Save Your Money, Invest Your Time

If your team is ready to start finding new customers with goals for growth in the next quarter, you need to invest in marketing. However, for small businesses with tight budgets, expensive campaigns may not be an option. Instead, we have a list of free marketing strategies for small business owners and tools that you can use to lay the foundation for your plans to expand. If you’re curious about any of the topics listed, follow the links to learn more about their practical use. Stop wondering how to promote your business for free and let’s get started!

Invest Your Time into Short-Form, Video Content

Instagram Reels are growing in popularity. In fact, our sources have shared that Instagram users spend the majority of their time on Reels. Since this is the case, you can use a UGC style to create brand related content that enhances your brand image. Reels are also a great way to get exposure among new audiences because Instagram will expand your reach beyond your followers if your content is engaging. Increasing your impressions with organic posts is the beginning of how to promote your business on social media for free.

A recent study shows that Instagram Reels get 33% more reach than single photos or carousels. This doesn’t mean you should eliminate the other two formats. Your main focus should be on sharing valuable, engaging content that will attract interest and raise awareness of your brand in whatever ways are available for you.

Short form videos for social media should be filmed vertically with a phone camera that can capture footage in at least 1080p. Most social platforms have native video editors, but you can also try a freemium service like CapCut or Canva. These free marketing tools are available as apps and online interfaces that save your projects to an easily accessible cloud. When posting, make sure to choose a sound that flows with your message. It also helps to add captions whenever someone is speaking. There are several other best practices for Reels that you can explore here.

Use SEO Blogs to Drive Traffic to Your Website

There are several ways to enhance your SEO strategy without spending a dime. Writing SEO driven blogs is one of the best free marketing strategies for small business owners. While it is time consuming, you reap benefits like higher SERP rankings, more website traffic, increased reputability, thought-leader status, and more loyal website visitors.

You can use a free tool like Google Trends to identify trending keywords that potential customers are searching to find information about your industry. Once you pick a topic that has relevance to your business, start doing research to find backlinks that you can link to for reference throughout your article. This helps people find exactly what they’re looking for and increases your ranking with Google’s bots. 

From there, craft a blog that conveys value through experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Drop the keyword phrases you researched into the article wherever they flow naturally. It doesn’t need to be more than 600 words. What’s more important than length is the format. Make sure you adequately use H1 and H2 tags to divide the sections of your post and highlight those search terms. Optimize your blog title to be relevant to the most popular keyword phrase you have chosen. Your URL slug should also include this keyword phrase. For your articles image, adjust the alt-text to be keyword relevant so it can be indexed by Google’s bots. This is the most extensive of our recommended free marketing strategies for small business owners, yet with commitment and consistency it will pay off in the long run.

Leverage an LLM AI to Help You Develop Ideas and Write Captions

If writing is not your strong suit, a lot of AI tools have been released that can assist you in generating content. Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have free versions that you can use to develop organic strategies. Try using one of these LLMs on your own by asking a question like, “How to promote your business locally for free”. The responses will be vague, but the goal is to use the ideas presented to inspire your team’s creativity.

Beyond that, you can ask the AI to write a rough draft of any article you want. Once it’s done, use your discretion and style to revise the article so that you can proudly put your own name on it. Using AI content without revisions could backfire because there are systems at work within search engines that can recognize generated content.

You can also use free AI to ideate captions for posts, translate text, and generate images for your social media headers.

Invest in Educating Yourself about Google Products

We all know and love Google products like Sheets, Drive, and Docs. However, there are other tools that provide insights into your brand’s performance online.

Google Analytics 4 is a free-to-use platform that allows you to track daily website activity on your website or app. It’s fairly intuitive to use and if you’re willing to learn a new skill, there are free courses you can take to learn how to use this tool ranging from basic to advanced levels. Additionally, there’s no shortage of tutorials on YouTube that can teach you the essentials in half the time.

Google Search Console adds even more depth to the GA4 platform. This free add-on will tell you specifically which keywords users searched to land directly on your website. Knowing this information is extremely helpful in identifying what keywords should be added into the body text of your website. 

Finally, Google My Business will provide another layer of data collection and also enable you to use more of Google’s professional features. Google My Business allows you to establish a preview card for when people search your company’s name where you can host reviews, images, business information, and much more. This platform is also where you can upload your products to the ‘Shopping’ section of Google.

Invest in Developing Relationships Within Your Community

Business is all about forming genuine, dependable connections. The most important ones are with your clients, but you can reach out to industry peers or even online profiles you respect to develop a winning strategy with little cash. You’d be surprised how far an Instagram DM can take you. Forming a partnership through collaboration can allow your business to thrive through referrals, white-labeling, sponsorships, and bargains. 

There’s a lot of different ways this strategy can play out. You could work with a micro-influencer that is relevant to your product or service and provide them with something complementary in exchange for promotion to their eager audience. You can also reach out to a local business that provides a service/product that you use every day and negotiate a bulk deal to save money on overhead costs.

One of the biggest ways a professional relationship can pay dividends is through referrals. If you often find that your customers are asking for a feature that you are not capable of developing yourself, it would be wise to find a partner you trust in that field who you can send them too. Providing this connection alone will make you more valuable to customers, but you can also negotiate with your new partner to provide kickbacks from the profits they receive due to your referrals. The process can work in the opposite direction as well if you find that someone you know and respect needs an outlet for customers they cannot fully satisfy.

Conclusion

These 5 free marketing strategies for small business owners should give you a better understanding of how to promote your business for free. There are many, many more ways to do that but we can’t discuss them all in one article.

We’re excited to see how you can use this knowledge to create your own strategies, so tag Gold Level Marketing in your posts so we can share your content and expand your reach.

When you’re ready to take the next step, or if this all sounds like more work than you need right now, contact our client managers about taking your strategies to the next level.