7 things you should do before you spend $1 on marketing

My broke brand blueprint is all about teaching you how to do a lot with little to no money. When you first start a business and even as you grow, marketing dollars will ALWAYS be tight. Learning how to get creative is essential, so here’s 7 things you should do when you start a business before you ever spend one single $1 on marketing.

In 2025 creating a website is super easy. If you’re selling a product you should use Shopify. They have FREE themes you can customize to fit your branding. If you’re not selling an online product there are dozens of platforms you can use that have drag and drop templates like godaddy.com or even build a site with Ai using Hostinger. I’ve built websites in under an hour, and I have zero coding or web design skills. There is a cost to buying a domain and hosting a site, but they’re minimal and I don’t count this towards marketing spend. I’d lump that in with startup costs.

I like Klaviyo because it’s very user friendly. You can easily resend campaigns and target people who haven’t opened. You can also A/B test almost everything. I can’t stress enough how important email is, IT’S NOT DEAD. My email list for our restaurants has a 40% open rate and can drive 10K+ on a single email. Same with DTC products, you’ll need to rely heavily on email. Plus, it’s way easier to track a customer journey with email vs social media.

You want people to be able to find you right? Listing your business on google and yelp is essential to being found. Most newbies make the mistake of not completing the entire profile on google business. The more you fill out the more google rewards you. Add every detail you can and make sure to include searchable keywords into your description and profile. I highly recommend using the update feature as well and making updates weekly to improve your ranking. Google now has a spot to include your social media links as well.

Blogging sounds so 2000 , but it’s still a powerful tool. I don’t ever call my blog a ‘blog’ you can call it Q&A, insights, or something else relevant to your business. But the point of your blog should be to drive traffic to your business. Use the website answerthepublic.com and find 20 questions people are asking in relation to your business and answer them all in blog form. You can use chatgpt or another ai platform to help you but make sure you rewrite it and put the revisions back into ai to help train it. When people search for frequently asked questions in your niche on google they’ll land on your blog and hopefully click through to your website. Make sure to always include links to other pages on your site to keep them from leaving.

Drafting a press release might sound like an expensive task for a PR firm. But it’s not. There are hundreds of press release templates on the internet or you can create a PR assistant in chatgpt who can help you draft releases, find contacts to send them to and provide a pr strategy for you. For new businesses I recommend making local press contacts and reaching out to them directly. Google can help you find where to send releases for your local newspapers, magazines and news stations. For very important releases that need to go on the wire I use ereleases. They’re affordable and reliable.

This is everyone’s favorite part. Social Media! Personally I wouldn’t get crazy with every platform out there. I would start with 2-3 like FB, IG and tiktok. You may even opt out of FB if you don’t have a local brick and mortar or your mainly an online store. However, if you start running meta ads later on you may need a FB account. I personally still like FB for local networking groups, mom groups, and niche groups like vegas foodies, san diego vegans, NYC moms etc. You can interact in these groups without spamming or doing outright self promotion.

Last but not least, build a strategy. A strategy isn’t just post to social media every day. It has to be an omni-channel strategy that includes all of the things I listed above. I can’t emphasize enough that you don’t have to hire a marketing expert for this when you first start out. Use chatgpt or gemini to help you build this out. You’ll need to upload documents to make it tailored for you like brand assets, tools you use, a link to your website and socials along with mission statements and goals. Keep this thread going as you grow and it will continue to build on what you start with.

Have one of these topics you want me to dive deeper on? Comment or send me a message. I love helping brands do a lot more with less. You don’t have to be scared of marketing, I want you to enjoy it.