St. Louis local marketing aimed past the neighborhood.

Local marketing here has an odd job, as we see it: reaching customers who aren't local to you. St. Louis has 15,936 business establishments and fewer residents than it had in 2020, so a neighborhood alone may not fill the room. First look at where the click lands. 11 of the 42 homepages we tested had no tap-to-call link, no lead form and no booking tool, 26% against 17% in our 31-city sample, on a modest count. Those sites may list an email or a contact page, which we didn't measure. Tap-to-call alone is on 50%, against 72%, though the mix of restaurants and shops explains much of that.

The Google Business Profile comes next, and it costs nothing but attention. Mardi Gras in Soulard and the race in Forest Park bring visitors into the city, and our read is that they look for somewhere close by on a map, not in your newsletter. A lead form is on 10 homepages, and it can be a newsletter sign-up anyway. Get the hours and the street right, add real photographs, and ask for a review after each job or visit. We didn't measure reviews, so we can't say how yours stand. For a restaurant or a shop, the profile may do more than the site for a first-time visitor.

Ads come last and they can be short. The 2027 Grand Parade is on February 6, the balloon race is in September, and the Thanks-For-Giving Parade runs downtown in November. A business can buy those weeks with Google Ads, then stop. A home services firm might instead run small all year across the city and county, though that's our guess, so test it. Our local marketing starts at $575 a month, depending on complexity, setup and budget, and you pay the ad spend to the platform yourself. The St. Louis report has the numbers. Tell us which week you can't afford to have slow, and we'd plan from there.