Advertising puts your business in front of its target audience, influencing them to buy the product or service you’re promoting.
While most platforms charge for advertising space, it is possible to get free advertising. Word-of-mouth campaigns, online directory listings, and email newsletters are all tactics for reaching potential customers without spending.
Need help figuring out where to start? The ideas below will help you spread the word about your business.
11 free and low-cost advertising ideas
- Word of mouth
- Email newsletter
- Content marketing
- PR
- User-generated content (UGC)
- Creator seeding
- Classified ads
- Organic social media
- Review sites
- Google Business Profile
- Local independent chambers of commerce
When starting a new business, you probably won’t have money for a big advertising campaign, yet it’s an ideal time to run one. Here are 11 ideas for getting the word out without spending much or anything at all:
1. Word of mouth
Word of mouth is the original free advertising campaign. If people like your product, they’ll tell their friends, and they’ll tell their friends, and … You can see where this is going.
Word of mouth spreads naturally when your product is good, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help it along. Start by reaching out to your network.
Founder Jing Gao sent personalized emails to 400 people when she launched the condiment brand Fly By Jing. “I tried to find every single person I’ve ever met and write them a letter about what I was doing,” Jing told Shopify Masters. “It’s a really time-consuming process, but it is rewarding because, at the end of it, you get your base of potential future customers.”
After reaching out to family, friends, and acquaintances, try contacting organizations related to your product. Glade Optics founder Curt Nichols credits some of his brand’s success to “early, unscalable actions” like emailing individual ski clubs to tell them about his ski goggles.
“If we got 10 ski goggles out there, five of those people would tell their buddy on the chairlift about Glade, and that would create two new customers for us. That marketing flywheel is really, really effective,” Curt told Shopify Masters.
2. Email newsletter
It costs nothing—except time—to start an email newsletter, yet it becomes a significant revenue driver for many brands. “Any time you have a channel like [email], that you own the relationship with the customer, and you’re not reliant on a third party to get your message out, is always beneficial,” Curt says.
Email lets you stay in touch with current customers and advertise new offerings. Then, as you build your email list, you’ll capture people interested in your brand but who haven’t purchased yet.
Many email marketing platforms offer a free tier of service to get started. As your list grows or campaigns get more sophisticated, you may have to spend—but the cost is low relative to paid channels like digital advertising.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing involves creating helpful content (like blog posts and videos) to engage your audience, and all it costs is time. As Anaita Sakar, cofounder of Hero Packaging, told Shopify Masters: “Content is like that free tool that you can use to get brand awareness and traffic to your website and not have to pay a dollar for it.”
SEO content marketing, for example, means getting your brand in front of customers using organic search. Instead of (or in addition to) paying for expensive Google Ads campaigns, you can reach your audience by including targeted search terms and following SEO best practices on your product pages, blog posts, and other content.
“When you’re starting out as a bootstrapped business, it is critical that you are just pumping content, whether it’s educational or just product-based, to every platform at any given point in time,” Anaita says.
4. PR
Public relations, or PR, is how your business presents itself to the general public, especially in the press. Large companies often hire publicists to get their brands featured in newspapers, magazines, and online publications, but you can drum up free publicity on your own.
Start by researching journalists who cover topics in your niche. “I cold emailed several editors who I knew had interest in writing about Asian food, and two of them ended up writing pieces about [Fly by Jing’s crowdfunding] campaign,” Jing says. It helps if you have something topical to pitch journalists, like a new product launch, crowdfunding campaign, or special event.
5. UGC
User-generated content (UGC) is social media content customers create featuring your products. Think of it as word of mouth for the digital age.
UGC happens organically, but there are things you can do to encourage customers’ posts, like:
- Run a contest or giveaway that requires sharing a photo or video of your product in action.
- Create a branded Instagram hashtag.
- Start a TikTok trend.
- Interact with UGC by liking, commenting, and reposting (with credit to the creator).
- Create a fun unboxing experience your customers will want to share on social.
“Focusing on packaging in your business doesn’t make you boring,” Anaita Sakar, cofounder of Hero Packaging, told Shopify Masters. “That unboxing experience for your customer is so important.”
Anaita found that making Hero’s compostable mailers pink added to the excitement of receiving a package: “Immediately, people are like, ’What is this?’ And they put it on their Stories and they talk about a compostable bag that’s bright pink and then they chop it up and put it in their home compost bin and it lends itself to such great user-generated content.”
