As a general rule, the more money you spend on your marketing, the better the return you are going to get. Opting for highly professional marketing campaigns will help you to attract new customers and make sales conversions.
Free Online Marketing for Your Business
However, for many small businesses, there isn’t an endless pot of money that can be thrown into their marketing strategies. When this is the case, you sometimes have to look at other, cheaper options to help promote your business. So if you are in this category, then we have some advice that may help you along the way.
Here are some free digital marketing tools that you could start using to help boost your business:
1) Free Websites
There are numerous companies that offer free web hosting services that will enable you to get a website set up if you don’t already have one. They provide easy to use tools to help you to get started, like templates so you don’t need to have a web development degree to use it. Take a look at providers like Wix, WordPress and Weebly for their free hosting plans to consider whether they will work for you.
There are some limitations involved with free hosting, so it might not be the right solution for you. However, if you just want a very basic company website with a few pages of content and contact details, you can easily achieve this with a free website.
For more demanding websites that you should look at other hosting options such as shared or dedicated options. James from Top 10 Website Hosting has put together a list of the best web hosts which have been tried and tested using Pingdom.
2) Social Media
More and more companies are developing social media strategies to promote their business. One of the great benefits of social media is that your potential network reach is absolutely huge. Another big plus is that you can set up social media accounts for free. So for example, you can set up a business page with Facebook and use it to share content and useful information.
LinkedIn is another platform that businesses are increasingly using to expand their network. Creating high quality articles, infographics and guides can help you to become seen as an expert in your industry, attracting new followers who can convert into customers.
Depending on your target audience, certain channels are more likely to suit your customer demographics than others. So for example, if you sell corporate training services, LinkedIn would be a good platform to use. This is because corporate professionals tend to use LinkedIn more than they would use Instagram for example.
However, if you own a nail salon and you want to share images of your nail designs with women in their 20s then Instagram is going to be the right channel for you. That is not to say that you should only use one social media platform, but just have your target audience in mind when you are developing your social media strategy.
3) Email Campaigns
If you want to create professional looking email campaigns, using responsive templates through companies like MailChimp is the perfect solution. If you are sending out campaigns to relatively low volumes, then you can get a free plan with MailChimp that also enables you to monitor your campaign success.
4) Video
Video has become easier to create these days, with smartphones that enable video recording and simple to use editing tool software. Facebook offers live streaming and YouTube has inbuilt editing tools to help you create a basic video without any costs. All you need is some good content to capture that will promote your business.
So as you can see, there are a number of free marketing tools for you to use to help boost your business. 🙂
