If you’re like many business owners or marketers, your goal is to grow your brand into a globally recognized product. There are plenty of ways you can increase sales, build meaningful connections, and spread brand awareness.

Some people think that organic traffic is almost impossible to accumulate without paying for ads. Advertisements can help you spread the word about your business, but this tactic is not always ideal. You could end up annoying customers with a bombardment of promotional material, which may result in them being less likely to use your product or service.

Today we are going to take a look at several ways you can spread brand awareness and grow your business without paying for ads.

Let’s dive in!

Connect with Your Target Audience on Social Media

When you consider that over 3 billion people use social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter become an obvious destination for brand growth. Marketers around the world use paid advertisements on these platforms to expand their business, but that’s not the only way to get consumers interested in what you’re offering.

All social media platforms have a way to connect with like-minded individuals. For example, if you have a site that sells gardening supplies, Facebook has groups full of millions of people talking about growing flowers and vegetables!

If you want to spread brand awareness, engaging in social media groups, and correctly using hashtags can help you generate new traffic. The people interested in these topics regularly browse the group posts and engage in conversations with other people. You can use these small windows of opportunity to introduce customers to your brand by providing a helpful resource from your website, or by simply having a conversation.

Create a Lead Magnet

Lead magnets are another excellent way to introduce your brand to new consumers. Essentially, lead magnets are pieces of content that provide value to your potential customers. Examples include promotions, ebooks, or fact sheets. Each type of lead magnet can help you grow your business, depending on your marketing goals.

One of the best parts about this marketing strategy is it’s designed to attract people that are more likely to engage with your brand through email subscriptions, on-site browsing, and purchases.

Let’s say you want to attract customers to your online gardening shop. You could create a lead magnet that gives consumers the best months for planting flowers based on their location. If you share your link on social media, people who are interested in gardening will click through and download your magnet.

Now you’ve managed to spread awareness and secure another lead for your email marketing list.

Run an Online Giveaway

Online contests are another great way to build your brand awareness without buying ads. There are plenty of advantages to using giveaways over ads to promote your business. First, when you create a giveaway, you’re giving new and existing consumers a chance to win something from your online store.

Instead of worrying about pushing your audience away with promotions that look closer to spam than targeted marketing, you can build your brand with a viral giveaway. Simply pick a sought after item from your online store, such as a free physical product or subscription to your service, and share the event on social media.

Encourage people to share your post on their wall and tag their friends to organically spread the word about your promotion. Imagine asking someone to share their post with 3 people for a chance to enter, and all 3 of those people tag their friends and the process repeats. You can exponentially grow your business and spread brand awareness by using giveaways as an ad-free marketing tool.

Step Up Your SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial growth tactic you can use to increase brand awareness. Everyone with a website has a dream of making it to the first page of Google for their keywords, and with good reason. A staggering 95% of searchers stop searching on the first page of Google. In other words, the close to the top of the results your website appears, the better chance you have of introducing your site to new consumers.

You can improve your text SEO by optimizing your keywords on-site while ensuring that you use contextual long-tail keywords so Google’s crawlers can properly rank your website. Additionally, you should consider researching Google for new keywords you can implement within your content for even more opportunities to reach potential customers.

When you talk about SEO, you can’t leave voice search out of the conversation. Voice search is quickly becoming one of the fastest and easiest ways to browse Google and get information. In fact, by the end of 2020, it’s estimated that 50% of all searches will be voice-activated. Consumers are using their smartphones, as well as smart home devices like Amazon’s Alexa, to browse Google.

Optimizing for voice search means understanding the nuances between what someone might say, compared to what they may type. Understanding the difference will help you use keywords that get the attention of people using their smart devices to search.

Review and Refine

The last tactic we are going to talk about here consists of reviewing and refining your marketing strategy. There are several ways you can look at your results. Start by measuring your content performance. Look for patterns in traffic or behavior on-site. Understanding how consumers interact with your content will help you improve your strategy and create compelling posts that will get shared.

You should also review your email marketing list for new ways to segment and build connections with your existing leads. If someone signed up for your list, you have to get to know them so you can consistently deliver relevant offers and messages to their inbox,

A big part of spreading brand awareness is word of mouth. If you take steps to get your existing customers invested in your brand, they will gladly tell their friends how much they enjoyed their experience with your company. By regularly reviewing and refining your marketing channel, you’re contributing to both the quality of your brand and word of mouth marketing.

Spreading brand awareness takes time, and marketing is not a one-size-fits-all glove. You may have to make some adjustments depending on your industry and audience size, but know that building brand awareness without buying ads is in your control.