Having started Millside Creative on a shoestring budget, we appreciate how expensive business start-up costs can be! Deciphering what you can and can’t afford to spend your money on in the early days can be quite a headache.
As you can imagine, there are plenty of businesses that invest seriously big bucks into their Marketing – numbers that are simply out of the question for many start-up’s and SME’s. The great news, however, is that there is plenty you can do to market your business for free – it just takes a little time and the necessary know-how.
Here is our list of 6 simple ways you can market your business for free:
1. Set Up Social Media Business Profiles
When looking for a new product or service you can pretty much guarantee that most people today will reach out to their smartphone as a first port of call, which is why investing a bit of time in setting up some social media profiles for your business is an absolute must.
From Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest and Reddit – the list of social media platforms to choose from are seemingly endless. With countless millions of users accessing the sites every day, social media is a fantastic way to reach out to new customers. Even better, the vast majority of social sites are totally free to use!
TOP TIP; less is more when it comes to social media. Approach your social media set up by thinking about your customers first. Ask yourself things such as who your target audience is and what demographic your customers are to determine what social media platforms they might use and stick to those. You’ll find it far more fruitful to put more energy into one or two social media accounts rather than spreading yourself too thinly!
2. Become a Source of Knowledge
If you have taken the plunge to set up your own business, the chances are that you are very knowledgeable about your industry. Using social media to share that knowledge and become a source of trusted information is an invaluable marketing tool.
Start by joining facebook groups that are relevant to your business and begin commenting on and sharing useful information related to your industry or potential customer base. Help people by answering their questions and provide advice relating to your field of expertise. The more that you interact in a useful way on social media, the more likely it will be that you’ll appear in potential customer’s news feeds. This will ultimately help to build trust and awareness of your brand within your community.
In addition, using sites such as Quora, Reddit and related industry forums will really help you improve your SEO as Google will be more likely to recognise that you are a consistent source of information in trustworthy places and will rank your business better as a result!
3. Collect Customer Email Data
You only need to take a look at some of the incentives that big brands offer in return for your email address to get some idea of how valuable data is to a growing business. Capturing your customers’ email data will help you to begin to build a better picture of your customer base which will in turn help to inform everything about your marketing strategy, sales and commercial growth.
There are many ways that you can collect email data for free, such as adding a ‘sign up’ option to your site and across your checkout process as well as including links to sign up in your email footers and pushing it through on all your social media platforms. Be sure that you read up on and comply with all GDPR regulations before jumping in though!
4. Set Up Email Marketing
Once you have your data collection processes in place you can use Email Marketing to inform those who have signed up about your new products, services, news and promotions. An important thing to remember is that Email Marketing is targeted towards people who have already interacted with you. In short, they are warm leads rather than cold leads as they are further along your sales pipeline – so you can tailor your Email Marketing to reflect that.
Types of emails you could send as part of email marketing could be business updates, product launches, newsletters, new blog post alerts or information about sales and offers. Email Marketing is especially useful in nurturing your customer towards the sale if you’ve got a long sales process or lead process. Similarly, if you’ve got a standard product that you sell, Email Marketing can be used to help boost return revenue and repeat custom.
Most of the major email marketing platforms offer comprehensive free packages that are more than enough to help get your new content to your customers’ inboxes. A couple of our main recommendations are Mailchimp or Active Campaign.
5. Make sure you claim your ‘Google Business Profile’
“I’ll google it”. Sound familiar? There is no denying that Google is the go to place for instant information. Ensuring that your business is highly visible on Google is an absolute essential and there is no better place to start than making sure you claim your Google Business Profile.
Completely free to set up, your Google Business Profile is a great place to inform soon-to-be-customers of all the essentials such as the location of your business and how they can contact you as well as publishing your opening/closing times. This can also have a great impact on your local SEO. And if your looking to improve your SEO, check out some of our top SEO tips here: 10 ways you can do SEO for free
In addition to the essentials, your Google Business Profile will allow your customers to leave public reviews about your products / services, making it a fantastic free marketing tool as you can never underestimate the benefit of great customer feedback.
6. Get Customer Reviews
This leads us nicely into our final free business marketing tip – getting customer reviews.
Potential customers will want to know that they are dealing with a business they can trust. The easiest way to establish this is to encourage your existing customers to say something lovely about your business online and recommend you to others.
There are numerous ways to begin collecting customer feedback, but as with our comments on social media above, we find it best to pick a review platform most suited to your customer demographic and focus your energies on acquiring reviews there. You’re much better off having fifty reviews in one place than five in ten different places!
Some of the most trustworthy, free platforms for collecting customer feedback are:
