Getting your brand name out there is critical if you want your small business to last. Building brand awareness doesn’t necessarily have to cost a fortune either. When you’re just starting out, your marketing budget will most likely be pretty limited so the following strategies for building brand awareness are either free or very inexpensive and are great options for starting on your journey of establishing your brand.

Make use of press releases

Press releases are a vastly underused marketing strategy. When you unveil a new product, secure a patent, launch a crowdfunding campaign, or receive the necessary funding for a project, you can write a press release to be distributed across the relevant news and magazine publications to spread the word. If you’re willing to do the legwork yourself and find outlets that want to publish your press release, you can get free publicity. For a small investment, you can pay a company that specializes in press releases to get it published in bigger publications.

Host a contest

Instead of reducing profit margins in order to offer a great sale price to get recognition, you can offer a single grand prize and maybe a few smaller prizes as part of a contest. You can can the same kind of recognition but without having to spend as much. Social media and SMS are great channels for contests since you can use contests to get likes, shares, and comments or to get opt-ins for your SMS channel if you make these conditional steps for entering the contest.

Conduct a survey

Conducting a short survey, either through a social media platform or SMS is another inexpensive way to build brand awareness in an indirect fashion. Surveys get you valuable information about your customers that you can use in future marketing efforts to create more relevant advertising. When paired with SMS, you can get new opt-ins by offering an incentive to customers who’ve made a recent purchase and choose to opt-in and complete a customer satisfaction survey about their experience.

Invest in affiliate/influencer marketing

Affiliate marketing can take a number of different forms. One of the most common is pay-per-click in which you pay affiliate sites for every person who clicks on a link to your website from their sites. A free kind of affiliate marketing is influencer marketing in which you team up with an influencer with an established audience to help create awareness of your brand. Since influencers are always looking for new things to blog about or make videos about, many will review your products for free if you send them samples. The relationship can be mutually beneficial if you feature them in guest blog posts or interviews so that their audience grows as well.

Start a company blog and social media pages

Content marketing is another free (if you create the content yourself) or inexpensive (if you hire a freelancer) way to build brand awareness since you can just add a blog onto your existing website. Not only will it improve your standings on the search results page of popular search engines, it will serve as an entry point for many new potential customers who are seeking out the information you’re posting.