E40: The Step-by-Step Marketing Strategy Every Local Business Needs to Dominate Online
Most business owners work hard but don’t see the growth they expect, and it’s usually not because they’re doing the wrong things. It’s because they’re doing the right things in the wrong order. In this episode, I lay out the complete, step-by-step marketing strategy that’s helped hundreds of local service businesses grow faster and more predictably.
You’ll learn how to fill your funnel with both free and paid strategies, like content marketing, video podcasts, LSA ads, and PPC campaigns, and how to optimize everything once data starts rolling in. I also share how automation and ongoing testing can turn your marketing from a grind into a system that scales.
If you’re ready to stop guessing and finally follow a proven roadmap for growth, this episode gives you the full playbook.
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P.S. When you are ready, here are a few ways I can help…
Get Your FREE Marketing Domination Checklist: https://www.seangarner.co/
FREE Marketing Assessment | Discover what's wrong with your marketing & get a FREE customized plan to fix it: https://www.seangarner.co/marketingreport
Schedule A Call to Build, Fill, and Optimize Your Sales Funnel For More Leads: https://www.seangarner.co/
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Sean Garner is a marketing consultant and Certified StoryBrand guide dedicated to helping small business owners grow and dominate their industries. He created the Marketing Domination podcast to teach people how to combine storytelling with strategic marketing to help businesses connect with customers and stand out online.
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MARKETING DOMINATION PODCAST
EPISODE 40 TRANSCRIPTION
Introduction
Sean Garner [00:00]
Okay, this video is going to cover the complete marketing strategy that every local service business owner needs to understand and implement.
Sean Garner [00:14]
After working with hundreds of local service business owners, I can tell you this—it’s not that they’re always doing the wrong things. In most cases, they’re actually doing the right things, but they’re doing them in the wrong order. And if you don’t follow the right order, you’ll end up spinning your wheels, getting frustrated, and wondering why your results aren’t improving.
So in this video, I’m going to walk you through the complete, step-by-step strategy that I’ve found helps local service business owners truly grow online and dominate their industry. Welcome to Marketing Domination.
Messaging That Connects and Converts
Sean Garner [00:53]
Alright, nailed that intro on the first try—that’s always a win. So before we dive into the tactics, you need to understand the overall strategy that makes this whole thing work. Everything revolves around the concept of a sales funnel.
Now, you’ve probably heard that term before, maybe in connection with tools like ClickFunnels or HighLevel. But when I say “funnel,” I’m not talking about software. I’m talking about a relationship-building journey—taking your prospects from not knowing who you are to becoming loyal, lifelong customers.
For your business to grow, that funnel has to be built and optimized properly. The first step in the process is to build your sales funnel. And again, remember, a funnel isn’t software—it’s a structure for guiding relationships.
The foundation of that structure starts with your messaging. If your messaging isn’t right, if it doesn’t connect with your audience, everything else you build on top of it will fall flat. At our agency, I use the StoryBrand Messaging Framework because I’m a certified StoryBrand coach and guide. This framework positions your business as the guide and your customer as the hero.
It’s based on the hero’s journey. Your customer wants something, but they’re facing a problem that’s keeping them from getting it. You step in as the guide—with empathy and authority—to give them a simple, clear plan to succeed. You call them to action so they can avoid failure and experience success. That’s the heart of the story, and we distill it into key messaging sound bites that you can use across all your marketing.
Building Your Funnel
Sean Garner [02:40]
Once we have those sound bites, we use them as a filter for all your marketing communication. Every piece of copy should pass through that StoryBrand messaging filter. If it doesn’t align, that means one of two things: either we need to adjust the filter because we misunderstood part of your audience, or we need to rewrite the copy so it fits the message.
So step one is nailing your messaging. The next step is building your website. Your website has to do two things—collect leads and make you money. If it’s not doing that, it’s time to rewire it. We’ve actually created a proven wireframe you can use. You can find it at SeanGarner.co/websitewireframe. It walks you through the ten essential sections every homepage or landing page needs in order to convert.
