COMPASS, FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES

Marketing for Local Businesses

You run a café, butcher's, barber shop or one-van trade business, and the high street keeps changing under your feet. Compass helps you build your visibility with local customers through a well researched marketing plan that earns you footfall, positive reviews and repeat business whilst teaching you the marketing craft that your business can rely on in the future. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.

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Launderette owner

What You Came Here to Solve

It's Saturday morning. You unlock the door, you check the till float, you wipe the tables, and you wait for the first regular of the morning. The bell on the door rings once before nine. The café two doors down has a queue out the door, the weather's gone cold and the takeaway run has dropped off, and your Google reviews sit at 4.6 with the last one written three weeks ago. You know you need to do something to bring the regulars back through the door and pull the new neighbours in, but the marketing options run into the dozens, the local Facebook group is full of recommendations for everyone except you, and your time is the hour between closing and getting home. So what do you do?

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Barista

Why Most of the Advice Misses the Mark

Most local marketing advice was written for franchise chains with a marketing manager and a paid-media budget you do not have, and the agencies offering retainers want more per month than two slow weeks of takings combined. You have likely been burned before: a website you paid for that nobody finds, an SEO retainer that sent a monthly report and no calls, a lead site that charged you for jobs that went nowhere. The agency playbook leans on tactics that cost more than they bring back at a single-shop scale, and the trade press is full of operators at three locations and a marketing intern that have nothing in common with you. The advice you can find online slips into trying everything once, committing to none, and ending the quarter with the bell on the door still ringing once before nine.

Freelance writer

What Makes Compass Different

Other AI tools take the marketing off your hands and give you back something that sounds like every other shop on the parade. Compass does the opposite. It pairs the speed of AI with coaching and a feel for what makes an independent worth walking into, so the words still sound like your shop and you pick up the craft as you go.

Compass starts with your Google Business Profile and the local-search visibility that decides whether the new neighbour walks in or walks past. It surfaces the listings, photos, opening-hours accuracy, and review-collection actions that lift your visibility in the moments your local catchment is looking, and it names the reason behind each one so the craft stays with you the next time you update the shop window. It sets your local channel mix to fit a single-shop budget, calibrated to your catchment of a mile or two rather than the agency-scale model that assumes nationwide reach. It teaches you how to build the customer-comeback rhythm that turns the new walk-in into a regular, with the small touches that work in a local context like a name remembered and a loyalty signal that does not require an app. And it walks you through the seasonal moments that matter on your high street like the back-to-school week, the run-up to Christmas, and the post-January quiet that turns into Mother's Day, so your year lands planned rather than reactive.

You stay the one in charge, you learn why each one works on your high street, and your shop gets the kind of marketing eye a chain pays a salaried manager for.

Adapted to Your Business

Compass calibrates to your specific business. Each of these has its own page with the actions that fit the work best

How Compass Works

1

Learns Your Shop

Twenty minutes to get started. You answer a handful of quick questions about your business: what you sell or serve, where you operate, who walks through your door, where you already appear online. While you answer, Compass researches your local catchment and your immediate competitors and surfaces what it finds for you to confirm or correct. Then a short guided conversation captures the rest: who your last great customer was, what success looks like for the next quarter, what marketing you have already tried, and how much time and budget you can put behind it.

2

Writes Your Marketing Strategy

The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan personalised to your shop, with the market truth about your category, the customer profiles most worth pursuing, the buying moments that turn the passer-by into a walk-in, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that matter most for the next three months. Your Pro subscription turns that into a full 12 month marketing strategy with deeper market research, five customer profiles instead of two, and a monthly cadence that adapts and flexes as your year unfolds.

3

Turns Your Strategy into Action

A short daily task list, sized to the time you have, anything from one task to a few, organised by customer profile and channel. Some tasks Compass handles for you in the background, such as listings monitoring and review-surface tracking across Google, Facebook, and the local-directory sites your category uses. The rest are short and clear, designed to fit between everything else you are doing, with the marketing science behind each one explained in jargon-free language so you learn the craft as you go. Every week, Compass synthesises what your customers are saying online. Every month, it shows you how your local market is shifting. Every quarter, the plan rolls into the next phase of the year.

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The Marketing Science Underneath

Local-business marketing has its own canon of science: how customers choose within a catchment of a mile or two on factors like reviews and proximity and the small visual cues they pick up walking past, the frequency maths that decides whether a regular comes back once a month or once a week, and the way repeat custom and word-of-mouth carry the margin while paid ads chase the marginal first-time visit at a cost most single shops cannot recover. Compass applies the science to your shop or yard and names the reason behind every task in plain English, so you learn your marketing craft every day until one day you won't need Compass anymore.

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Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.

  • The first 1,000 founder members can upgrade and lock £19 a month for life.
  • When the places are filled, the Pro Plan becomes £39 a month.
  • Your founder rate never changes.
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FAQs

Compass walks you through the listing fields that decide whether your shop shows up for the searches in your catchment, names the photos and the opening-hours accuracy and the review-response rhythm that move you up the local pack, and surfaces the changes worth making this week. Your Google Business Profile stays in your account, and Compass shows you what to update and why.
Compass walks you through the response framework that turns a difficult review into a trust signal for the next potential customer reading it. The response stays in your voice, and Compass coaches the tone and the structure that work in your category.
In some categories the maths still works, in others it does not. Compass looks at your catchment, your average customer value, and your category's response rates, and tells you whether a leaflet drop is worth the print bill this quarter or whether your hour is better spent on the Google Business Profile instead.
Often yes, and Compass walks you through the partnership pitch that lands with the neighbour you want to work with. A shared loyalty signal, a cross-referral, or a joint event can lift footfall for both shops at zero ad spend.
It depends on how much time you have available. Compass sets tasks calibrated to the time you can give it, whether that is fifteen minutes between customers or a longer session at the weekend.
A single on-screen marketing plan personalised to your shop. Twenty minutes to set up. What your category typically does in your catchment, two of your customer profiles, the buying moments that turn the passer-by into a walk-in, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that come next. Free and yours to keep.
Free includes the 90 Day Growth Plan. Pro is £19 a month for the first 1,000 founders, locked for life. After the 1,000th seat is taken, Pro is £39 a month. No card needed to claim the free plan. See full pricing details.