There’s no doubt that promoting your business isn’t just a nice-to-have. As we head into 2021, businesses need low-cost and free marketing tactics to help meet their business goals—whether it’s raising brand awareness, driving website website traffic, or making sales.
Business promotion is more than just publishing images on social media or buying ads. It’s a process to help you achieve measurable success in your business. Here’s how you can promote your business for free to drive traffic and sales for your store:
Use affiliates to promote your business
If you want to take product reviews a step further and solicit even more people to promote your product, consider starting an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing incentivizes other people to drive traffic to your business by offering a commission on every sale, similar to referral programs.
Finding your first affiliates can be tough if you don’t have wide brand recognition. Use an outreach campaign to find and recruit your first few affiliates and get the ball rolling. Look for affiliates who have an engaged audience and are already writing about your industry.
Write Guest posts on blogs
Free traffic—as opposed to paid traffic that comes from things like purchased ads—is often hard to come by for new websites. You can start blogging to drive traffic, but it takes time before you start seeing results.
While you grow your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Not only does this drive traffic back to your website, but the links to your site will help with search engine optimization.
Find and connect with bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach. Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to your business or it won’t drive any traffic.
Do a roundup
While blogging is a great way to drive traffic back to your store, it can be a lot of work. This is especially true if you don’t feel very knowledgeable on a topic you need to write about, or you’re not generally comfortable writing. One way around this is to solicit contributions from other bloggers or experts.
Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story to your blog post. Then, publish a list of all the responses you got back. You’ll be providing your audience with great content from relevant experts, plus the contributors will want to share the article with their own readers, increasing your own reach.
Get reviews For Products
Getting your product reviewed can be a great way to spread awareness and drive sales. Instead of waiting around for someone to review your product, use a blogger outreach campaign to get the ball rolling. You may end up landing a product review in outlets like Buzzfeed.
Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them new products for free in exchange for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.
Invest in infographics
Investing in a professionally designed infographic is one way to drive traffic and potentially build backlinks, which are great for search engine optimization (SEO). The cost ranges greatly for quality infographics—depending on what you need and the skill level of the person you hire—but it can be well worth the investment.
Need an idea for an infographic? Check out sites like Visually for inspiration. Once you’ve chosen an idea, research the topic and identify the points that you’ll cover in the infographic. You can hand this outline over to a professional designer as direction for what you want the infographic to cover you’re DIY route, in which case you should check out tools like Canva or Piktochart).
Let’s say you sell bicycles and related gear. You might create an infographic that talks about the environmental benefits of bicycling. Some points or figures you might include in the infographic could be how much a daily commute saves in fuel emissions, as well as a comparison of the total number of car owners and bike owners.
That message speaks to your customer base, but is also compelling enough that many blogs and even news sites might want to feature and link back to it.
Start an email marketing campaign
Email marketing is a great way to attract and retain customers as a small business. You can ask potential customers to sign up for an email list on your social media profiles or ecommerce store. Email is one of the most cost-effective ways to market a new business.
Once they opt-in, you can send them promotions, product launches, or content to build a relationship and increase sales.
The best part? You can create automated email marketing campaigns to send the messages for you. It’s a huge benefit for small business owners who don’t have a ton of time or resources to spend on marketing.
Get found on Google Search
When it comes to promoting your online business, SEO is one of the best ways to get traffic and sales over time. Research shows that online businesses receive 35% of total traffic and 33% of revenue from search engine results pages.
The goal is to get to position one, so when shoppers type in a specific keyword, they find your brand first. These shoppers are considered “high-intent,” which means they are more likely to buy your products compared to people who watch an ad or find you on social media.
The problem is, small businesses often don’t have the time or resources to do search engine optimization. The upside? Executing the basics is enough to get you ahead of competitors.
promote your business on social media
It’s no secret that social media is a smart way to market your business.
Get on TikTok
You’ve no doubt heard of TikTok by this point. According to the latest TikTok statistics, the social media platform has over 689 million active monthly users worldwide and has been downloaded over two billion times from the App Store and Google Play. Using TikTok for business is also the easiest way to reach younger demographics like zennials and Gen Z.
Why get on on board? TikTok uses a proprietary discovery algorithm that helps your videos go viral, whether you have 10 followers or 10,000. It helps businesses scale their social media presence and drive fast growth.
For example, SendAFriend was able to scale to $5 million in two years, thanks to their TikTok marketing strategy.
