You have signed the lease, fitted the shop and opened on a Tuesday. Eleven people come in. Four of them are looking for the unit that used to be there. By Friday you have taken £340 and the rent is £1,100 a month.
Nobody has heard of you. That is the whole problem, and it is a solvable one, but not by the things people usually try first. Printed tote bags and a social media account do very little for a business that does not yet appear on a map.
The sign above the door outsells everything else you will pay for
A shop sign is seen by every person who walks or drives past, every day, for the life of the lease. Nothing else you buy has that ratio. It is worth spending properly on it, and it is worth making it legible from across the road at speed rather than clever.
Signage is regulated. In England most standard shop signs are covered by deemed consent under the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007, which means you can put them up without applying. Illuminated signs, projecting signs, anything above the fascia, and almost anything in a conservation area will need express consent from the council. If the building is listed you will also need listed building consent, and putting up a sign without it is a criminal offence rather than a paperwork problem. A phone call to the council's planning department before you order the sign costs nothing.
The window is part of the sign. Say what you sell and when you are open, in letters that can be read from the pavement opposite. A surprising number of small shops fail this.
Local search is a map listing, not a website
For most local businesses, the first thing a customer sees is not your site. It is a map with three businesses on it. Getting into those three is the single highest-return marketing task available to you, and it is free.
Claim your Google Business Profile and verify it. Then be pedantic about the details, because they decide whether you appear:
- Name, address and phone number written identically everywhere they appear online, down to the punctuation.
- The right primary category. A café that sells sandwiches and a sandwich shop that sells coffee show up for different searches.
- Opening hours kept accurate, including bank holidays. Turning up to a closed shop is what produces a one-star review.
- Photographs of the actual premises, the frontage included, so people recognise it when they arrive.
Apple Maps and Bing have their own listings and take ten minutes each. Trade directories matter in some sectors and are worthless in others: a plumber benefits from being on a vetted trade site in a way a graphic designer does not.
A website still earns its keep, but its job is narrow. It confirms you are real, it answers price and location questions, and it loads on a phone in a car park with one bar of signal.
Reviews compound, in both directions
Reviews are the only marketing asset that gets more valuable while you sleep. They are also the one most small businesses handle passively, which means the only people motivated enough to write one are the annoyed ones.
Ask. Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually as they are leaving with the thing they came for, not three days later by email. A card with a QR code on the counter works better than good intentions.
Reply to every review, and particularly the bad ones. The reply is not written for the person who complained. It is written for the next reader, who is deciding whether a business that got something wrong deals with it like an adult.
Do not buy reviews, and do not write your own. Since the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force, fake reviews and the commissioning of them are explicitly banned, and the Competition and Markets Authority can act directly against businesses rather than going through the courts first. The penalties are calculated against turnover.
The rules on email and text are stricter than people think
Marketing by email or text to individuals, which includes sole traders and most partnerships, is governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, sitting alongside UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. The default is that you need consent.
The exception people rely on is the soft opt-in: you may market to someone whose details you collected during a sale or negotiations for a sale, about your own similar products, provided you gave them a chance to refuse at the point of collection and in every message since. A list of addresses copied out of a local directory does not qualify. Buying a list almost never does.
Every message needs an unsubscribe route that works, and you have to honour it promptly. The Information Commissioner's Office publishes its enforcement actions, and the pattern is consistent: the fines land on businesses that sent to people who never agreed.
Advertising claims themselves fall under the CAP Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority. The rule is simply that claims must be truthful and capable of being substantiated. Calling yourself the cheapest in town is a claim you would have to prove.
Leaflets are not dead in trades with a round
For a business that serves a geographic radius, paper still works, because the customer does not search until the boiler fails and you want to be the thing already stuck to their fridge.
It works for boiler servicing, window cleaning, gardening, takeaways and car valeting. It rarely works for anything a customer buys once a decade or shops for nationally. Royal Mail's Door to Door service delivers with the post to whole postcode sectors, which is cheap per household but blunt. A hand-delivered round of 500 doors in the streets you actually want to serve usually outperforms 5,000 scattered ones.
Put one offer on it, a phone number that a human answers, and a reason to keep it. Response rates on unaddressed leaflets are low in absolute terms, so measure by the job, not the feeling: ask every caller how they heard of you and write the answer down.
Where this shows up in the game
In Business Baron, marketing spend is not a slider that raises sales. Local awareness builds slowly in the area around your premises, reviews accumulate from the service you actually give, and a bad week on staffing shows up in your rating weeks later. A cheap sign on a quiet street is a permanent handicap. You can find that out in the free game before you sign a lease in the real world.