No matter what you make, sell, or provide, marketing is key to sustained growth.
But when you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur or small business, or feel like you’ve saturated a particular market, it can be hard to know what marketing strategy to try next.
We’ve already shared 8 of the best marketing tools that can elevate your business, many of which have a free tier. But sometimes, what you need isn’t new free marketing tools; it’s new ideas.
And if your marketing budget is already maxed, you need marketing efforts that won’t break the bank.
If that’s you, we’re here to help! Below you’ll find 12 free online marketing ideas, most of which require no upfront investment and won’t take a ton of effort to get started with.
Defining “free” marketing ideas
Before we dive in, let’s level-set. “Free” can mean a lot of different things, and we want to be crystal clear about what you’re getting in this article.
Our working definition for “free marketing ideas” is any tactic that doesn’t carry a direct cost. You’ll still have to invest time and (likely) pay someone on your team for labor. But those costs are tiny compared to a high-powered national ad campaign.
With that out of the way, let’s jump into our 12 best free marketing ideas you can start using right away.
1. Create a free Bitly account to transform your brand identity
For starters, it costs exactly $0.00 to start using Bitly. Our powerful link-shortening service does much more than just shorten links. Of course, some of our most powerful features are reserved for our paid plans. But many you can leverage with the Bitly Free plan, giving you the capability to transform your brand identity—no upfront investment required.
Short links clean up your linking strategy everywhere, but especially on social media (where every character matters). Free users can also customize the back half of Bitly links (more on this later in the post) and track metrics such as link clicks and referral information. Free users can even integrate with some social networks to post directly from their Bitly Dashboard.
Last, free users can access our open API, allowing you to integrate and configure Bitly into your existing tech stack.
2. Post and engage with your audience on social media
Posting and engaging with an audience often on various social media channels is another 100% free way to boost brand awareness and keep your products and services front of mind for your followers.
Be interactive: Respond to comments, post polls, and reshare user-generated content (more on UGC later). It also helps to keep an eye on relevant hashtags, and interact with posts where your brand is mentioned.
You also want your social media marketing to lead to sales and sign-ups, though. And that requires getting your followers off social and onto your website or ecommerce store.
Short Bitly links help you do this cleanly and professionally without taking up half your post’s character count. It’s one reason why we say everyone needs a free Bitly account!
3. Shorten your URLs to drive engagement
In this age of ransomware, phishing, and identity theft, people are more cautious and aware of the links they click than in the past. That’s good in the fight against scammers and spammers—but it can be bad for legitimate businesses posting safe yet unfamiliar links.
Shorter, cleaner URLs can appear more trustworthy to your audience. And if you use custom back-halves, you can even do some creative branding to increase that trust. (Paid Bitly users can even create custom domains, or front-halves, which supercharges trust and brand familiarity. That said, this article is about free ideas, so we’ll get back to the free stuff now.)
Benefits of link shortening
Why are we so passionate about link shortening (other than the fact that it’s what we do)? Because it delivers! Consider how these additional benefits could enhance or extend your business’s reputation or reach:
- Better brand awareness: Your links can “look like” your brand.
- Better click-through rates (CTR): More familiarity and trust = more clicks.
- Better tracking and analytics: See how many people are clicking through, plus when and where those clicks occur (better than Google Analytics).
- Cleaner, shorter social posts: Save that character count for your compelling message instead of spending it on URL characters that don’t move the needle.
4. Use custom back-halves for increased awareness and visibility
As we mentioned briefly up above, Bitly allows all users to create custom back-halves. What does that mean exactly? Free custom back-halves means you can create links that look something like this:
https://bit.ly/TodaysSpecial
or
https://bit.ly/ABCFreeTrial
Links like these can help people recognize your brand or understand where you’re sending them (in a way that /ak14Rm7 or something similar can’t). This feature is unlimited for paid users, but we’re looking out for our free users, too: With the Bitly Free plan, you can create up to five custom back-halves every month!
5. Tell a story with case studies
Customers don’t usually need (or want) to know every technical detail of what your product is or how your software does what it does. They want to know if their needs will be met. And the most powerful way to convey this is to tell stories of how your company met a satisfied client’s needs.
Story-based case studies cost nothing (other than what you’ll pay the writer to craft the story and perhaps a graphic designer to create some graphics). You already have the information; why not share it?
A big part of content-driven sales is helping people envision a future where your product or service solves an ongoing problem. Case studies are a fantastic approach, and you can use short links to spread the news, too.
6. Implement a customer referral program
Often, your best advertisers are your raving fans—customers who love what you do for them. Too many brands treat this powerful marketing tool with a hands-off approach, essentially leaving it to develop in the wild.