Once your messaging and website are set, you have to remember that not everyone who visits your site is ready to buy. That’s where the next piece comes in: a lead generator.
A lead generator could be a webinar, a mini-course, a checklist, a free PDF, or even a quiz—anything that positions you as the right guide for your customer and gives them an easy first step or quick win. It should have a clear, catchy title and provide genuine value. The goal isn’t to hard-sell, but to get potential customers to raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested in what you do, but I’m not ready to buy just yet.”
When they give you their information, they’re giving you permission to keep the conversation going. And this is where the real magic happens—the follow-up sequence.
Once someone downloads your lead generator and gives you their email, they should immediately enter a follow-up or sales sequence. Typically, this is a five- or six-email sequence that thanks them for downloading your guide, helps them understand the problem you solve, and shows how your product or service provides the perfect solution. It includes a testimonial or case study that proves your method works, an email that reframes the problem or offers a new perspective, and one that addresses the most common objections your potential customers have.
That’s how you nurture relationships and move people from awareness to action.
Filling the Funnel
Sean Garner [04:52]
And then the last one is sending them a sales email sequence that follows a specific sales email format to make sure that conversion land hits. Then the next part of our sales funnel is we want to take the visuals, the messaging, and all of the branding that we’ve created and make sure that all of our digital storefronts are built out — social media, banners, LinkedIn profiles, YouTube. We want to claim all those things, or our Google Business Profile specifically for local service businesses. And we want to make sure that it is all completely filled out.
That completes phase one of our Marketing Domination Framework — building that sales funnel and making sure all that stuff is done. After we have everything set up, the next part of the strategy is to fill the sales funnel. Because just because we’ve built it does not mean we are going to start ranking, dominating, and growing the business. What we have now is the net — or the funnel — to collect all of those leads and potential sales as we start to fill it.
So when it comes to filling the sales funnel, we really only have two ways of doing it. We have free ways or we have paid ways — what we call organic and paid. This can look like a lot of different things: the content that we’re creating on social, blogs, networking events, referral partnerships — a lot of things that can be done for free, but that take time to create. Personally, I love free. I don’t know about you guys, but I love free. I don’t want to have to pay for things I could get for free, just because I didn’t take the time to make sure all the content is optimized.
I personally believe the greatest return on investment for local service businesses is doing this right here — a video podcast. You can hit record, take 15 to 30 minutes, and share your expertise to showcase all the things you know. Then you can turn that into YouTube videos, shorts for social, emails, blog posts, and more.
All of this content can be pulled directly from the transcript. You can throw it into something like ChatGPT, and it’s going to sound just like you. It will have your perspective, your unique viewpoint, your context. Because a lot of people are just generating what I would call AI slop — content with no context, no voice, no heart. It’s just a general blog post like, “What are the best accounting tips for small business owners?”
Sean Garner [07:14]
There’s no life to it, no heart. By doing a video podcast, you can create a ton of content in the same amount of time it would take to record a few short-form videos that people just scroll past. I love video podcasts because it doesn’t have to be what most people think — you don’t need a Joe Rogan-style setup. It’s a medium and a method for you to share your knowledge and expertise online, and then have agencies like us take that and leverage it for you.
By the way, this is a service we offer — video podcast strategy and production. We help you set up your show, record it, and then distribute all that content for you. If you’re trying to grow online, schedule a call with us at seangarner.co/contact. Book a call with me and we’ll show you how we can do this for your business.
The second way you can fill the funnel is with paid content. For local service business owners, LSA ads — or local service ads — are a great option. If your area and your business qualify, that is the best, safest, and smartest way to start with paid advertising because you only pay when you get a lead. You’re not paying for clicks or impressions — you pay when someone calls your business.
