Milan is not one market. It is forty.
For somebody who serves eight streets and keeps being offered a plan for two million people.
The city breaks into zones
Search from Isola and you get Isola. Search from Citta Studi and you get Citta Studi. For a great many businesses the real competition is not all of Milan, it is the six or seven places inside the same walk.
That changes the arithmetic brutally. Against the whole city your problem is enormous. Against your own radius it is a list of names you can open one by one in an afternoon.
The mistake that costs most
Buying city-wide ambition for a neighbourhood business. It sells easily, because the big number looks like the right number, and the reports that follow are full of people who are never going to come to you.
The symptom is always the same: the figures climb and the phone does not. When that happens the problem is almost never how much work was done, it is what radius it was done against.
What actually wins a neighbourhood
The same dull things, but measured against those six or seven names instead of against two thousand. Real hours, photographs of the real place, a price or a range, and recent reviews.
The difference is that here you know exactly who you have to pass, and there are few enough of them to look at all of them before deciding what to do first.
When we are the wrong call
If you need a national campaign, an operation that can hold several suppliers, or somebody sitting in internal meetings every week. We are not that and we do not pretend to be.
And if your customers are not from here. Anybody selling across the country, or living off passing tourists, is looking at the wrong lever, and we would rather say so now than after three months of work.
What we can do that a remote studio cannot
Turn up. A meeting in Milan is something we arrange rather than a polite phrase. If seeing each other helps, we do it.
The clients we have are on this site by name, each with a page saying what changed and what did not. That is checkable, which is more than an adjective about experience ever is.
Questions worth asking
Can a small business rank in Milan?
Inside its own radius yes, and often more easily than in a small town, because the neighbours are few and almost none of them has filled the profile in properly. Across the whole city is a different question and the answer is usually no.
How do I work out what my radius is?
Look at where the customers you already have come from. If nearly all of them arrive on foot or two metro stops away, that is the radius, and the rest of the city is an audience you are paying for and cannot serve.
Are you not too small for this city?
For some work yes, and we say so first. For a shop, a practice or a place that wants to be found in its own area, size is not what is needed: what is needed is somebody who does the work and answers.
Can we meet before deciding anything?
Yes, and it is the reason this page exists. A coffee commits neither of us and settles in twenty minutes what a written proposal does not settle in ten pages.
How does the cost compare with an agency here?
Lower, but that is not the reason to choose. The reason is that you talk to whoever does the work. If price is the only thing that matters there are cheaper options than us and you will find them.
Tell us your zone and who you count as a competitor, and we will tell you how many there really are and what keeps them above you. Get a free audit.
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