are using click fraud software, then it will probably perform well for you. But again, 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 we speak to who have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries they expected is pretty scary. While we are on the subject of paid, we have spoken about paid social ads and now PPC with Google or Bing. I am going to throw in paid ads on AI platforms 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 LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. If you are one of the early adopters and innovators who gets on there first, you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. 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, is forums where you can get your brand mentioned, like Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to your previous customers. Are they raving about you? Are they recommending you? If they are, then that is a very good resource for getting other people to recommend you as well. It is a bit out of your control, but asking for reviews and asking people to recommend you to friends and other people can generate a decent amount of leads and enquiries.

James Dooley: And the add on benefit to places like Reddit is that they get cited so much now in AI overviews. So when you were speaking earlier about AI visibility, if you can get positive discussion around the products and services that you offer, plus some reviews on there, it is either indirectly or directly going to help you with AI visibility. The last one for me is tradesman websites such as Checkatrade, Bark 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. It is very important for business owners 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 could all be amazing platforms to generate leads that produce a positive return on investment. If they do, you should continue using them.

James Dooley: 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 that FatRank and Promo SEO do lead generation and they guarantee a return on investment. It is a commission based lead generation service or performance based lead generation service. 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 as well. You should never have a single point of failure and you should always be trying to get diversification. Make sure you head 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.