Guerrilla marketing has been around for decades. Small operator, no budget, wins by being quicker and cheekier than the big lot rather than by outspending them.
The same thing applies to being found locally, and most small businesses never work it out.
You cannot outspend a national chain. You can do things they structurally cannot.
Not because they lack money. Because the things that work locally do not scale, and anything that does not scale is invisible to a company operating in four hundred towns.
Here is what that actually looks like on the Fylde coast, and then the thing that has changed recently, which makes this approach considerably more valuable than it was even two years ago.
The ground they will not fight you on
Get properly involved in local groups. Facebook groups, community forums, wherever people in your area actually ask each other things. Not posting adverts. Answering questions, helpfully, as a person who knows. “Can anyone recommend…” posts are where a huge amount of local work still comes from, and no national chain is in that thread.
Write about local things. Events, happenings, changes in the town. Not because a blog post about the Illuminations switch-on sells anything directly, but because it is genuinely about your place and nobody else is writing it.
Get reviews beyond Google. Facebook, trade directories, community sites, anywhere local. Google matters most, but a business that only exists on Google looks thinner than one that turns up in several places.
Sponsor small local things for the links. A junior football team, a school fair, the local gala, the chamber of commerce. These usually come with a mention and a link on a genuinely local website, which is exactly the sort of thing a national brand never bothers chasing.
React fast to hyper-local events. A road closure, a burst main, a storm, flooding. If it is relevant to what you do, being the first to post something useful about it is worth more than a month of ordinary content.
Answer the questions only a local would know. This is the strongest one by a distance and I will come back to it.
Why this works better than it used to
Now, none of the above is new. Any decent local marketer would have told you the same fifteen years ago. What has changed is how much it is worth, and that is worth understanding.
All of that was originally aimed at Google. It still is. But something else is now reading, and it changes the arithmetic.
When somebody asks an AI who to use in your town, the AI has to say something specific.
Think about what it has to work with. A national chain has an enormous website and vast authority, but its Fleetwood page says nothing about Fleetwood. It is a template with a postcode in it. There is no local knowledge on it, because the company does not have any.
You do. And specificity is exactly what gets quoted.
You cannot out-authority a national brand. You can out-specific them, and in a system that needs concrete local detail to give a useful answer, that is a genuinely better position than it sounds.
This is the first time in my career that being small and local has been an actual technical advantage rather than a romantic one.
The one that matters most
That last one deserves more attention than all the others combined, because it is the hardest thing to copy and the easiest thing for you to do.
Write down the things only somebody who works here would know.
I did this for the towns round here when I wrote about location pages: Lytham and Poulton with their restaurant trade, Thornton-Cleveleys quietly shedding its retirement-town reputation, Fleetwood with the best sunsets in England and a serious concentration of skilled trades. Three short paragraphs, and not one of them could have come from a marketing department in Manchester or an AI with a prompt.
That is precisely the point.
Your version of that list
Whatever you do, there is a version of this you know without thinking about it:
- Which streets have the parking problem, and what that means for a delivery or a job
- What the properties are like in each area, and what consistently goes wrong with them
- Which areas flood, and what that means for what you would recommend
- What the local council is actually like to deal with for permits
- The seasonal pattern nobody outside the area understands
- Where to park for the venue everybody asks about
- The thing that is always more expensive here than people expect, and why
Every one of those is a page. Not a good page, necessarily. But a page that no competitor with a head office can write, that answers a real question, and that proves you are actually here.
Where I would actually start
Being honest about effort, because that is a lot to take on at once.
Start with the local knowledge. It costs you nothing but attention, it is entirely yours, and it feeds everything else. Write down five things this week.
Then the community groups, if you have got the temperament for it. Genuinely helpful answers, not adverts, and be prepared for it to take months. It works, but slowly, and it is not for everybody.
Then the sponsorships, because they are cheap, they get you a genuinely local link, and you would probably do it anyway. Sponsoring the under-11s costs less than a week of ads and lasts longer.
Leave the rapid reaction stuff until the rest is in place. It works brilliantly when it works, but it requires you to be paying attention at the right moment, and if you are not already publishing regularly you will not manage it.
The reason a chain cannot copy this
Worth understanding, because it is what makes the whole approach durable.
None of this scales. A national company with four hundred branches cannot write genuine local knowledge for four hundred towns, cannot be authentically present in four hundred Facebook groups, and cannot sponsor four hundred junior football teams in a way anybody notices.
So they do the thing that does scale: a template, a postcode, and a large advertising budget.
Which means the ground you are standing on is permanently available. Not because you are cleverer, but because you are only in one place, and being only in one place is the entire advantage.
That is a strange thing to write after fifteen years of watching bigger budgets win. But this particular corner genuinely belongs to you, and most local businesses have never once tried to claim it.
Want to work out what you know that nobody else does? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.