How to Market Your Business: 4 Free Advertising Tools

Connect With Professionals 

Linkedin is the world’s largest professional networking site. After creating your Linkedin profile, you can effectively promote your online business. Your free profile will attract contacts associated with your industry. By creating and posting interesting content, you will establish and build brand awareness

Linkedin is a great tool to build your brand awareness as the platform houses over  701 million users making it the perfect habitat to increase your exposure, follower count, and engagement. Linkedin is recognized as a premier platform for advertisers for B2B marketing, as  97% of B2B marketers utilize Linkedin for their business’s marketing.

 Creating quality Linkedin content is what will make you stand out from the other users. According to Linkedin’s Engineering blog, “ the algorithm sorts tens of thousands of posts and ranks the most relevant at the top of the feed.” 

The platform automatically sorts post this way causing a slower decay of relevant, relatable posts.  

You can learn how to make an effective Linkedin ad here.

Join and Create Facebook Groups

After successfully building your business’s free Facebook page, you should now enter the world of Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are a platform to communicate shared interests with people around the globe. 

 To market your business you should create a group for your own page as well as join groups within your community. This is a great place to promote, connect, answer questions, and stay updated with your industry’s current events. 

 Making shareable posts about products or services that you offer is an effective way to advertise. It also doubles as a great tool to organize events and gain knowledge from like-minded people.

 According to the 2016 Salesforce Advertising Index,  “Facebook ad revenue reached $6.2 million, representing a 63% increase since Q22015:”

 The Front Page of the Internet

More commonly known as Reddit, is another popular and extremely diverse networking platform. The site is a melting pot of communities with over 430 million monthly active users. 

 You can explore and join these communities based on your interests by prefacing your search with Reddit’s signature “ r/”. For example, you can join r/marketing for a community that gives advertising advice to consumers,  businesses, or anyone else interested in that topic.

 Reddit users subscribe to forums that pique their interest, where they can then join relevant discussions.

 Because of the outreach potential, Reddit can be a great place to promote your product or service. Target your audience and promote your business in a niche subreddit.

 Using the Force to Connect with Customers

“Duracell worked with Reddit to drive mass awareness of their Star Wars holiday broadcast spot through a classic banner campaign”. 

 In 2016, a small, Oregon based, hat company,  Findlay Hats, generated $28,000 in sales from a single Reddit post. The post was an image of the owner sharing his surreal experience of seeing someone in Italy wearing one of his hats.

 The post was seen 2.9 million times that evening and within 24 hours Findlay Hats owner states their website had “more traffic in one day than in the entire previous year. We ended up getting a couple of months’ worth of sales, all in a 24 hour period”. 

A Blog Of Your Own

Incorporate a blog onto your website. Blogging is an effective way to attract organic traffic to your website. The more your blog content you create allows search engines to direct people or potential customers to your site as well as recognizing that your site is a source of information. 

 5 Types of corporate blogs

Some of the largest corporations listed on the Fortune 500 utilize blogs for various purposes such as promotion and customer service. 

These corporations likely use one of the five types of corporate blogging. By understanding and adopting one of these blog styles, you too could gain organic traffic to your website.

References

Lee, S., Hwang, T., & Hong-Hee, L. (2006). Corporate blogging strategies of the Fortune 500 companies. Management Decision, 44(3), 316-334. doi:http://dx.doi.org.libraryaccess.sdmiramar.edu:8080/10.1108/00251740610656232

6.) cold calling/ cold emailing people/businesses that have to do with your product

3.) Find blogs about the domain, and reach out to people who write the blog; see if they will write a post about your product

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