Small businesses have limited budgets, so most businesses need to pay close attention to their limited resources. Most of the time, some small businesses don't have advertising budgets.
However, in order to be noticed by customers and business partners, you need to grow and increase your visibility.
Luckily, even with zero advertising budgets, small businesses can promote their products and services and tell their brand stories, allowing them to grow into large companies.
This is usually possible, and many small businesses have grown millions of times through these means simply by using free platforms that allow small businesses to advertise for free.
In this blog post, we will introduce you to the most popular and top free online business promotion platforms to help your small business grow for free.
Online advertising platforms are not limited to search engines and popular social media platforms. Other platforms such as forums are a great way to grow your business. Forums are one of the best free advertising sites and many people spend more time on these platforms than they do on search engines or social media platforms. We will discuss some of the most important below.
Quora Ads
Quora Business is one of the best online forums out there right now. The platform has hundreds of thousands of experts and people looking for solutions and sharing knowledge. The platform has over 100 million monthly active users of all backgrounds. This is a great opportunity for online businesses to reach their intended audience. To get a lot of traffic from Quora, you need to be an expert in your niche. Answer questions related to your niche and make sure your answers are as valuable as possible. This will help you attract more followers and make your answers more visible.
A good tip here is to answer questions that get a lot of views and include images and links below in your answers. Quora features all major ad types, including image ads, in both desktop and mobile ads in various sizes, and contextual ads. Advertisers can use list-matching targeting by uploading mailing lists of people they want to target.
We also optimise pixels to support multi-level conversion tracking and behavioural advertising options to help businesses get the traffic they need to grow their business.
Reddit Ads
Reddit is another great forum that many businesses use to get targeted traffic. Over 52 Million daily users share links, images, and texts contributing to multiple subreddits.
Small businesses use Reddit to get a lot of traffic. It's also great for networking and scaling your business.
Because there are so many people spending a lot of time on the site. For small businesses, you can create and optimise your business profile. This allows you to post images and links, create blog posts, and more.
It will get you a lot of attention and attract customers. Another nice thing about Reddit is the subreddit you can join. If you want to join these subreddits, you should read the rules first to avoid getting banned.
Maintaining a high level of participation is great, but please refrain from spamming. This subreddit provides an opportunity to contribute, learn and build a useful network. It's also a great paid platform and works as a free advertising platform for businesses as well. Small businesses active on forums often use these platforms for free advertising. On Reddit, we do this by sharing links, the latest blog posts, images, and text posts.
As a small business, joining the Reddit subreddit will get you followers and lots of upvotes, making your posts more popular. Small businesses are encouraged to use these platforms to grow organically.
DigitalPoint
DigitalPoint is another great forum with a huge amount of digital markers. They share their knowledge on various topics in digital marketing. DigitalPoint also enables paid advertising using CPM and email advertising models. Banner ads are based on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. If your service is related to digital marketing, this is another platform to consider.
BlackHatSEO
It's one of the oldest forums online, but it's also used primarily by digital marketers. Posting on this forum gives you the opportunity to expose your posts and posts to a large number of potential customers
You can also get strong backlinks from this forum to improve your organic search engine rankings. This will result in a lot more traffic later when you come across your valuable keywords.
We also sell advertising space to advertisers who want to buy it. Place banners and text ads on your platform to encourage participants to share stories, ask questions and get answers.
Free Business Advertising Platforms
Most of the above platforms are also great platforms that allow businesses to advertise their products and services and tell their brand stories.
These platforms offer a great opportunity for businesses to create a business page and have it regularly updated with new content designed to educate, inform, entertain and promote their business.
See how you can grow your business with these free online business promotion platforms that are free to use.
