11 Free Advertising Ideas for Your Business in 2025

Advertising puts your business in front of its target spectators, influencing them to buy the product or service you’re promoting.

While most platforms fee for advertising space, it is feasible to get free advertising. Word-of-mouth campaigns, online directory listings, and email newsletters are all tactics for reaching potential customers without spending.

require assist figuring out where to commence? The ideas below will assist you spread the word about your business.

11 free and low-expense advertising ideas

1. Word of mouth
2. Email newsletter
3. Content marketing
4. PR
5. User-generated content (UGC)
6. Creator seeding
7. Classified ads
8. Organic social media
9. Review sites
10. Google Business Profile
11. Local independent chambers of commerce

When starting a recent business, you probably won’t have money for a large advertising campaign, yet it’s an ideal period to run one. Here are 11 ideas for getting the word out without spending much or anything at all: 

1. Word of mouth

Word of mouth is the original free advertising campaign. If people like your product, they’ll inform their friends, and they’ll inform their friends, and … You can view where this is going.

Word of mouth spreads naturally when your product is excellent, but that doesn’t cruel you can’t assist it along. commence by reaching out to your network.

Founder Jing Gao sent personalized emails to 400 people when she launched the condiment brand Fly By Jing. “I tried to discover every single person I’ve ever met and write them a note about what I was doing,” Jing told Shopify Masters. “It’s a really period-consuming procedure, but it is rewarding because, at the complete of it, you get your base of potential upcoming customers.”

After reaching out to household, friends, and acquaintances, try contacting organizations related to your product. Glade Optics founder Curt Nichols credits some of his brand’s achievement to “early, unscalable actions” like emailing person ski clubs to inform them about his ski goggles. 

“If we got 10 ski goggles out there, five of those people would inform their buddy on the chairlift about Glade, and that would make two recent customers for us. That marketing flywheel is really, really effective,” Curt told Shopify Masters.

2. Email newsletter

It costs nothing—except period—to commence an email newsletter, yet it becomes a significant turnover driver for many brands. “Any period you have a channel like [email], that you own the connection with the customer, and you’re not reliant on a third event to get your communication out, is always beneficial,” Curt says.

Email lets you remain in touch with current customers and advertise recent offerings. Then, as you construct your email list, you’ll capture people interested in your brand but who haven’t purchased yet. 

Many email marketing platforms propose a free tier of service to get started. As your list grows or campaigns get more sophisticated, you may have to spend—but the expense is low relative to paid channels like digital advertising.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating helpful content (like blog posts and videos) to engage your spectators, and all it costs is period. As Anaita Sakar, cofounder of Hero Packaging, told Shopify Masters: “Content is like that free tool that you can use to get brand awareness and traffic to your website and not have to pay a dollar for it.”

SEO content marketing, for example, means getting your brand in front of customers using organic search. Instead of (or in addition to) paying for expensive Google Ads campaigns, you can reach your spectators by including targeted search terms and following SEO best practices on your product pages, blog posts, and other content.

“When you’re starting out as a bootstrapped business, it is critical that you are just pumping content, whether it’s educational or just product-based, to every platform at any given point in period,” Anaita says.

4. PR

community relations, or PR, is how your business presents itself to the general community, especially in the press. Large companies often hire publicists to get their brands featured in newspapers, magazines, and online publications, but you can drum up free publicity on your own. 

commence by researching journalists who cover topics in your niche. “I cold emailed several editors who I knew had yield in writing about Asian food, and two of them ended up writing pieces about [Fly by Jing’s crowdfunding] campaign,” Jing says. It helps if you have something topical to pitch journalists, like a recent product launch, crowdfunding campaign, or special occurrence. 

5. UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is social media content customers make featuring your products. ponder of it as word of mouth for the digital age.

UGC happens organically, but there are things you can do to inspire customers’ posts, like:

• Run a contest or giveaway that requires sharing a photo or video of your product in action.
• make a branded Instagram hashtag.
• commence a TikTok pattern. 
• Interact with UGC by liking, commenting, and reposting (with financing to the creator).
• make a fun unboxing encounter your customers will desire to distribute on social.

