It might seem a little overly simple to claim that all a local business needs to do, in order to dominate their local area, is to just get 2 things right.

However, my opinion isn't based on theory or guesswork, it's based on 13 years of first hand experience, trying literally every marketing strategy that I could think of to get new customers and grow my own local service businesses.

Then there's over a decade of doing the same for my clients.

When you boil it down to the fundamentals, getting these 2 things right will put you miles ahead of your local competition, whether you're a local service business owner, tradesperson, a franchisee running a local area, or franchisor trying to build a model that actually works for the people who buy into it.

1 - A website. But not just any website. You need a website that CONVERTS.

It's not hard to get a website these days. The software available makes it extremely easy for anyone to get competent using a few basic online tools, and call themselves a web designer.

Whether you're in cleaning, gardening, pest control, kitchens & bathrooms, specialist trades, or any other home service, chances are that at some point you've at least wondered about the level of value you get from your web designer or agency.

However, while it's not difficult to find someone to build you a website, finding someone to build you a website that actually SELLS, is much more difficult.

The whole point of your website is that the potential customers who land on it are convinced into taking the next step in your sales process, which for most home service businesses, would usually be for them to request a quote, either by picking up the phone, or filling out a form.

In web design speak, this is known as 'converting' them.

A website that doesn't convert isn't doing what it's there to do, so you need to keep track of this.

As counter intuitive as it sounds to anyone running a service business and always looking for the next job, there are lots of web designers out there building websites who give no thought to conversion whatsoever.

For whatever reason they just don't put 'getting customers' high on the list of priorities of the websites that they build, and they don't consider it part of their job.

Many of these web designers have chosen home services or tradesmen as their 'niche', and market themselves as specialising in trade or service-based websites, when actually, they have no authentic specialised knowledge.

In reality, they don't know anything about your specific industry, your customer base, or how to sell your particular service to the general public.

CONVERSION should always be the number one objective of your website.

This matters even more in a franchise. If you're a franchisor, the website you hand down to every franchisee isn't just a nice-to-have, it's one of the single most important elements in ensuring that every area performs consistently.

Get it wrong, and you've got fifty franchisees independently fighting the same battle, badly, with fifty different home-made fixes.

Get it right once, and you've solved it for the whole network.

2 - The second thing you need to get right is the marketing that drives potential customers TO the website.

Once you have a website that's set up to convert visitors into enquiries, you will then need some form of marketing to send people to that website.

'Build it and they will come', doesn't apply to websites, or for that matter, your business in general. You have to let people know that you, and your website, exist.

You have to let them know what you can do for them, and why they should pick you above any and all available options to them, INCLUDING, doing nothing.

That's real marketing, and that's real web design.

The marketing can be anything online or offline, but the most important thing is that it's targeted at your ideal customer.

For example, if you run a general domestic cleaning or maintenance franchise, you might want to target affluent homeowners in your area.

If you specialise in something like end-of-tenancy services or property compliance, you would be looking to target hands-off portfolio landlords and management agents instead.

If, like one of my service businesses, you specialise in something niche such as garden lighting & installations, then your target market would include affluent to very affluent customers with large gardens.

Other markets to target would be garden designers and high end landscapers to form collaborations, the kind of referral partners who see your ideal customer before you do.

The important part, is that you're consciously targeting your ideal client so that you have an idea of what marketing would work best.

If you're a local plumber, then a local leafleting campaign would work great when targeting general domestic work, but wouldn't be cost effective if you were targeting landlords.

A Google Ads campaign would work well for emergency call outs or anything urgent, but wouldn't have the search volume for a niche service, such as my garden lighting business, mentioned previously.

The marketing that would work best for you is determined by who you are targeting. This is exactly where local knowledge becomes a genuine advantage.

(This is especially important to consider for franchises. A franchisee on the ground knows their territory's makeup better than any head office spreadsheet ever will.

The best franchise models combine a proven national framework with the flexibility for local operators to actually use that knowledge, rather than forcing identical campaigns onto territories that look nothing alike.)

So to summarise;

A website that converts, along with effective marketing driving potential customers to that website.

That's it.

Fundamentally, if you get those 2 things right, then pretty much any local home service business, franchised or independent, will get all the customers they ever need.

In my experience, it seems to just be the case, that most local service businesses, even most franchisees who've bought into a proven system, will never optimise their websites, never even scratch the surface of proper marketing, and spend so long messing about and tinkering, that they never get their front foot on the ladder.

They end up resorting to relying on lead generation sites, referral schemes, word of mouth, and are, constantly in peak and trough, reacting to what happens, instead of being proactive.

I've discussed marketing in casual conversation with countless other business owners over the years, told people what works and what doesn't work, and while many are interested, practically no-one ever takes any action on it.

Because of that, it's really not difficult to dominate your local territory by doing these 2 simple things consistently.

The opportunity isn't hidden, it's just sat there, mostly untouched, while everyone else waits for the phone to ring.