Facebook Business Page
A Facebook business page is a great way to promote your business for free without paying a penny. The only difference between paid and free Facebook ads is the limited exposure compared to paid ads. Either way, there's a lot you can do with free Facebook ads. Here's how:
Optimise your company page with all company information. Make your business page stand out so your prospects can easily access all the information they need. After optimising your page, the next step is to create a marketing strategy for Facebook. This requires creating quality content and scheduling Facebook posts on your Facebook Page so that they are published to your Page on a regular basis. Facebook rewards consistency and quality content. Post daily and people will see your posts more often. This will increase your page followers and page likes.
Join many informative and interactive Facebook groups related to your business. There you can join these groups or share posts on your Facebook page. This will increase the exposure of your post and allow more people to find your content. Another visualisation hack is to make sure you reply to all comments and messages on your page. The more you interact with people, the more visibility your posts will get. Some companies are leveraging these tools to grow themselves into global companies today. You can do that too.
Twitter Business Page
Twitter gives small businesses great tools to build awareness and gain followers through tweets and trends. It’s one of the best platforms for building great relationships that lead to loyal followers and sales. As a small business, using Twitter should be strategic in shaping your sales channel for your business.
Engage your Twitter followers by creating valuable content and content that encourages your audience to engage with your profile and website. It helps a lot in crafting tweets that are of interest to your followers. This gets them involved with your content. Many small businesses can do this successfully.
A perfect example of a company doing this successfully is NameCheap. As of the date of this post, it has 121,000 followers and is still growing. One good thing they've done well is combining fun and business. Try it yourself and give us your feedback.
Create attention-grabbing tweets. You need to understand that you have competitors and creating attention-grabbing Tweets can be a big plus for your business profile. Some small businesses that make good use of Twitter can gain large followers and market share. One example is the Roger Smith Hotel, which has over 15,000 followers. Knowing that they were too small to compete with the bigger brands, they turned to social media marketing, especially Twitter, to raise awareness.
You can even invite influencers and journalists to try out your service. When these influencers turn to Twitter to share their experiences, their Twitter becomes popular with many.
They are currently offering discounts to those who book hotels through Twitter and have Twitter kiosks in their hotels. This is one of many other social media marketing success stories.
Another way to raise awareness on Twitter is to connect with people who need your product or service. Twitter has countless pros promoting itself. This is another opportunity to build a network around them.
You can also use Twitter as a lead-generation platform by promoting your Tweets.
You also need to listen to your customers on Twitter. Lastly, here are few points to wrap up...
Listen to the voice of the customer
Promote hard-to-find products
Create attention-grabbing Tweets
Keep your followers engaged
be consistent
combine work and fun
Optimise for mobile devices
Connect with people who need your product or service.
Grow your business with Twitter for free.
LinkedIn Company Page
LinkedIn is primarily seen as a professional platform for professionals with over 822 million active users as of Q1 of 2022. This is a great opportunity for small businesses to promote their business. A LinkedIn Business/Corporate Page gives you the opportunity to boost your business and be seen by thousands of LinkedIn users.
Company Pages also have some features that allow you to post content and connect with people searching for your business. Here are some ways you can use LinkedIn to boost your small business.
Lead Generation – Use this platform to reach your target audience and grow your business for free, as LinkedIn provides easy access for businesses to contact other members and even subscribe buttons. You can also message your viewers on LinkedIn to let them know about your business. It may be just a message, but it actually builds a network of businesses.
LinkedIn Boost SEO – As a small business, using LinkedIn can have a significant impact on your company's search engine rankings. It can also increase your visibility and grow your organic search traffic over time. Share content on your company's LinkedIn page to connect your company with the right audience. You can also join groups related to your niche and publish valuable blog posts to attract a wider audience.
Think of LinkedIn as a free business promotion site because it offers great opportunities for small businesses.
Treat your LinkedIn Business Page as a Marketing Channel
LinkedIn can be a great platform for marketing content such as your blog posts, updates about your business, and advertisements for your products and services. Blog posts can be shared at any time. If they are valuable enough, your content will continue to be liked, shared, and have a greater presence on the platform.