TikTok is great for building brand awareness. But you can also drive sales with a link-in-bio feature that directs viewers to a landing page. It also has free advertising features like AR filters and lenses to promote your business online in an interactive and fun way.
Get Instagram influencers to promote your product
Sometimes you don’t need to write a guest post or ask other people to review your product. When you find the right match for your brand, a simple mention on Instagram can go a long way. This is especially true for apparel products, where the right mention or stylish photo can drive tons of sales.
Use an outreach campaign to connect with Instagram influencers—whether they have a blog or not—and arrange sponsored posts. Look for Instagrammers with audiences that would like your product and ask them to feature your product in a photo. Make sure you have your own Instagram account set up so they can tag you.
Promote on your YouTube channel
Did you know that YouTube users watch over one billion hours of video on the website every day? Yet only 9% of businesses use YouTube to promote themselves. As YouTube continues to grow and amass more users, it’s a prime marketing opportunity for you to take advantage of.
Compelling video content is excellent for attracting new customers and engaging with current ones. A basic YouTube marketing strategy will help showcase your brand’s identity and connect with your target audience in a fresh and exciting way.
Use word-of-mouth with social reviews
Using product reviews and testimonials to create trust and gain insights into your products is a great way to increase online sales.
Host a Twitter chat with your audience
Engagement is critical to keep any online community alive and well. A great tactic to grow your Twitter following and boost online sales is by hosting a weekly Twitter chat.
You can either co-host an existing Twitter chat or start your own. Co-hosting allows you to tap into an existing audience, while you’d need to do more work promoting it if you were to host on your own. Over time, others in the space will take part and you’ll gradually establish your brand as an authority in the space.
Tip: Pick a hashtag related to the Twitter chat and ask your community to use it within their tweets. This helps with branding, makes the practice familiar to those who choose to take part, and allows you to search the chat later for content and recaps.
Make it easy to share your products
Social share buttons are a key element to increasing the “virality” of your site, which can in turn drive traffic and boost online sales. Make sure the buttons to the popular social networks—Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest—are easy for users to find.
Enable Shopping on Instagram
One of the biggest challenges for brands on Instagram is linking. And when the main goal is to drive traffic and, ultimately, sales, that can be a big hurdle. One way to work around this to boost online sales is to add products to your Instagram posts and Stories.
Essentially, you put virtual “tags” on your product photos (and stickers in your Instagram Stories). Mobile users can then click on these tags to see how much a product costs, and they can tap to learn more and make a purchase. It’s one of the most seamless ways to blend Instagram and ecommerce.
promote your business locally
More than half of North American buyers changed the way they’ll shop going forward. One breakout trend has been support for local and small businesses. Here’s how you can take advantage of this:
Join local events
A local event refers to any affair that attracts an audience from a local market. Artisan markets, craft shows, trade shows, and festivals are examples of events small businesses can promote themselves at locally.
“Right now, many local businesses are meeting online. They are using live streams and online meetups to show off products online and reach people at scale. But as areas start to open back up, we don’t want to overlook the power of local in-person events.”
Local events help small business owners meet customers one-on-one and create individual connections. People can touch, feel, and smell whatever you’re selling and interact with your products.
“Another way to promote your business locally is through workshops and lectures. It’s a great way to build your reputation in the community and increase brand awareness.”
Offer local delivery
People are buying more from independent businesses. Our consumer trend data shows that nearly a third of buyers bought something online and had it delivered to their home during the first three months of the pandemic.
Offering local delivery is a smart way to capitalize on this trend. When a customer orders something from your online store, you can personally deliver it to their doorstep. It serves as an alternative to traditional carrier shipping and in-store shopping, and is a thoughtful way to sell to concerned customers.
Create a Google My Business profile
Google My Business is an easy-to-use listing tool to manage your presence across Google Search and Maps. It’s the best way to promote on Google for free and get in front of prospective customers.
People use Google My Business to check and see if you’re legitimate. You can add photos and videos of your shop, and provide links to your website or appointment booking software. You can even give people a look inside your business to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
If someone decides they want to engage with your business, they have your contact information, website, and business address right in the listing. People can easily visit you online or in-person.
Next Steps:
Good products are the cost of entry, but promotion will bring you the money. Unfortunately, most owners overlook promoting their business. They assume it’s expensive and time-consuming, but you need to create a foundation for your online presence and focus on getting in front of the right people, quickly and efficiently.
