Startup marketing - 5 useful freebies

There are some quite handy freebies out there which can help kick-start your marketing if your budget is tight, ranging from website design and promotion to press release distribution and email marketing. As with anything labelled ‘free’, it’s always handy to check the exact definition and scope of the offer before signing up - there’s an awful lot of free marketing deals which look good on the surface, but in reality you don’t get very much.

With that in mind, here are a few useful startup marketing freebies to take a closer look at:

Free website design

You’ve various options here, from the domain, design and hosting package offered via Yola, to Moonfruit or Weebly - they’re all offering a similar recipe: non-technical design systems, a range of templates, hosting, etc. In each case, do take the trouble to check their Ts & Cs before you commit (Yola is free for 12 months, for instance, then you have to pay). If you’ve got time, test their free services to see which meets your specific needs.

But for overall value and versatility, the Wordpress system is hard to beat.  It is offered as a platform that Wordpress hosts for you, with the usual line-up of template options, or a more powerful version that you can download and enhance as much as you like. It’s in use on millions of websites including my own, and is completely free.

Free website promotion

Google has been offering various startup promos for a long time, and the free £75 of credit they are currently offering is an excellent way to get started. For most of us, £75 won’t really go a long way, but if you restrict your keywords to a few specific examples it’s a great way to learn about the AdWords system. As with all of these freebies, read the Ts &Cs - in this case, you have to remember to suspend your ads before the £75 is used up, or you will be charged extra.

Free business cards & marketing basics

It’s very easy to get hold of free business cards and other basics such as logo designs, letterheads, compliment slips, etc - the payoff is quality, whether that means you can’t find the design you’d really like, or the print is lightweight. HP’s Creative Studio offers a range of templates you can download, with the likes of Vistaprint and Moo.com competing to give you free business cards. All are worth a try.

Free press release distribution

The big question to consider here is: Distribution to whom? If you want to get your news spread around the web, and secure some useful Google News visibility, the any one of the many free services will do the job - PR Fire, i-newswire and Clickpress are all good examples. But that’s about all they will do. The missing link for the free services is distribution to journalists - you’ll be very lucky to get this free anywhere and that’s understandable given the effort it takes to maintain a journalist database.

Free email marketing

If you’ve access to an email database, then there are some design and distribution offers out there which should be useful. MailChimp and ConstantContact are two examples of well established systems where you can use feature or time-restricted versions of their services. But don’t forget, you need permission-based data and some interesting content to make an email marketing campaign worthwhile.

Good luck!