If you wish to promote your business, there are many avenues open to you. If you are running a startup or a small business, it is really not possible to shell out a large sum of money to advertise your brand and that’s alright. It is annoying at times when your budget determines the number of people your business can reach but you might be surprised to know that there are many other free ways that will go hand in hand with your paid advertising endeavors. You can incorporate some great and effective free advertising tactics in your marketing plan and get more out of your marketing budget. You can try out the methods mentioned in this article irrespective of your budget.
Here are some great free advertising tactics for your business that will help you to spread a word about your business:
- Use ‘Google My Business’ for optimizing the local search
- Write guest posts for other blogs
- Answer questions on Quora
- Publish content on LinkedIn
- Promote your website through your email signature
- Become a speaker at some event
- Do a free product giveaway or contest
- Create YouTube videos
- Post on social media
- Encourage happy customers to give reviews
Let’s get into the details…
Use ‘Google My Business’ For Optimizing The Local Search
Google My Business is one of the most powerful free platforms for advertising your business. This platform enables you to manage your presence on Google Maps and Google Search. Presence on this platform will help in supporting your rankings in the local search results.
When your business website ranks higher in the local search results, your business is portrayed as a legitimate and a relevant company. Consumers are most likely to favor local brands while searching online; therefore if you are ranking well for the local searches, you get a better reach.
Write Guest Posts For Other Blogs
Guest posting on other authoritative blogs has many advantages. When you post on some other blog, you connect with the audience of that blog and this also gives you an opportunity to establish yourself as an experienced leader/author of your industry.
Guest posting provides you access to an already-established blog audience and a higher domain authority. Guest posting can at times prove to be more beneficial to you, more beneficial than posting in your own blog. When you make a guest post, you can also link back to your own website page/pages – this provides you with an inbound link that helps in increasing the domain authority of your website and all this results in better search engine ranking for your website.
Answer Questions On Quora
Answering questions on Quora can provide your business with a huge opportunity to get new audience. There is a large active audience on Quora and you can also answer direct questions on this platform for your prospective customers. Quora is a great platform where you can interact with your potential leads and you can also establish yourself as an expert in the subjects related to your industry or niche.
Publish Content On LinkedIn
LinkedIn as we all know is a great platform for connecting with professionals and it is also a great platform for sharing your business related content. LinkedIn has a blogging platform that enables you to post on various topics related to your business brand.
When you post on the LinkedIn’s blogging platform, your connections and your LinkedIn members will view your posts, engage with them and share them – this is free promotion for you! LinkedIn consists of a huge amount of social media traffic that comes to the B2B company websites from LinkedIn. Therefore, if you don’t publish on LinkedIn, it will be a great opportunity missed.
Promote Your Website Through Your Email Signature
You might be sending several emails everyday! You must recognize the fact that your email signature has a great promotional potential. It’s not necessary that you must add your website link always in your email signature, you can promote a contest, a sale, an event or even a newly published blog post. Your email signature is capable of getting you new leads just make sure that it contains the necessary links. Along with your email signature, it is also important for you to add link to your business website on all your social media website profiles.
Become A Speaker At Some Event
Becoming a speaker at some event is similar to networking. When you speak at an event about a certain topic related to your industry, you establish yourself as an expert on that topic and that’s how people will start seeing you. Create a thought-provoking and a powerful speech that draws everyone’s attention. With this, you can surely enhance your brand awareness and when people see you as an expert on some topic they also consider that your business is capable of handling the consumer issues and challenges.
To begin with, think about various topics that you can speak on. You can start volunteering at various upcoming events for making new contacts and networking. If you are not very comfortable with public speaking, even then you should speak if you get an opportunity, there’s always a first time and you will be just fine!
Do A Free Product Giveaway Or Contest
Organizing a product giveaway or a contest is an easy and effective way to grab the attention of new viewers and potential customers. If you plan your contest smartly and make it active on the social media channels, you have a great opportunity of getting new subscribers. You can give away affordable branded products like mugs, t-shirts or pens and promote your brand name through them. Word of mouth is a powerful way of creating brand awareness and you can utilize it in the best possible way through organizing product giveaways and contests.
Create YouTube Videos
YouTube has become a very efficient platform for artists and for all types of professionals and freelances as well. Creating a YouTube channel is going to benefit you for sure! YouTube hosts billion of active users who might take interest in your content. You can convert your written content into videos. Your potential customers and viewers will be more interested in the videos in place of plain content. You can get your videos done from professionals and promote them through your channel.
You can sell your brand and reach out to a wide range of people by creating and posting interesting and informative videos. If your viewers are interested and entertained, they will want to visit your website as well.
Post On Social Media
Social media is a crucial part of every marketing strategy and you should be there too! You can post on most of the prominent social media websites for free unless you opt for paid advertising. Paid advertising on social media is highly beneficial as well, you can opt for paid advertising according to your budget. There are various groups on social media websites that you can join for promoting your content, images, infographics, videos, product launches, contests and offers. Select the platforms that are best suitable for your target audience. Make sure that you have detailed product pages on these platforms. If you haven’t created your social media presence yet, you can start with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and then get on to Instagram and other social media websites.
Encourage Happy Customers To Give Reviews
Word of mouth by your customers will work the best for you and this is the best way to market your products and services. Your potential customers will surely trust what your existing customers have to say about you. If you ask your customers to share their reviews, you must be prepared for negative comments as well. Remember that all the comments including negative and positive are good for you! You can post the good and positive comments as they are and when there are negative reviews, address them and provide solutions to them so that people know that you are capable of handling all the issues.
Conclusion
Along with all the ways mentioned above, don’t forget to make sure that the on-page optimization is done perfectly for all the pages of your website. Implement all the search engine optimization strategies of your website and keep promoting it.
