Marketing can be hard, especially for a small business with limited resources. Marketing is even harder again when you’ve stretched your budget tight in order to try and get your business going.

So, here are some of the best hacks to market your small business online for free. They may seem quite simple, but trust me, they’re effective.

This may or may not be something that you’re already doing if you are keep going and try your best to write the best possible content you can. If not start now!

A blog which focuses on your industry and customers is great for multiple reasons. The first reason is it makes Google happy.

Writing a blog lets Google know that you are an active businessan active blog shows that you care for your customers). This tells Google that you are a relevant business in the industry. What does this mean? You’ll get shown higher in Google search rankings.

Provide value to your audience. Don’t just write about yourself and your product (no one cares – really!), write about your industry as a whole. For example, if you  such as Twitter, Medium and even Facebook allows other people to read your content. It may just inspire them and keep them coming back for more, or even better it may just encourage them to find out more about your business and those readers may just become a new customer. 

Don’t be afraid to share old content that you’ve written again in your newsletter and social media. If you had a very popular blog post before, don’t be afraid to share it again in a few months time.

This could once again catch the attention of some new potential customers. You could even repurpose old content with lots of facts and figures into white papers. This is a new offering to gain new customers or even entice old customers back to your business.

If you want to advertise online (which you should) and market your business but can’t afford to spend too much, keep an eye out for various ad credits offered across the web.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are amongst some of the online ad providers that are available to you and regularly offer a discount or account credit. Google regularly give you an extra $75 Adwords credit when you spend $25. Twitter recently offered an extra $50 to spend on advertising once you have created your first ad on the platform. It’s a no-brainer. 

Social media competitions are a great way of building your social media followings and create hype around your business.

Facebook is a great way to promote your business and one of the easiest ways to host a competition. Giving away small things regularly really builds a following. For example, Bobo’s restaurant (in the below picture) have a monthly competition giveaway. As a result of them doing this every month for a year they now get thousands of shares on their posts each month – for the cost of a few burgers!

If your product offering is a bit more complicated or you have a b2b business it doesn’t mean you can’t use this tip. Just try and fit the prize to your offering. So if you sell software solutions, you could discuss your product and tell people using your software will save time, giving them extra time to relax, and to help them relax give away a spa voucher. Have people like and share your post to get your post on the newsfeeds of people who haven’t liked your page before.

Infographics are a great way to show people condensed information in a visually appealing way.

Use stats or facts for your industry or use ones that you have found through your own market research. If you have a designer on the team, you could ask them to create a visually appealing infographic for you to share.

If you don’t have a designer, it may be a little bit more difficult but not impossible. Try out some free tools to create them on such as Pitochart or Infogr.am. Share these tools across your social media channels and attract potential customers.

Instructional videos can be used across multiple platforms including your website.

These types of videos are great to teach a person about your product offerings and with 64% of people more likely to buy a product after watching a video about said product, can you really afford not to have them?

Gone are the days when you need a big production budget to create these videos. Phone camera quality is so great these days you could film a simple product video on a phone. You can then upload these clips to viddyad.com and create the perfect video for your products here. You could look for other video making tools, but we’re a little bit biased.