$0 Marketing Strategies To Get Your First Customers

Whether you’re just starting out your first company or are working on growing your business, marketing is something we all struggle with.

Especially for those who can't spend big money on ads or hire a big marketing team.

That’s why I’ve put together this list of marketing strategies that are basically free.

You’ll have to hustle and put the time in to make them work, though. There are no silver bullets.

Check these free ways to promote your company when you have a low budget:

(And remember that you can explore our Growth Database with 200+ proven marketing strategies you can copy)

Podcast guesting

Did you know there are over 2M active podcasts? And many of them regularly have guests to interview.

This is a great way to put yourself out there because (1) you don’t have to build those audiences, (2) it’s evergreen content, and (3) it’s free!

How to approach this? Interview-based podcasts need guests. Just reach out (Twitter, email) and tell them why you’d be a great guest.

Case study: This founder heavily relies on podcast guesting to grow his $16K/month business.

Twitter

Huuuuuge tool to promote your business. There’s a lot of noise on the platform but the potential is unbelievable. 

Some of the things you can do:

#1. Reply to high-intent tweets

“What’s the best hamburger in London?” If you have a restaurant that sells hamburgers in London, you should be monitoring those tweets and replying to them.

#2. Create lead magnets that are valuable to your target audience. And ask to retweet / comment in exchange.

#3. Follow competitors. See what people say about them and interact when there’s an opportunity (they request a product that you have).

Case study: This is how I grew my side project to $2,500 per month thanks to Twitter

Building in public

A big trend right now. If you never heard of this, it essentially consists in publicly sharing your journey of building your business.

For many, that level of transparency can be scary but the upsides are priceless: support, inspiration, and getting exposure way before you have anything to sell.

Case study: Building in public helped me generate $60K with my marketing tool  in the first year

Instagram

Everybody is on Instagram. Hard to find a platform where you can find all possible demographics. Don't discard it before giving it a try.

However, it’s so saturated and full of people trying to sell that you need to get creative.

A great example is how this niche brand grew to $20K per month by leveraging Instagram DMs.

They got many popular athletes to promote their brand with a super unique proposal.

TikTok

This platform is a hard nut to crack but if you manage to go viral, the exposure you can get is stunning.

The best advice is to try things and have fun with it.

When sales started to slow down, this founder was desperate to find a new marketing channel and now he’s on pace to make $125K thanks to TikTok.

Bonus: This engineer makes $30K/year on the side after gaining 155K followers on TikTok.

Product Hunt

The go-to platform for those who want to discover new products.

It has millions of monthly visitors, a newsletter with thousands of subscribers and it’s completely free to list your product there.

You may need to spend some time doing your homework and creating specific content for it but if you make a home run on your launch day, it can result in a huge spike in popularity.

These guys studied previous top-ranked products to reverse engineer how to have a successful Product Hunt launch. The result? They now have 20K users.

Facebook groups

Meta stock plummeting? It doesn’t matter, these groups are still a marketing gold mine.

Join every possible group in your space. and scan comments to provide thoughtful answers without strings attached (no spam).

Since most people are taking the spamming route, you’ll quickly become an influential and trusted contributor.

Read the story of how this guy used Facebook groups to generate $80K per month after quitting his job to learn his system and use it to your advantage.

Did you enjoy this article? I've got 6 more remarkably effective free marketing tactics to share. If 20 people tweet about our newsletter I'll share them next week!