7 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Online for Free
If your business is not yet online, please understand that your customers are already online.
Therefore, it is essential to today’s market to promote your business, build brand awareness and connect with them whenever they frequently use Google and social media.
This can be very challenging, especially at the early stages when you have to invest a lot of time and money.
But everything is part of the process of being successful in this modern market.
You may or may not have a large budget to promote your business online, and unsure how and where to spend it on and optimize visibility for every dollar spent.
As you consider this, let me tell you that the online universe is teeming with free marketing tools and platforms that you can use today. You just need to know where to look.
Today, let me show you 7 ways to promote and grow your business online for free.
These will help you:
- Reach more customers.
- Make your expertise known to your niche market.
- Connect with those who are ready and willing to do business with you.
- Increase brand awareness and distinction.
- Drive leads.
Likewise, these are very helpful to get your small business running until you’re super ready to level up and be more aggressive with your Marketing advertising and spending.
1) Use the “big 3” search engine business listing services.
Help your customers find you online and ensure your business is found everywhere.
By listing your business on the top 3 (English) search engines here in North America, you connect with current and target customers in real time and tie in offers and updates as well.
The latest stats are very clear and encouraging:
- 4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. (source: Think with Google)
- 88% of searches for local business either call or visit the business within 24 hours. (source: Nectify)
- “Near Me” or “Close By” types of searches grew by more than 900% over the last two years (source: Chat Meter)
Signing up is free, quick and easy. Also, it can be the best form of advertising for you.
Check them out:
- Google MyBusiness
- Yahoo! Small Business
- Microsoft’s Bing Places
2) Amplify your social networks.
Social media has undergone tremendous changes in the past decade and has become a reliable marketing platform for companies.
It is now an important platform and strategy for small businesses to gain strong market presence and leadership.
In addition to exposure, it also provides many opportunities to grow brand awareness through entertaining and high-value content that connects with their target customers.
Plus, with it booming e-commerce capabilities, you can now schedule appointments and directly sell through these platforms.
Excellent content like videos, images, copywriting; plus, networking, you can amplify your social media channels to reach your target customer and broaden your audience.
You just need to invest time and creativity to make it happen and fine-tune your channels to remain relevant to your niche market.
3) Start a blog.
Blogs are very powerful for SEO (search engine optimization).
Those are one of the most effective ways to connect with your target customers through relevant content that demonstrates your expertise, showcase the quality of service or products you have, and the depth and dependable help you can provide.
Have a dedicated blog page in your website and publish content on it that can also be shared on social media.
Remember to update the page of new posts regularly so that you can stay relevant in search engine algorithms. Therefore, it ranks better in search results.
4) Publish on YouTube or Vimeo.
These platforms are very useful when you have rich video content for distribution or promotion.
I recommend that you do not post the video directly to your website because it will take up a lot of disk space on your server.
When this happens, your site’s load time will be significantly longer and it will perform poorly in search results as the algorithms will essentially demote your site.
Embedding or linking to your YouTube or Vimeo channel will save your website from slow loading times, which is essential for SEO.
These platforms can also improve your SEO ranking because you can provide more valuable and relevant content to your target audience and customers.
5) SEO your business website.
In this era of Googling, keeping your website primed for SEO performance should be one of your top priorities.
SEO best practices and regular updates are essential to maintain or improve your online presence.
It won’t cost you money, it only takes a lot of time to fine-tune your main sales and marketing vehicle.
6) Publish press releases.
Press releases are great for publicity and can be distributed for free from many news and public relations websites.
You can check out these pages:
Do it every time you or your business have done something newsworthy like charity events, company updates, and business events.
7) Join and participate in online groups.
Make networking part of your marketing plan.
Join your niche`s online communities on social media and chatrooms, and get involved in conversations, contribute in discussions, and build rapport with the members.
It can help you build your network who then can talk about you and your business outside the group, grow your audience, and get referrals.
This may seem counterintuitive but try not to sell there nor post rarely just to talk about your business.
Although, what you can do is passively promote your business by putting a link in your signature or mentioning it when called for.
So there you have it. I hope these ideas can help you use the free resources discussed above to promote and grow your business online.
It should be quick and easy to set up and run.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.
