Trying to Market Your Business? How to Market for FREE!
(This article may contain affiliate links.)
Creating a business is hard, but once you have created it, it’s done! Right? You have created a great product or a fantastic brand — but how are you actually going to make sales? How will customers find you and buy from you? And how much will you pay for advertising and marketing to generate leads and customers? Oftentimes, something that is even harder than building your business is getting customers to find your business.
Fear no more because here are 10 of my favorite marketing techniques that you can use today to earn more customers and generate sales!
Getting Found On Google
There are a variety of different ways that you can make yourself more prominent in Google search results. Firstly, you need to set up a Google business profile. Once you set it up, you will automatically show up on the map when local clients and customers are trying to find your products or services. Next is optimizing your website, your shop, your content, or anything that you are sharing online for search engine optimization — also known as SEO. SEO is an incredibly powerful tool that will help customers to find and buy from you.
How to Optimize for SEO
There are lots of different ways that you can boost and harness the power of search engine optimization. First, you can set up Google Analytics on your site to gather data about what keywords are or aren’t working, and how customers are finding your site. Next, you can utilize Google Trends or SEMRush’s Keyword tool to help you gauge popular search terms for your area or niche.
Avery common mistake that people make when they are trying to increase their SEO, is that they will try to keyword EVERYTHING. They will shove every possible keyword into their title, text, description, and tags that they think might be relevant to their customers — this actually has a negative effect on your search engine optimization. You want to try to utilize long tail keywords — meaning using something much more specific.
For example, I am a wedding photographer, and my instinct might be to include keywords such as wedding, wedding photography, wedding photographer, or photography. However, what I should be doing is crafting very specific words and phrases for what my unique customers are going to search for. Instead of tagging everything with “photography” or “wedding photographer,” update it to something very specific like a “Napa wedding photographer” — use the same keywords in your title, your tags, your metadata, your image or file names, your description, and your text.
Blogging
This free technique may seem a little outdated to you, but I want you to not underestimate the power of blogging. Blogging is a fantastic free marketing method. Why? Once you blog and you create content, it’s going to boost you in the search engines. If you aren’t creating content that leads to your website, you’re not going to rank as easily as someone who does blog regularly.
You need to make sure that your blog posts contain at least one sort of rich content such as an image, infographic, or a video. Make sure that your title and tags for that rich content are always in line with the long tail keywords that that you’re trying to rank for.
Once you have created content on your blog — or any other online platform — you can utilize the power of Pinterest to reshare that content to an even larger audience. Pinterest functions as a visual search engine. While it might not be the best type of fit for every kind of business, there’s a wide variety of niches and industries that can benefit from maintaining an active Pinterest account. Pin your content and point it back to where customers can actually buy from you.
YouTube
Youtube is a platform that allows you to upload videos for free. You can reach an audience, grow an audience, and eventually market to that audience. However, keep in mind that it does take a significant amount of time in order to build up your channel and actually get views on YouTube. You want to ensure that the content you’re producing is something valuable to your target clients and customers — do not simply make advertisement videos for your products. Try to create value for your viewers so they will develop a trust in your brand and want to subscribe to your channel — and hopefully, become a future customer!
Social Media
Social media is extremely powerful. Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or another network, it is incredibly useful to be able to choose a platform, devote a significant amount of time to it, publish regular content, and get people to recognize and trust your brand.
TikTok has been blowing up small business owners, self employed individuals, and content creators recently. It is extremely easy to go viral on TikTok, but you do need to post consistently with any platform. Make sure that you really niche down so that you are sharing content that is relevant, helpful and useful to your target customers.
Referral Circle
This is going to apply for a very specific type of business, primarily service based businesses.
If you find people in your area that are offering the same or similar services to you and you have the same sort of target client, you might initially view them as your competition. However, the best thing to do with competition is to turn it into one of your greatest assets by creating a referral circle. If you are not able to take on a certain customer, you can send that customer to your referral circle. Utilize forms such as Facebook groups or other communities where you can reach out to similar businesses with relatively similar price points, and ask them if they want to be a part of your referral circle. Then you can add your booked dates onto a shared Google calendar and when one of you is already booked, you can simply send the client a full list of everyone who happens to have that date available. This allows you to take that competition mindset and pivot it into a community mindset.
Get Published
Believe it or not, there’s a variety of different types of media outlets that are looking for content to feature — for free! Creating press releases, pitching your story, and coming up with collaboration ideas are all different ways that you can get yourself featured in the media.
Review Sites
Review sites such as Yelp, Google or TrustPilot allow customers and clients to leave you reviews and star rankings which help new customers gain trust before purchasing and booking with you. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers and clients specifically to leave a review if you know that you have satisfied that customer.
Email List
How are you going get people to sign up for your email list? You are going to give away a free piece of content that you think is valuable to your target clients. Provide something that is a great piece of free content that they can quickly download such as a PDF, an ebook, or a how-to guide. Once they download that, you can save their email address and send out marketing emails.
Want to learn more about free marketing methods? Watch the video here!
