One of the hardest things to do, especially at the beginning, is trying to figure out how to market your business. It’s even harder to try to figure out how to market it when you don’t have the money or resources just yet.
Fortunately, there have never been more opportunities to market your business for free than ever before. In this post, I’m going to walk you through a couple of different tactics you can start today.
Have A Marketing Process
I’m putting this one first because this is the most important. If you don’t have a Marketing Planning Process in place, you’re basically blindly swinging at promoting your new great thing, and then no one will get to see it.
Your first step should be to make sure you understand who you are trying to attract to your business. If you’re going for an older demographic, then maybe Snapchat shouldn’t be your top priority. If you’re reaching for younger kids, maybe you should start learning about Tik Tok.
It’s a good idea to write down what you think you know about your target market at the start of this exercise and then ask yourself some general questions about them to compare after the exercise.
Have A Website
There are two reasons that having a website should be important to your business and help out your marketing.
The first reason is that it helps your customers and future customers with problems or things that need solving surrounding your product. You should always be thinking of ways to write how-to or helpful posts for your website visitors.
But also, (and I would say more importantly), your website is the number one thing to help you with search engine rankings. It’s hard for any type of business to just make a website and be found through Google nowadays. Getting a website audit is essential for checking issues on your website. An SEO website audit is a very good SEO solution to help you boost your search engine rankings.
Google has a process like every other business and they want to see their users get the helpful content they need. So they promote websites that help their users. Having a website means search engines are more likely to rank you higher in their results meaning more customers coming to your site.
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
Social Media is probably the holy grail for getting free marketing for your business but the problem is that most just don’t use it right.
90% of business owners on social media either do too much or too little. Some only post about their sales and deals on their pages, while messaging everyone they can talk to about maybe buying something from them.
Others just post motivational quotes and scroll their feed aimlessly without having a true purpose for using the platform.
You want to find a happy medium for each social platform because, in reality, all of them are different. You can be more sales-focused on Facebook compared to Instagram and Twitter. You can post 10 times on Twitter a day but if you post twice on Instagram in one day, you’re probably getting unfollowed.
The secret is to take the time to learn these platforms and really focus on each separately based on the advantages and disadvantages of the platform.
Create YouTube Videos
Even though technically YouTube is a social media platform, I classify it differently because there is so much that can be done on YouTube to promote your business.
Against popular opinion, you don’t have to create movies that Spielberg makes for your YouTube, even holding up an iPhone and talking to the camera works. Here are a couple of different videos that everyone can make for their business.
- How-to Videos in your niche
- Tutorial on using your product or service
- Behind-the-scenes of your process
- Sales-type video on why they should buy from you
- Helpful videos on topics just outside your niche that you can relate to your business.
Once you create videos around these topics, other videos will start popping up in your head as well. Also, don’t be discouraged by the numbers on this channel. YouTube is a different beast compared to all the other platforms because everybody has to find you.
You can’t go out and “friend” someone to get them to subscribe to you. Just focus on making quality content and the rest will follow.
Set Up A Business Listing
If you have a local business, one of the best free ways to market it is to set up a Google My Business listing. If you don’t know what that is, it is the box that shows up at the top of the first page of Google when you search something like “Best Restaurants near Me”.
No matter what your niche is, I promise you people are putting in something like “Dog Walkers near me” or “Roofers near me”. Not only does this listing put you in that Google directory, but it also puts you in Google Maps whenever people are using that and loads of other services that use Google’s tools.
If people are looking for a business to help them solve something, you want to make sure you’re there for them to find, especially if it’s free to set up.
Join Relevant Groups or Forums for Your Business
No matter what your business is, there is a group of people somewhere on the internet that can use your help. If you have a local plumbing business, try searching Facebook for your city’s Facebook group.
This is a place where basically people from your town just learn and talk about the ins and outs of your city. Contribute to these conversations and become a helpful part of the group. People will start asking what you do and keep you in mind when they (or their colleagues) have a need for your service.
Now, this works just as well for online businesses. Let’s say you write a blog about gardening. I can think of five gardening subreddits that are looking for experts every day when they go in there and ask questions like “How do I grow this plant?” or “What’s the best soil for X plant?”
Just like the plumbing business, if you become just a small contributor on these subreddits, people will start coming to you for advice and you can show them your blog in return.
Try These Out!
There is no cookie-cutter perfect answer to how to market your business for free but you just learned six different ways that you can give it a try. Test each of these out but make sure you create that plan first!
Interesting Related Article: “How to Grow Your YouTube Channel“