Getting press for your business is important for growth and for your bottom line. The larger the audience that sees or hears about your company in the news, the more potential customers your business brings in. But for smaller businesses or for businesses with smaller budgets, PR and marketing campaigns might not be cost-effective.
To support your business’s growth on a budget, eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared some easy ways of getting positive publicity and free press coverage. Follow their recommendations to boost awareness of your business for little to no marketing spend.
1. Leverage Friends And Family
If you have big news and a small budget, embrace your relationships and call in those favors. Simply ask your network to share your news and tag a few friends in the process. If the campaign is important enough, the outreach won’t feel awkward and you’ll likely get the reach you’re looking for until you can save enough for the next paid campaign. – Drew Gurley, Redbird Advisors
2. Submit Guest Posts
This is the perfect opportunity to have a good relationship with a publisher, put yourself out there and have a link back to your site. At the same time, it also shows your knowledge about a specific topic and makes other publishers curious about you, which will eventually lead to working with you or featuring you as well. – Daisy Jing, Banish
3. Offer Work For Free
You could do pro bono or free work for a good cause. You’d be surprised how many people want to connect with you when they know you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons and they want to do the same. – Givelle Lamano, Lamano Law Office
4. Connect With Journalists
Reaching out to journalists who write stories about your industry or seem to have a particular interest in companies similar to yours is a good way to build a relationship. Don’t write them to pitch, but write to them as a reader or someone who has interesting thoughts about the articles they have written. Being a journalist can be a lonely job, so contacting them via email or Twitter can be a nice way to get their attention and build a relationship. Again, don’t tell the journalist that you’d like them to write about you, but reach out and tell them if you enjoyed their past articles, give some feedback or a new spin that they may not have considered and let them know if they ever need help with an article you are available. Journalists are always looking for sources! – Matt Wilson, Under30Experiences
5. Consider Case Studies And Testimonials
Offer yourself as a case study to some of the services you may be using. I’ve done a couple of these personally. We use a tool called PeopleKeep to manage our healthcare for U.S. employees. We did a case study for them, and now we are on their website, which generates free publicity for Bounce. We also did one with our bank, Brex, and we’ve gotten a lot of hits from being on their website. All we had to do was review their product, and then I told them that if they wanted a case study or testimonial, just let me know. Offering case studies and testimonials to your service providers can be a great way to get free publicity. – Cody Candee, Bounce
6. Focus On Creating Viral Content
Adapt your content and participate in social media trends. Viral marketing is an excellent option, but the difficult thing is getting your content to go viral. Millions of pieces of content are uploaded daily, so you have to be strategic. This is where trends come in incredibly handy. Users are increasingly browsing the sounds, filters, dances or topics that are booming. Participating in trends from your company’s perspective is a way of creatively adapting your content in order to promote your business. For example, it may seem like medicine and dance trends do not have much in common. However, the number of doctors who give medical advice and promote their services while also doing dances is rather surprising. This content is so original that it has become a trend in itself. – Kevin Ryan Tao, NeuEve
7. Encourage Customer Word-Of-Mouth
If you are operating on a small budget and need to get some publicity or press, you can encourage your loyal customers and the community around your brand to help spread the word about your products. Encouraging positive messaging through rewards or other incentives can help potential customers come into direct contact with current happy customers, who in turn can do a lot of the work when it comes to spreading the benefits of your brand. This also has the added benefit of “social proof,” as consumers are often more likely to listen to other buyers rather than a brand itself anyway. – Salvador Ordorica, The Spanish Group LLC
8. Start A Podcast
What I have been able to do is run a podcast. I try to get people with a larger audience than mine on our show, have a good conversation with that person regarding my approach to business and life, then ask them to share the conversation on their show as well. This effectively allows me to leverage other people’s networks to gain exposure. To be successful, you need to figure out how you can bring something valuable to their listeners as well. When we were scaling the business but were limited in how much we could devote to the marketing, we found that the podcast allowed us to reach networks of potential clients who were previously out of reach while forming strong business relationships with some movers and shakers in the industry who could give us credibility. – Liam Leonard, DML Capital
