The 2026 Digital Marketing Strategy That Actually Works for Inverness-Based Companies

James Dooley: If you're a business based in Inverness and looking to grow in 2026, but you're uncertain what digital marketing strategies you should be doing, should you be trying to team up with an SEO agency based in Inverness or a PPC pay per click agency that's based in Inverness? There's a lot of different questions in the communities whether you should be trying to get yourself cited and recommended in the AI overviews or within ChatGPT. What strategies are working? What strategies are not working? This is what we're going to uncover today with Kazra. But before we get started on the different types of digital marketing strategies that businesses in Inverness should be doing, Kazra, what bit of advice would you give to business owners?

Kasra Dash: So, business owners in Inverness, the number one piece of advice that I would give is go and set up some KPIs. Because myself and James in this video, we're going to be talking about a lot of different marketing channels. That's not to say you should go and try every single one of them because some of them might not work. However, before even spending a single penny, what you want to do is go out and set up some KPIs. You want to know these figures. You want to know exactly how much money you are spending per campaign.

You also want to know which of the campaigns is actually generating you the most leads. So is it Facebook Ads? Is it PPC? Is it SEO? Then you want to figure out, of the leads, how many of those leads are actually contactable. So let's say Facebook Ads has generated you 25 leads for £3,000. Out of the 25 leads, how many of those have you actually been able to contact and actually try to sell? And the last is how many of those have actually been converted into paying customers or clients for your Inverness-based company. If you can get those figures, that's when digital marketing becomes a lot more predictable. You can scale certain campaigns up, you can switch certain campaigns off as well. So James, for Inverness-based businesses, what is the first marketing strategy that they should be focusing on?

James Dooley: So step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making certain that you're looking good online. You've got a strong reputation. I think everything needs to start, the foundations need to start with a positive kind of brand SERP of who you are and what you do. So a SERP stands for search engine results page and getting that branding right across the board then can lead on to other things of what you can be doing. It will improve your conversion rate on paid ads or social media. Any leads that you're getting, the conversion rate would be good. If at the 11th hour they're going to decide who you're going to go with, branding I think becomes very, very important. So I'd say that's the first thing that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies.

Kasra Dash: My next strategy is going to be AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are actually looking into this. So what does ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity say about your brand or about your business? Is it a positive thing or is it a negative thing? And also trying to figure out what it says about your competitors as well. And obviously trying to improve that's really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some people call it GEO, some people call it LLM optimisation, but this is going to be a big thing in 2026 and also in the years to come as well.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think that's a huge strategy that people need to be looking at with regards to artificial intelligence. More and more people obviously using AI. The next one for me is filling in the form at Fat Rank or Promo SEO, which do a commission-based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. I think it's important to be looking at your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but also if you can use some freelancers and outsource some as well, you've got that diversification of leads. So 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 do a very similar performance-based lead generation service as well that you might want to fill in the form with there and just double check whether you can go and get a third party lead generation company to top up and start generating you some leads for your business to grow in 2026.

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

James Dooley: Yeah, for certain. If you're in a local area, you want to try and get those local maps 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 of where you cover. So like plumbing in Manchester, create a page for that. Hopefully then share that on the Google Business Profile of what you mentioned. But trying to get organic rankings, the amount of search volume that people are out there searching for different services of what you do, or it could be some blog posts that you could be doing as well. There's 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's another big part that you need to be doing as part of your digital marketing strategies in 2026.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. And then the next one, which kind of ties back to what you were saying before, James, is obviously organic social media. Now, organic social media, I think it's 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've just published maybe four or five posts on their Instagram profile and they've not been active for three years. That's 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, that way people will see you on socials and they will actually click to actually figure out more about you, fill in the contact form. The caveat to organic social media, yes, it's free to do. It's 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: Yeah, for sure. On the subject of social media, paid social ads as well is massive. I'm a massive advocate of the kind of the dollar a day strategy of what 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 spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting it. So getting case studies, any awards that you've won as well for reputation and starting boosting that. You can also be running retargeting ads. So if anyone's clicked through to your website, you can be running retargeting which is paid social as well. Different places like Meta, so whether that's Facebook and Instagram, you've got Twitter, you've got YouTube, you can be running Pinterest, you can even run places like Reddit as well for paid ads. And I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. The next one is probably a love-hate relationship. It is PPC, right? Google AdWords or doing it on Bing, wherever. That's basically the sponsored results. So, if you search for a service, it's above local SEO. Now, I have spoken and both myself and James, we've both spoken to so many business owners that are either, they've spent 10, 15, 20,000 on it and they've not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads and it's just not been of quality, or you've got other guys that have spent hundreds of thousands on it and they're like, "It's the best thing that's ever happened to my business."

Now, the reason why people are either they absolutely love it or they absolutely hate it is probably down to how it's been set up. There's 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. For example, your competitors could be clicking on your ads and that's deemed as what's called click fraud. Making certain that you've got a high converting landing page. Making certain 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's all of these different nuances, and if you're not on the ball with PPC, it's probably not going to work for your business. However, if you've got a really good, well refined sales team, you've got a really good landing page, you've got a well kept, up to date negative keyword list, 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 to PPC.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. There's certainly pros and cons. There's benefits of using it to get instant leads, but like you said, the amount of people that we speak to that have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries and stuff that's come through as part of the digital marketing is pretty scary. While we're on the subject of paid, obviously we spoke about paid social ads and now you've spoke there about PPC with Google or Bing. I'm going to throw in the mix, paid ads on AI platforms. It's not fully rolled out as we're doing this video, but I know that ChatGPT are looking to try and roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity, other kind of LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. I think if you're one of the early adopters and innovators to get on there, I think you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. So, it's something to look out for of doing paid AI listings and ads. I think that could be something to look out for in 2026.

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

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And the add-on benefits to places like Reddit is that it's 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 lot of people talking about the products and services of what you do and some reviews on there, it's indirectly then going to help you, or directly actually is going to help you with AI visibility. And then the last one for me is tradesman websites. So like Checkatrade, Bark, or teaming up with a third party lead generation company. Something I would say with all of these practices, Kaza touched on earlier about making certain that you understand your KPIs and your ROAS, return on ad spend. I think it's very important for business owners that are doing any sort of digital marketing to be tracking how much time and efforts being put into any sort of digital marketing.