Here at Momentum Digital, we take digital marketing seriously. However, we know that not everyone has the budget to hire an agency to take care of their business’ digital marketing needs. Thankfully, there are plenty of free digital marketing tricks you, as a small business owner, can utilize to hit your target audience. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Bump Up Your Business’ Social Media Presence:

Social media is by far the best tool a small business owner can have in their toolbox. Posting on social media allows your business to build a brand voice, publish information about your business, and familiarize your followers with your products and services. Posting daily content on social media will keep your business at the top of your followers feeds and help you to gain organic engagement and followers.

Luckily, both Facebook and Instagram have options for businesses to create a business account on their platforms. This gives you FREE insights into who is following your posts and directly engaged with your business’ page – this includes information such as age, location, gender, what times they are more likely on the platform, etc.

To create a Facebook business page…

• Select the “Pages” header from your Facebook profile page.
• Click on the “Create a Page” button
• Select the type of page you can’t to create.
• From here, you can fill out the fields according to your specific business.

To create an Instagram business page…

• Find the “Settings” tab on your Instagram account.
• Scroll until you find “Switch to Business Account.” It will ask you to connect a Facebook business page (which we just created) before choosing your business category.
• Fill out the remaining fields with information pertaining to your small business.

2. Optimize your Social Media Accounts
Once your business pages are created, it is important to optimize your accounts to make it easy for new people (and potential customers) to find you. This is often referred to as SMO, or Social Media Optimization. To do this…

• Make sure your business profile name and handle is the full name of your business
• Make sure your social media bios state exactly what your business does
• Make sure your profile photo is your company’s logo
• Make sure all of your profile’s fields are complete and correct.
• Make sure all of your social content is original and curated to fit your brand
• Make sure you are using a handful of trusted hashtags. This will allow your post to reach more people. Also, pay attention to “trending” hashtags that your business may be able to take advantage of.

It’s also important to optimize your social media posting schedules. There are tons of studies done to pinpoint which exact times for different days of the week are the best to post on social media. However, it is often best to go off of your own analytics and test different times of the day to see which schedule does best for your brand and target audience.

3. Attend Networking Events

In a city as large and diverse as Philadelphia, there are plenty of free networking opportunities available to small business owners. Make sure you are taking advantage of platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, MeetUp, and Eventbrite to keep tabs on events happening in your area that could help you promote your business.

Make the most out of free marketing events by:

• Familiarizing yourself with who is going to the event and who you want to connect with. Doing some research on the attendees will give you create conversation starters and help you stand out
• Setting goals for what you want to get out of the networking event – do you want to hand out 10 business cards? Connect with 3 different people on LinkedIn? Knowing what you’re looking to get out of the event will make the experience much more worthwhile for you.
• Preparing yourself for the usual networking questions. This will give you the confidence you need to put yourself out there.

4. Create a newsletter or weekly email marketing campaign

There are a number of great email platforms offering free marketing ideas for small businesses and websites that owners can take advantage of. Some of our favorites are MailChimp, SendPulse, and BenchMark.  

These websites will allow you to customize your own newsletter or email campaigns. You can save templates to send to different email lists. This will allow you to not only stay connected with your customers but to give them updates and the latest information about what is going on with your business.

5. Utilize Momentum Digital’s Small Business Saturday service
At Momentum Digital, we are passionate about giving back to the small business community in Philadelphia. One way we give back is through an initiative we call Small Business Saturday.

This idea was conceived by American Express, but we felt that small, local businesses should be honored every single day, not just once a year. So, we decided to take Amex’s idea and run with it. Once a week, we feature a different unique small business in Philadelphia.

We do this through producing a professionally made video about the business, crafting an email campaign to send to all of our subscribers, posting and promoting the small business on our social media channels, and writing a blog post highlighting the business. So far, we have featured 50+ small businesses in and around Philadelphia.

This service is completely free of charge to the small business owner. The only thing we ask in return is that the business reposts the content on their channels and that they give us a referral to another small business that could benefit from this service.