Most local marketing advice describes the finished state and leaves the owner to guess where to start. This is the order instead, arranged so that the cheapest things with the largest effect come first and the expensive things are funded by results rather than hope. It assumes a working business with customers and no meaningful online presence, which describes a great many local businesses.
First: the business profile, because it is the storefront
Claim it, set the primary category to what you most want to be found for, add the genuinely applicable secondary categories, get the hours right including holidays, and handle the address properly. Google's guidance is explicit that a business not serving customers at its address should remove it and set a service area. Add real photographs. This costs nothing and is what most local buyers see before anything else.
Second: answer the phone, because you are already paying for those calls
Before buying any traffic, find out what proportion of incoming calls are answered and what happens to the ones that are not. In most local trades this is the single largest leak in the business and it costs nothing to measure. Improving it raises the return on every other thing you buy afterwards, which is why it belongs before the marketing rather than after.
Third: reviews, as a routine rather than a campaign
Ask every customer at the end of every job, not only the ones you expect to be pleased, and reply to what arrives. Recency and specificity matter more than total count. Selective solicitation is a practice the FTC's endorsement guides address and a filtered profile is legible to any careful reader, so the routine version is both safer and more effective.
Fourth: a page for each service you sell
One page per service, each explaining what is included, what it typically costs and what happens, with photographs of your own work. This is what the profile links into and what turns a visitor into an enquiry. A single combined services page is the most common structural weakness on local business websites and among the cheapest to fix.
Last: paid advertising, once you know what a customer is worth
Paid works well for local businesses and it magnifies whatever is already happening, including the leaks. Once the profile is right, the calls are answered, the reviews are flowing and the pages exist, you can calculate what you can afford per enquiry and buy accordingly. Starting here instead is how local businesses conclude that advertising does not work for them.
Questions people ask about local business marketing
How much should a local business spend on marketing?
Percentage-of-revenue rules are arbitrary. Work from per-job economics: what a customer is worth, what proportion of enquiries become customers, and therefore what you can pay for an enquiry. Once you know your cost per acquired customer you can judge any proposal against it rather than against a benchmark.
Do I need a website if I have a business profile?
Yes, for anything beyond the simplest business, because the profile is a summary and the website is where a buyer checks detail, price and evidence. The profile is where the first impression happens; the site is where the decision is made. A thin site with a strong profile loses enquiries that a decent site would win.
Should I hire an agency or do it myself?
The first three steps are within any owner's reach and are where most of the return is. Service pages and sustained consistency are where a supplier earns their fee. A sensible split is to do the profile, the answering and the reviews yourself, and buy the writing and the ongoing work.
What about social media?
It supports a local business more than it drives one, with the exception of trades where the work is visual or the audience genuinely social. For most local businesses the profile, the reviews and the website produce more enquiries per hour spent. Do social if you will enjoy it enough to keep doing it, and do the first four steps regardless.