6 Digital Marketing Tips for Bath Small Businesses

6 ways Bath small businesses can keep their digital marketing effective (without it taking over your life)

Every small business owner I speak to feels the same low-grade guilt about marketing: they know they should be posting more, blogging more, doing more, and they know they’re not.

If that sounds like you, here’s some relief: doing everything badly is worse than doing a few things well. Below are six things Bath small businesses can do that genuinely move the needle, each one manageable alongside actually running your business.

1. Pick one social platform and do it properly

The instinct is to be everywhere – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok – and the result is usually a scattergun of half-finished profiles, each one signalling that nobody’s really home. It’s far better to choose the one platform where your customers actually spend time and commit to a posting cadence you can sustain indefinitely, not just for a fortnight.

Two good, considered posts a week, every week, will outperform seven rushed ones followed by three weeks of silence. Consistency is what social platforms, and customers, actually reward. If you only have capacity for one channel, make it the one where your ideal client is, not the one that feels the most “professional.”

2. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile

If you do nothing else on this list, do this one. A Google Business Profile is free, takes under an hour to set up properly, and is one of the few pieces of digital marketing that works even while you’re asleep, showing your opening hours, reviews, photos and location to anyone searching for a business like yours nearby.

Bath is a place where local search matters enormously: people search “[what you do] Bath” constantly, and a complete, active profile (with photos, services listed, and posts added occasionally) is a genuine low-effort, high-return win. Most small businesses either haven’t claimed theirs or set it up once and never touched it again, which means simply keeping yours current puts you ahead of a lot of competitors.

3. Send a press release when you have news

You don’t really need a PR agency to get local press coverage, you need something genuinely newsworthy, the confidence to pitch it, and a little bit of research to make sure it lands in the right journalist or editors inbox.

A new hire, an award, a charity partnership, a milestone, a new product or service: local publications are often glad of good local stories, and coverage does three jobs at once. It, more often than not, builds a backlink to your website (which helps your search rankings), it builds trust with anyone who sees your name in print or online, and it gives you a ready-made piece of content to share on your own channels afterwards.

The trick is to genuinely have news before you pitch. A press release with nothing to say gets ignored, but one solid story, sent to the right local title, earns real, sustained coverage.

4. Start a newsletter

An email newsletter is one of the most underrated tools available to a small business, mostly because it feels harder than it is. You don’t need weekly content or a beautifully designed template, a short, honest monthly email to people who’ve already shown interest in you keeps you front of mind in a way that social media, at the mercy of an algorithm, simply can’t guarantee.

Unlike a social following, an email list is yours: nobody can change the rules on you overnight. Start small, even a handful of subscribers who open and read is worth more than a large list nobody engages with, and it all build from there.

5. Blog, even if it’s just once a month

A blog is one of the few things you do for your website that keeps working long after you’ve published it. One well-targeted blog post a month, answering a real question your customers ask you, does two jobs: it gives Google a reason to keep recrawling your site as an active, useful resource, and it gives you something specific and helpful to share on social media and in your newsletter, rather than starting from a blank page every time.

The key word is “well-targeted.” A post written around the actual question a potential customer is typing into Google, full optimised for the target keyword, will do far more work for you than a vague update about what your business has been up to.

6. Get the SEO basics right on your own website

You don’t need to become a Bath SEO expert, but a handful of basics make a genuine difference to whether people searching on Google or LLMs actually find you.

Firstly, make sure you map a keyword to every page and ensure each page has a clear, unique page title and description that mentions what you do and where you’re based (“Florist in Bath,” not just “Home”). Use your keyword and relevant semantics throughout your copy naturally, using the keywords a customer would use to search for you. And add proper alt text to your images, a short, honest description of what’s in the photo, which helps both accessibility and Google understand your site.

Even tackling one page a month will start to compound alongside everything else on this list: the blog posts start to get found on search, the press coverage gets credited, and the Google Business Profile has a well-optimised website to point people towards.

The common thread when it comes to building a digital marketing strategy

None of these six things require a marketing degree, a big budget or hours of your week. What they have in common is consistency over intensity, doing a small number of things reliably, rather than a large number of things sporadically. That’s the version of digital marketing that’s actually sustainable for a small business, and it’s the version that genuinely compounds over time.

About the author

Joanna Lewis has spent 20 years working as a journalist, lifestyle editor, and as head of content at an ultra-luxury marketing agency, before founding Joanna Lewis Media, a small business marketing agency based in Bath, where she specialises in working with ambitious lifestyle brands in Bath and across the UK. Find her at joannalewis.media.