That alone can help your business page gain new followers and ultimately loyal customers. Use as a multi-channel marketing platform – The perfect channel to market your business products and services as a small business.
You will have the opportunity to reach local audiences through this new channel. This has a huge impact as it opens up so many doors when it comes to online traffic and user interest in your business. Use LinkedIn legally to get noticed and grow your business for free.
Pinterest Business Page
One of the best ways to grow your audience and grow your business is on Pinterest. An excellent platform for quality traffic for small businesses. Pinterest is a powerful image storage platform that is slightly different from other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
This means that there are also many different rules and practises that enable small businesses to grow. Here's how you can use Pinterest to grow your small business.
Feature Your Blog Post on Pinterest
Pinterest is an image platform, but bloggers have successfully used this platform to build their wealth for free. It's easy. Once you've created your blog post, you'll need to create a Pinterest-sized image and pin it to your profile so that users can click your post to visit your site.
Doing this properly and consistently can significantly increase your traffic. Especially if featured on one of the boards.
Promote Your Site
Pinterest boards are useful if you want to grow your website by creating a board with all the important information about your website. Create visual pages containing "About Us", "Testimonials", "Pricing List", "Products and Services" and any other information necessary to disseminate information about the company's website. You can choose to post this information on one of our recommendation boards for more people to see.
Promote Your Videos on Pinterest
Video is a great way for modern businesses to increase their online presence. For small businesses, this is one of the best ways to promote your business on Pinterest. In fact, many digital is like free business advertising platforms for his marketers. Businesses promoting their videos on Pinterest get more views and pins from other interested target audiences. Consider using videos on Pinterest to increase your visibility as a small business.
Google My Business
When it comes to free local business advertising, this is a great local business marketing strategy that allows your business to appear in Google searches when people are searching for businesses within their location.
Restaurants, Gas stations, hotels, hostels, malls, shops, universities, schools, pups, mechanic workshops, and many other local businesses use Google my business to generate a lot of traffic that leads to sales.
It’s simply one of the best ways to advertise businesses for free by appearing in local search results which also use Google maps to direct thousands of customers to your business doorsteps and is widely used by millions of businesses worldwide.
Business Listings
There are millions of people that still visit online directories also known as business listing directories to search for businesses online which means huge potential for free business advertising.
Although some charge a fee to feature your listing and to review and approve your listing fast, most of them allow you to list your businesses for free which is awesome, however, this tactic works best if you list your businesses in your niche-related business listing directory (online directory).
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to get customers to come back to your website and buy from him. Many consider it one of the most effective free ways to market your business for free.
You should use your email funnel to strategize and collect your emails and keep your emails up to date whenever you launch a new product or service, publish a new blog post, or check for discounts.
Press Release
Another great way to spread the word about your online business is to use press releases to report changes happening in your business. Some of these pages have large numbers of followers. This way, you can easily reach a large audience that may be interested in your business. Most of them aren't free, but that feeling is nothing compared to the advertising value you get. Choose the right one and get more traffic.
Facebook Marketplace
This is one of the free advertising sites where you can sell your products for free and reach millions of people. I myself have purchased many things on the Facebook Marketplace.
Very popular and a must-try. It doesn't matter if you are promoting a product or service. It has the ability to help your business be seen by millions of people for free.
Conclusion
There are many other free ways to boost your small business and grow it faster, but let us know in the comments section which one you think works best. We've highlighted the most popular channels that small businesses can use for free to promote and grow their business. Each platform has unique opportunities to boost your business if used properly.
Doing more research on this topic and getting services from a company focused on clients’ business success like DigitalxMarketing will ensure you optimise your budget while getting the best results.
DigitalxMarketing Ltd has its head office in Wellington NZ with its support and resource centre based in the Philippines. DxM implements the latest digital strategies, tactics, tools, platforms and technologies to deliver integrated digital marketing services so your digital footprint can be found online.
Learn more about DigitalxMarketing today!