The desire not to risk a large sum of money when starting a business is perfectly justified. Even if you conducted a thorough analysis of the target audience, made sure that your offer will have a response, thought out a business strategy, investing a huge amount of money in marketing still does not make sense. It is much better to do everything gradually, to grope your approaches to the target audience and test ideas. In this article, we have collected several marketing ideas that are free or almost free but still do not lose their effectiveness with a reasonable application.

 

Use the Potential of Social Media

Social media would not have become so popular among business owners if most of their features were not free. Yes, you can set up paid advertising, you can hire an SMM manager, you can connect expensive tools for scheduled posting and analytics, but the basic and most effective functions are still free.

Creating a profile on a social network, including a page for a business, is free. Publishing content is free. And unlimited access to the target audience is a huge plus.

Therefore, you need to be able to get the most out of the free features of social networks. Here are some top tips.

  • Think in advance of the content strategy and topics of the posts that you will publish.
  • Build a semantic core for your publications in advance. In simple words, these are the key queries that are most relevant to the topic of your publications. Moreover, you can use them as key requests for the SEO of your site, plus as hashtags for your posts on the social network.
  • Think in advance how your individual style in a social network will look. And below we will tell you how to create unique graphics, also for free, of course.
  • Do not limit yourself to just one social network. All your best practices that you come up with, let’s say for Facebook, you can use for Instagram for the same purpose.
  • And by the way, focus precisely on these sites. As a rule, they give the best result due to the high engagement of the audience.

 

Come up with Unique Graphics for Free

You can easily start by creating graphics for social networks and marketing for free. Yes, uniqueness now plays a big role in all types of content, but this does not mean that you definitely need to hire a designer and pay for his work.

You can do everything you need to start for free using modern tools. Canva is one of the best free apps. This is a full-featured but very intuitive and useful thing, with the help of which you can create a graphic for any social network, independently design a logo, create presentations, promotional materials, save your templates, make your text content more visual by visualizing statistics and infographic, and many more other features. Try it once, and you will never again consider the idea of ​​spending extra money on a designer, at least until you have it.

 

Sign Up For SnapRetail

SnapRetail is one of the most helpful marketing tools you’ll find online for an affordable price. It is an all-in-one marketing solution made for small businesses. It includes an extensive email template library with over 1,000+ pre-written templates, Smart Marketing Calendar to schedule your content on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, tools for personalization, segmentation, autoresponders, and so much more!

Sign up for a free trial today!

 

Add Some Lead Generation Plugins

Lead generation forms are also powerful marketing tools. Powerfull, and free if you know how to use them correctly. If your site was created using WordPress, then you can easily find free plugins for lead generation.

As with email marketing tools, there will be nothing supernatural. However, a correctly designed and posted form for lead generation, plus valuable content or an opportunity that you offer your potential subscribers will still do their job.

 

Ask Your Users to Help You with the Content

A good copywriter is an expensive pleasure. Plus, it’s still necessary to spend money to find him, in addition to having to pay for his work. But there is a way to get good enough marketing content for free from your users.

To do this, you need to come up with an interesting initiative that motivates users to create content and share it with you (or publish on their pages on social networks noting the brand hashtag). For example, you can launch a contest on a social network, the condition of which will be to take a photo with your product or at your point of sale. Or you can offer a small gift to anyone who shoots a video unpacking your product or creates a video review. And that will be strong social proof that will work in your favor many more times.

 

If You Still Need Some Money

The features we have listed are free or nearly free. At the beginning of the article, we said that it does not make sense to invest a huge amount of money immediately at the start of the project, even after conducting thorough analyzes before that.

But still, there are times when money is badly needed. If the budget of your business is limited, and the end justifies the means, then sometimes it makes sense to take a small amount in a safe place, for example, using Lendgenius. This is a great alternative to a bank loan because you get rid of the need to make excuses and report, bring huge mountains of documents and convince the bank employee that you need money for a good cause.

 

 

 

Mónica Rodríguez is a writer, art historian, and editor located in the tropical island of Puerto Rico. She specializes in Art History, Art Conservation, History, Literature, Finance, Tech, Wellness, and Travel. In her free time, she’s usually roaming the halls of the museum or the local bookstore surrounded by stacks of books.