“Focusing on packaging in your business doesn’t make you dull,” Anaita Sakar, cofounder of Hero Packaging, told Shopify Masters. “That unboxing encounter for your customer is so significant.”

Anaita found that making Hero’s compostable mailers pink added to the thrill of receiving a package: “Immediately, people are like, ’What is this?’ And they put it on their Stories and they talk about a compostable bag that’s luminous pink and then they chop it up and put it in their home compost bin and it lends itself to such great user-generated content.”

6. Creator seeding

Creator seeding is the habit of gifting products to influencers in the hopes that they’ll use your product in their organic content. It’s not entirely free, because you have to provide away products and pay for shipping, but it has a ripple result when done well.

Before sending a product to a creator, consider how likely it is they’ll actually use it on camera: “These people are getting hundreds of boxes, hundreds of DMs, every single day,” Graza founder Andrew Benin told Shopify Masters. Micro-influencers are more likely to open your package, but they’ll only use it if relevant, so research person creators before sending them anything.

Product packaging impacts the effectiveness of creator-seeding campaigns. If your product is distinctive, it will capture attention. Graza olive oil, for example, has a signature green squeeze cap. When creators cook with it in videos or photos, you can inform. “Sometimes you don’t even view the whole bottle,” Andrew says. “You view a green cap here, you view a green cap there.”

“These micro-moments in the creator economy and in content creation are what count,” Andrew says.

7. Classified ads

Free classified ads may not be intuitive, but they can be great for reaching out locally, especially for service-based businesses. Most classified ad sites propose free posts. 

Simply identify your product or service category on the free advertising site and pursue site guidelines to make a post. Here are some classified ad websites to try:

• ClassifiedAds.com
• Locanto
• Oodle

8. Organic social media

Social media ad campaigns can be expensive, but creating an account and posting engaging content is usually free—and one of the best ways to reach recent audiences. Use demographic data to identify your target spectators’s preferred channels, then make accounts and commence posting.

“If you are starting a business and you don’t arrive from money and you don’t have that institutional money, get scrappy,” Dieux Skin cofounder Charlotte Palermino told Shopify Masters. “It’s incredible what you can do and construct on your own. TikTok, for example—it’s like free marketing if you can figure it out.”

Charlotte posts authentic videos of herself talking about things she cares about, like sunscreen legislation and plastic versus aluminum packaging. “I ponder if you feel like you could just talk about something for 10 minutes, then make a video on it and try to cut it down to two,” Charlotte says.

Dropshipping business owner Kamil Sattar also recommends an organic TikTok schedule: “What works on TikTok is a video that doesn’t even look like an ad,” Kamil told Shopify Masters. “You desire a very soft call to action at the complete because if you don’t, and you make it aggressive, people are going to ponder it’s an ad and then they’re not going to desire to buy from you.”

9. Review sites

Free business review sites like Yelp, the globe’s most visited community record and directory site, aren’t just great for social proof. Like free advertising sites, they also assist recent customers discover local businesses.

Yelp listings are best suited to businesses with a physical location, such as in-person shops, gyms, or restaurants, while sites like Trustpilot cover online companies. make a listing (or claim an existing one) for your business, and work on soliciting and responding to reviews. Businesses with high ratings typically appear at the top of local search results on Yelp.

10. Google Business Profile

Formerly known as Google My Business, a Google Business Profile helps tiny businesses appear in Google search results, where 98% of searchers assess local companies. This channel is especially valuable for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations. 

Claim your free Google Business Profile and upload your business info, including operating hours, locations, and phone number. An optimized profile will appear on both the search engine results page and Google Maps when local shoppers search for businesses like yours.

Strawberries & Cream appears in Google Maps results for “children’s clothing,” providing the brand with free advertising.

11. Local independent chambers of commerce

States all over the US have local chambers of commerce. It’s the globe’s largest business organization, acting as a referral source for entrepreneurs. 

Join the US Chamber of Commerce for $300 to $400 a year. Although membership isn’t free, perks may include advertising, networking opportunities, and a monthly email blast to more than 30,000 contacts.