How to Promote Your Business for Free – These are all common questions asked by small business owners when the budget just doesn’t seem to stretch far enough. The creative ways in which businesses can promote their brand online without spending a single penny is very popular at the moment, right now in fact there are thousands of ideas floating around. Of course, no one is telling you to actually do any of these things for free, each of them is merely an example of creative thinking.
Free sounds good, right? We all have limited resources, especially when you’re just starting your business. If you’ve been scouring the internet looking for resources on how to promote your business for free, but have yet to find anything – this article will point you in the right direction.
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Look Within for Positive Word of Mouth
Your strongest advocates for your business might just be under your own roof. An employee willing to share positive things about the company on their personal social media accounts can grab the attention of potential new customers. Therefore, incentivizing that behavior is a savvy business move and a great way to advertise your business for free. Platforms like Dynamic Signal make it easy for businesses to encourage their employees to serve as brand advocates for their employers online.
Let Your Customers Peek Behind the Scenes
Whether you use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, share a behind-the-scenes video. This could be an interview with a member of your staff, a tour of a manufacturing facility, or a montage of your participation in a recent trade show or industry event. Giving your customers a sneak peak into what it’s like on the inside is another creative way to advertise your business for free.
Giving customers a greater sense of what goes into making your product is a transparent way to interact with your customers, which’ll give you a credibility boost. It also lets you show off your team and your brand’s personality, and define your company’s unique point of view within your market. That’s how to advertise your business in the era of social video.
Google My Business
Google My Business is one of the essential places to promote your website online in 2021. It improves your SEO, tells prospective customers more about your business, creates rich search results when people search for your business, allows customers to review and contact your business through Google, and much more. If you don’t have a GMB account yet, you’re missing out.
Bing Places for Business
Bing Places for Business is Bing’s alternative to Google My Business. It functions in almost the same way, providing you with all of the same features and tools for promoting your website. The benefit of Bing Places is that it opens you up to another portion of the internet-based market, and best of all, because Bing isn’t as widely used as Google, it’s easier for businesses to stand out on the lesser-used search engine.
Put a Face to Your Company’s Name With Live Video
CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs are inextricably linked with their brands. Customers feel like they know them personally, and that is part of the fabric of the brand loyalty that Facebook, Tesla, and Apple enjoy. Using live video through Facebook or other social media channels can humanize you and your business, and make any customer even more likely to become a loyalist.
Partner With a Fellow Small Business Owner
Wine and cheese, movies and popcorn, high heels and gel insoles—some things are meant to go together. Reach out to other business owners whose goods and services complement yours, and see if they’re open to creating a cross-promotional deal with you. This can be a great way for you both to tap into each other’s client bases, and advertise your business for free.
Do Good, Feel Great
Partner with a well-respected local charity to increase brand awareness while doing good for others. When done right, you won’t think of it as how to advertise your business, but how to make an impact in your community.
Whether you choose to launch a campaign where donations are made based on the number of users sharing a certain message on social media, ask customers to donate a dollar to a given cause when they make their purchase, or use your business’ resources to boost awareness for an important social issue, there are lots of ways for your business to give back while also gaining awareness for your brand.
Guest post on blogs
Free traffic—as opposed to paid traffic that comes from things like purchased ads—is often hard to come by for new websites. You can start blogging to drive traffic, but it takes time before you start seeing results. While you grow your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Not only does this drive traffic back to your website, but the links to your site will help with search engine optimization.
Find and connect with bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach. Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to your business or it won’t drive any traffic.
Find affiliates to promote your business
If you want to take product reviews a step further and solicit even more people to promote your product, consider starting an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing incentivizes other people to drive traffic to your business by offering a commission on every sale, similar to referral programs.
Take BarkBox for example. If you look through popular dog accounts on Instagram, many will have a BarkBox affiliate code in their bio, like @henrysworldtoday.
Finding your first affiliates can be tough if you don’t have wide brand recognition. Use an outreach campaign to find and recruit your first few affiliates and get the ball rolling. Look for affiliates who have an engaged audience and are already writing about your industry.
Invest in an infographic
Investing in a professionally designed infographic is one way to drive traffic and potentially build backlinks, which are great for search engine optimization (SEO). The cost ranges greatly for quality infographics—depending on what you need and the skill level of the person you hire—but it can be well worth the investment.
Need an idea for an infographic? Check out sites like Visually for inspiration. Once you’ve chosen an idea, research the topic and identify the points that you’ll cover in the infographic. You can hand this outline over to a professional designer as direction for what you want the infographic to cover (or as a guideline for yourself if you’re going the DIY route, in which case you should check out tools like Canva or Piktochart).
Let’s say you sell bicycles and related gear. You might create an infographic that talks about the environmental benefits of bicycling. Some points or figures you might include in the infographic could be how much a daily commute saves in fuel emissions, as well as a comparison of the total number of car owners and bike owners.
That message speaks to your customer base, but is also compelling enough that many blogs and even news sites might want to feature and link back to it.
Create a personal business presence using a fan page.
One of the major strengths of social media marketing is its ability to create relationships between businesses and their audiences. The person-to-person interaction that can happen on social media makes consumers feel that they have encountered a brand in a meaningful way and that they now have a special connection with that company. So imagine how much this feeling is intensified when that consumer is interacting not just with “the brand,” but with the person behind that brand!
Depending on your personal social media habits, you may or may not already have a personal Facebook account. If you do, and you prefer to keep your personal profile private, Facebook will allow you to create a page for your public, professional persona, as well. Otherwise, you can use your personal profile to interact with consumers. Gain a following by engaging with the people who frequent your brand’s page.
Here’s what our CEO, Shama Hyder’s, personal page looks like:
Facebook offers a way to promote your organization with a Facebook page. Make frequent updates to your Page. Also, use your Facebook cover image to promote something special. Experiment with Facebook Call to Action buttons, and participate in Facebook Groups related to your industry.
Pinterest offers a way for people to share images from your company website. Pinterest is great for brands with a strong visual element and for blog owners. Make sure you have one good shareable image on each key page of your website. Tip: Set up Pinterest boards by topic or category and “pin” your own content. People often search Pinterest for images on a particular topic and may find your website.
List your events
Hosting a webinar or speaking somewhere? Create an event page and invite friends and people in the groups you’re in. You can even see how many RSVP and get feedback from attendees.
Here’s an event where Shama will be speaking:
Conclusion
Let’s face it, anything worth doing on the internet is not for free. But there are ways to promote your business effectively online without having to pay for it.
Free advertising methods aren’t always the best way to advertise your business, but they can be incredible tools if you figure out how to make just some of these tactics work.