A better approach in many situations is to cultivate this fan base and activate it into a positive marketing force. Creating a customer referral program (especially one that offers a small kickback to referring customers) is a fantastic way to activate people that already love your products. With the tiniest nudge, they may start telling their friends or colleagues about how you’re solving their problems.
7. Include QR Codes in your marketing campaigns
QR Codes have made quite the comeback.
The first time around, they didn’t seem to get much traction. But just when the technology seemed to be fading away, the pandemic made everyone contact-conscious. Suddenly QR Codes were everywhere, replacing sticky menus at restaurants, paper flyers, business cards, coupons, scan-to-pay, and beyond.
Today, marketers use QR Codes far more effectively than in previous decades. And the somewhat forced adoption during the pandemic has increased consumer understanding and confidence in the technology.
QR Codes provide an easy way for mobile users to follow a link without typing anything. And you can create them in several different ways. Bitly offers several approaches: Bitly-branded QR Codes (available for Free plan users), customizable QR Codes (for Core plan users and above), and the QR Code Generator by Bitly (a separate product) which offers other QR Code solutions.
In the Bitly Dashboard, paid users can configure QR Codes to redirect to your chosen site or landing page. This is important because you may not control where or for how long your QR Codes are displayed. A QR Code pointing to a long-dead promotion can be redirected to the current version, and one pointing to version 1 of your product can redirect to version 4 (or whatever happens to be current).
8. Invest in content marketing
Content marketing is what you’re reading right now: Content written for the web delivers value to readers, giving them a reason to read what you have to say and growing their trust in your brand.
When done right, content marketing can help your ranking on the search engine results page (SERP), a part of search engine optimization (SEO). One of the goals of a piece like this one is to show up in Bing and Google search results for a variety of terms (like “free marketing ideas” in this case).
Showing up in search is free—you just have to win at producing content. And once you win that reader, if your products or services meet their needs, you’ve already planted a seed that says, “This brand gets me, and I can trust them.” Readers become potential customers, and your sales team can take it from there, turning some of them into new customers.
Types of content to distribute
What we shared just above was primarily about content like what you’re reading—blog posts and articles. But those aren’t the only types of content you can distribute.
- Blogs: Medium- to long-form written content; primarily educational.
- Infographics: Visual- and stat-heavy pieces make a big visual impact and can increase trust.
- Videos: People like working with people. If it makes sense for your brand, a personable video presence (say, a YouTube channel) can increase trust and familiarity even more.
- Podcasts: Audio-only format good for both education and selling.
- UGC (user-generated content): Anything that people (like your customers) create and share that you then share on brand accounts (like an Instagram repost of a customer enjoying your product).
All of these can be distributed in a variety of ways. Organic and paid search, sending via an email list or CRM, and posts on various social media platforms are a few options that business marketing teams leverage to reach larger audiences and increase the number of website visitors.
9. Host an online event or webinar
Online webinars and similar events can position your brand as a thought leader, an organization on the front edge of your market and industry. These are especially useful in the B2B world, where you can probably lure in several professionals who could use a 30-minute educational break.
A webinar is a great way to pull in people with a specific pain point that your brand solves. Hearing you speak with authority and seeing you show how your product solves their pain point can be a powerful motivator.
10. Use a client/customer appreciation program
This one’s on the verge of stretching our definition of “free,” but it’s still worth considering. A customer appreciation program doesn’t cost anything to create, though you may need to offer discounts to make the program worthwhile or meaningful.
It’s pretty straightforward: People like to be liked and praised, and they like discounts. On the other side of the coin, businesses like repeat business. A loyalty or appreciation program delivers on all points.
11. Build cross-promotional relationships with other brands
Your brand has a natural reach, especially on social media. The people who have liked or followed you are, to a degree, a built-in audience.
Every other brand out there has the same thing—but the audiences are different people.
A cross-promotional relationship allows for two brands to reach each other’s audiences. If you find a brand with a complementary rather than competing offering, this kind of relationship can be powerful.
12. Empower your employees as brand champions
Using employees as brand ambassadors is a great free marketing idea.
Hopefully, most of your team members genuinely like what your company is doing, providing, or selling. Giving them tools (and perhaps incentives) to promote your brand to their own organic networks is relatively easy and inexpensive to do.
When they use those assets to promote your brand to their contacts and networks, you gain access to an audience you couldn’t effectively reach before.
Elevate your brand’s visibility and engagement with Bitly
We hope these ideas have inspired business owners and marketing teams alike with actionable ways to improve or expand your digital marketing efforts—with little to no upfront investment.
Successfully pulling off many of these ideas will require the right set of tools, and a free Bitly account is the perfect place to start.
Ready to explore more? Find the Bitly plan that’s right for you—or start with a Free plan today!