So check if your business is eligible. Just search “Google Local Service Ads” and see if your location and industry qualify. I highly recommend it — it’s popular for home services like plumbers, roofers, electricians, general contractors, med spas, dentists, and lawyers. Definitely see if you’re eligible because it’s one of the safest, highest-return paid ad options available. You don’t even need a website for it — it’s connected to your GBP, your Google Business Profile. As long as that’s optimized, you can optimize your LSA account and start getting leads for your business today.
The next place I’d start after that is PPC, or pay-per-click. These are Google search ads. People are searching for your product or service in your service area. With the right targeting, you can direct them to a landing page that’s focused solely on what they’re searching for — so they’re not distracted by everything else you do. Then you can start tracking results.
That’s pay-per-click. You’re paying per click, so you really have to monitor conversions and make sure the pages you’re sending people to are optimized.
Sean Garner [09:41]
So you're making the best return on your investment of time. After you have that stuff set up and it’s running smoothly, then you can start looking at doing things like Meta ads — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others. But I wouldn’t recommend starting with those for local service businesses until you at least have your LSA (if you’re eligible) and your PPC campaign set up before exploring other paid methods.
Optimizing the Funnel
Sean Garner [10:14]
The next thing is, after you have that set up — you’ve built your sales funnel, you’ve filled your sales funnel, and you have those systems running — the third step of this complete marketing domination strategy is optimizing your sales funnel. Once you’ve started doing this, you’ll now have some data you can use to make sure things are actually working. Because just building it and running campaigns isn’t always enough — and I’ve found that business owners often get frustrated, saying, “I’m doing all these things, but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me.”
That’s where we really want to dive in and look at the data so we know exactly what needs to be optimized in our campaigns. For us, this is where we start to do the detailed work and fine-tuning when it comes to building out our funnels.
I relate this a lot to the fitness industry — I was in fitness for a long time, right? The first thing we try to do is just get people moving. Then we help them start eating a little better. After that, we can look at specific micronutrients or recovery tactics they need to improve performance. It’s the same here — when we get to this stage of the marketing strategy, this is the training phase. We’ve got data coming in, and now we can see what’s working, what needs to be tweaked, where we’re ranking compared to competitors — because now we’re in the game.
We should have everything set up and be driving traffic to it. But often, I see business owners try to overly automate or optimize before they even have enough data. They end up spinning their wheels — always changing things, always trying something new — because they don’t have solid metrics yet to compare results and truly see what’s working.
By this point, hopefully, we’ve got thousands of page views coming in each month — so we have solid data points to analyze what’s converting. Then we can start split testing — running two variations of something at the same time to see which one gets better conversion results.
This is also where we want to start automating certain repetitive tasks, like Google review requests, sales follow-ups, and other ongoing marketing actions inside the business.
Need Help Optimizing or Scaling?
Sean Garner [12:33]
We want to make sure that these things are automated so we can go back through and start optimizing or scaling our time to focus on other priorities. This is part of what we call the Marketing Domination Framework. It revolves around understanding what a sales funnel truly is — that relationship journey of taking someone from not knowing who you are to becoming a super-fan customer for life.
We do this by plugging them into a sales funnel — building a solid foundation with clear messaging, a website that converts, and a lead generator that captures their information and follows up automatically. Then we make sure all of our digital storefront assets look consistent, sound like us, and reflect our brand across every platform.
Next, we fill that funnel with both organic and paid content — starting with organic efforts like blog articles, social media content, and educational videos, then layering in paid strategies like LSA and PPC ads. After that, we move into the optimization phase — analyzing performance, testing improvements, and ensuring every effort delivers a strong return on investment.
Plug this system into your business, and you’ll have the exact framework we’ve used to help dozens of local service-based business owners stand out and dominate their industries.
So, if you’re frustrated by being stuck on the hamster wheel of marketing that doesn’t work or doesn’t move your business forward, schedule a call. Go to seangarner.co/contact — the link should be right below. Book a call with me, and we’ll do a complete audit and analysis of your current marketing and SEO. We’ll show you actionable steps you can take right now to grow your business and truly stand out online.
