If you’re running a business on a tight budget, looking to stretch your marketing spend can be a real challenge. That’s why brands and marketers have been increasingly interested in finding inventive ways to create free marketing content to generate organic leads.
Creating digital content is essential to your business and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Today, we’re offering our top 5 tips for creating free marketing content, that will help you to maximize ROI without sacrificing quality.
#1. Your Audience Comes First
Free marketing content is great, but free doesn’t always mean it’s good. When evaluating the content you put on your site or deliver to your audience, you first need to assess each piece before it hits the public eye. Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Does the content keep in line with your brand or image?
- Is it going to offend or cause potential problems later?
- Will your audience find it useful and engaging?
Before you begin creating free content, you’ll need to have these questions answered. If the marketing content isn’t relevant to your audience, there’s a chance that you’ll end up damaging your business rather than helping it.
Define your audience and set a clear goal for each piece of marketing content before publishing anything.
#2. Social Media
Leveraging the power of social media platforms is a great way to create free marketing content for your target audience where they hang out. By encouraging your audience to post photos, videos, and reviews, you gain valuable user-generated content (UGC) in the perfect environment to interact with your customers.
Brands can also use social media platforms to engage with influencers in a particular niche, capitalizing on their sizable followings to increase their reach and promote products and services.
#3. Use Free Tools
There are a lot of free tools that can help you quickly create content for free.
You don’t have to be an expert digital artist or writer to create amazing free marketing content. Programs like Canva make it easy to edit professional-quality images and there are tons more that let you create videos, dynamic infographics, and edit audio.
YouTube, TikTok, and Stories are great free marketing tools that can be created with a simple smartphone. If you don’t fancy yourself a video editing guru, you can even use free stock videos to make awesome-looking visuals quickly and easily.
#4. Blogger Outreach
One of the easiest ways to get free content is to have someone else make it. There are over 600 million blogs on the web today, and that number is constantly growing. In addition, there are millions of freelance writers looking to build their portfolios.
Chances are if you own a blog or a site, your inbox is flooded with requests for “collaboration” or “guest posts”. These are great opportunities to get free content for your site. Sometimes they’ll simply want a byline or a link back to their blog, and that’s something that can be done without any cost involved.
If you want to promote your content, you can do the same by reaching out to other blogs. Email each one individually and develop a solid guest post idea that would fit well with their site.
If you do decide to email another blog or influencer, take the time to actually research their blog and email them personally with a plan already formed. Simply saying “I am open to collaboration” is the quickest way to get flagged as spam.
#5. Update & Repurpose Your Content
The best free content you can find is often one that you’ve either already paid for or made yourself.
With content, you can’t simply “Set it and forget it.” You’ve spent time and energy creating that piece, whatever it may be, and it can continue to pay dividends.
Refreshing old content by reposting it or updating it is often easier than coming up with a brand-new piece. It will save you considerable time and money and, when it comes to SEO and your audience, it’s presented as a unique piece.
Your audience that may have missed it on the first publishing has a chance to view it again, and as a bonus, search engines look favorably at fresh and authoritative content.
