Do you want to grow your small business with some free marketing tips? There are many ways you can get started marketing your small business for FREE.
Of course, you will need to pump up your marketing budget and do some paid promotions to grow your small biz in addition to these FREE methods.
This post gives great tactics, free and low-cost, to get you started with marketing tips to grow your small biz!
A Blog is a Marketing Tool
Of course, having a blog is a first great step in marketing your small business. However, having a FREE blog may not be the best solution for your small business.
As a better option, you may want to invest in having your blog self hosted. You can start with a special offer by Site Ground for 3 months FREE.
Site Ground is my favorite, and I switched from HostGator to them after my sites became too large for them to handle. I’ve had no issues with Site Ground and highly recommend them for you.
You can try their services and get your first self-hosted blog, too!
Why Do You Need A Small Business Blog?
A small business blog provides useful information to your clients and potential clients. You can showcase your expertise in your niche with your business blog.
Blogs provide content to do other marketing for your small business, like social media marketing. Your small biz blog is your home base, and social media is your rented space.
Many new small businesses rely just on a Facebook page, and then when something happens, they can lose it all.
By having a blog, you can showcase your content on social media, along with your videos and podcasts.
Therefore, you won’t have to worry about being censored or about the algorithm changes in the social networks.
Marketing Tips for Small Business: Google My Business
If you are a small business owner, you will need to have a Google My Business or a Google Business Profile.
Why do you ask? Well, this helps the SEO for your business website and/or blog.
You don’t have to have a physical location for this marketing tool by Google. And it is FREE to use!
But, if you have an actual location, you can quickly change your hours, so people will know when you are open when they search online. This aspect alone is an invaluable tool for restaurants and other small businesses that had to change hours on the dime during Covid.
However, do note Google will try to upsell you once you sign up.
Marketing Tips for Your Small Business: Online Directories
Another place you can market your small biz is on online directories. These directories help your small business get discovered online.
So if you are looking for more marketing tips for your small business to grow, these are for you!
For example, online listings services may include:
- Hot Frog
- FeedSpot
- EntireWeb
- BOTW
- About Us
Search Engine Journal has a list of 21 that still matter today for your business. Using these listing services won’t grow your business overnight but, in time, helps the SEO of your website so you can be found organically by others looking for information.
Marketing Tips for Your Small Business: Video Marketing
Doing YouTube or Rumble videos helps your business get found since many online users love watching videos to learn something.
Hence, by doing videos for your business niche, you will appear as an authority to provide helpful information to users. However, you may even go live as you create your videos!
Not only will you be answering questions or teaching on video, but people will get to know you better and trust you to do business with. That’s the power of video marketing!
Marketing Tips for Your Small Business: Email Marketing
In case you were wondering, email marketing is NOT dead. It is alive and well. People love receiving information from brands they trust and know. However, you will need to follow excellent email etiquette and must also follow GDPR standards.
If you are selling products, having an email with special offers is a highly relevant way to entice users to purchase from your small biz.
Emails that compel people to open, read, and hit the links for more seem to focus on readers and deliver highly trusted and valuable content with each “letter,” as Ann Handley likes to call hers. Adding email personality is icing to the tasty content you deliver.
And Last but Not Least Podcasting
Podcasting is another way to market your small business as people love to listen to audio podcasts as they drive. Content consumers are increasingly turning to podcasts for content.
Google Trends shows that searches for podcasts have surpassed searches for blogs recently. If you search on Google Trends, you will see crime podcasts are rising!
So if you love to talk about your business, why not start your own podcast?
Paid Advertising
All of these above methods are ways to help you cut down on the cost of marketing your small business. However, they are many paid methods also available to market your small biz today.
Native ads may be a way for you to reach more people in a less expensive method than, say, Google ads. Native ads are the type you see on content throughout websites. They frequently do not even look like ads.
Next, social media ads are a must if you want your business pages/profiles to market your biz effectively. Just posting to a Facebook page will no longer be an effective marketing method. It may help your content be seen and help some with SEO, but an ad will ramp up those marketing efforts.
Another option is Google ads though they can be pretty expensive for a small business. However, don’t forget to check our Loir’s tips on Google tools for your ads!
These paid advertising methods are something your small business should try to figure out and set which will work best for your unique business. After all, each niche is different, and things work differently for each of them.
Your turn
What other marketing tips for your small business are you thinking of testing and evaluating in the coming year?
Thanks Ryan, You are a natural on video. I love it when a dog barks or someone walks in. You take it all in stride and it makes you more real and relatable for those watching. Others may start over or never hit the publish button on the video.
All great tips Lisa. I really love video marketing. Spending a few moments to create a video forms a deeper bond with our readerships. Marketing your small business gets easier if you add the personal touch to your campaign. Video marketing makes this easy to do. For whatever reason, people seem to like a talking head here and there versus just reading words on a screen. Thanks for the nudge to create another short video and upload it to my networks. Heading off to do that now.
Ryan