6. Creator seeding
Creator seeding is the practice of gifting products to influencers in the hopes that they’ll use your product in their organic content. It’s not entirely free, because you have to give away products and pay for shipping, but it has a ripple effect when done well.
Before sending a product to a creator, consider how likely it is they’ll actually use it on camera: “These people are getting hundreds of boxes, hundreds of DMs, every single day,” Graza founder Andrew Benin told Shopify Masters. Micro-influencers are more likely to open your package, but they’ll only use it if relevant, so research individual creators before sending them anything.
Product packaging impacts the effectiveness of creator-seeding campaigns. If your product is distinctive, it will capture attention. Graza olive oil, for example, has a signature green squeeze cap. When creators cook with it in videos or photos, you can tell. “Sometimes you don’t even see the whole bottle,” Andrew says. “You see a green cap here, you see a green cap there.”
“These micro-moments in the creator economy and in content creation are what count,” Andrew says.
7. Classified ads
Free classified ads may not be intuitive, but they can be great for reaching out locally, especially for service-based businesses. Most classified ad sites offer free posts.
Simply identify your product or service category on the free advertising site and follow site guidelines to create a post. Here are some classified ad websites to try:
8. Organic social media
Social media ad campaigns can be expensive, but creating an account and posting engaging content is usually free—and one of the best ways to reach new audiences. Use demographic data to identify your target audience’s preferred channels, then create accounts and start posting.
“If you are starting a company and you don’t come from money and you don’t have that institutional money, get scrappy,” Dieux Skin cofounder Charlotte Palermino told Shopify Masters. “It’s incredible what you can do and build on your own. TikTok, for example—it’s like free marketing if you can figure it out.”
Charlotte posts authentic videos of herself talking about things she cares about, like sunscreen legislation and plastic versus aluminum packaging. “I think if you feel like you could just talk about something for 10 minutes, then make a video on it and try to cut it down to two,” Charlotte says.
Dropshipping entrepreneur Kamil Sattar also recommends an organic TikTok strategy: “What works on TikTok is a video that doesn’t even look like an ad,” Kamil told Shopify Masters. “You want a very soft call to action at the end because if you don’t, and you make it aggressive, people are going to think it’s an ad and then they’re not going to want to buy from you.”
9. Review sites
Free business review sites like Yelp, the world’s most visited public record and directory site, aren’t just great for social proof. Like free advertising sites, they also help new customers find local businesses.
Yelp listings are best suited to businesses with a physical location, such as in-person shops, gyms, or restaurants, while sites like Trustpilot cover online companies. Create a listing (or claim an existing one) for your business, and work on soliciting and responding to reviews. Businesses with high ratings typically appear at the top of local search results on Yelp.
10. Google Business Profile
Formerly known as Google My Business, a Google Business Profile helps small businesses appear in Google search results, where 98% of searchers evaluate local companies. This channel is especially valuable for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations.
Claim your free Google Business Profile and upload your business info, including operating hours, locations, and phone number. An optimized profile will appear on both the search engine results page and Google Maps when local shoppers search for businesses like yours.
Strawberries & Cream appears in Google Maps results for “children’s clothing,” providing the brand with free advertising.
11. Local independent chambers of commerce
States all over the US have local chambers of commerce. It’s the world’s largest business organization, acting as a referral source for entrepreneurs.
Join the US Chamber of Commerce for $300 to $400 a year. Although membership isn’t free, perks may include advertising, networking opportunities, and a monthly email blast to more than 30,000 contacts.
Read more
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- How to Network in Today's World- Tips and Tactics for Creating Priceless Connections
- 12 Powerful Google Ads Examples From Ecommerce Brands
- 12 Types of Marketing- A Guide to Different Marketing Strategies
- Marketing vs. Advertising- How Are They Different?
- The 5-Step Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business
Free advertising FAQ
Why should I use free advertising?
The rising costs of paid advertising channels means small business owners must compete for brand visibility. Free online advertising strategies help entrepreneurs combat costs and experiment with channels and audience engagement as they grow.
What are some free advertising tactics?
Some free advertising tactics are word-of-mouth campaigns, online directory listings, and email newsletters. These channels make it possible to reach potential customers without spending.
Where can I advertise my product for free?
Online directories, review sites, and classified ad sites function as free advertising websites, often allowing local businesses to post free ads to reach potential customers.
