In today’s market, being successful means having a great digital brand. If you are looking to increase business growth with limited resources, you must understand how to build a digital brand with no money.

Have you ever been so broke that you couldn’t pay attention? If so, you probably couldn’t afford to build your digital brand either.

If you have no money, budget, resources, bandwidth or however you phrase it in your organization, here is a list of hacks to help build a digital brand with no money.

How to Build a Digital Brand with No Money

Attend A Conference #notreally

• Try to land a speaking gig. Conferences are always looking for experts and influencers to educate their audience. Look for the speaker submission page on the conference site. Submit and cross your fingers.
• Network with organizers. Reach out to conference organizers on social media and schmooze your way into a conference for free.
• Become a volunteer. Volunteering at a conference requires a small time commitment. Usually, you’ll help with the conference management and be a resource for conference attendees. As you work, you’ll have the opportunity to meet and network with the right people that can help grow your brand.

A great way to increase awareness within your industry is to be a part of the conversation taking place at a conference.

You can add value to these conversations by including your opinion, advice, or thought-leadership.

• Reach out to conference speakers. Begin curating a Twitter list of speakers and attendees.
• Create and publish conference-related content on the conference dates.
• Post real-time content during the conference sessions. Create Snapchat and Instagram stories talking about the session topic, quotes mentioned, or questions posed to conference attendees.

Create Co-branded Content

The objective of co-branded content is to bring together two parties with different audiences and similar goals. These goals can be to increase brand awareness, grow email subscribers, or increase revenue.

Essentially, it brings your brand to a new audience and provides a new valuable resource to your existing audience.

Selecting the right partner when co-branding content is important. Consider reviewing the mission statement of your desired partner and determine if it’s aligned with your values and goals.

If you share the same goals and values, the co-branded content will have a significant impact for your brand.

What are the Benefits of Co-branding Content?

There are several benefits of co-branding your content.

Co-branding will enhance your position within the market. It will allow you to position your brand as a thought-leader while simultaneously increasing awareness in a new market.

Once you cross-promote your content, you’ll get more results for less effort.

Each party will pull together resources to reach the same market which can double your potential reach.

You’ll then be able to increase trust in a new market. Your current audience trusts you, now you have the ability to gain trust in new markets.

How to Cross-Promote Your Content?

Create a shared landing page. Feature both company logos on the page and mention the companies in the promotional text as well. Then offer a registration option for a webinar announcing the content.

After registration, be sure to include a social media share feature that includes the handles of each party.

Use social media. Both brands should tag each other on Instagram, or mention in a Tweet, LinkedIn post, or Facebook post.

Conduct a Webinar. Create a webinar highlighting the topic of your co-branded content. This will give both parties the opportunity to introduce the content in an impactful way.

Reuse Old Content

If you have an eBook that is performing well, you can repurpose it as a SlideShare presentation. You can also take that same eBook and turn it into a month’s worth of blog posts or you can turn that blog post into an infographic or video.

You can even take your most popular blog post about a certain topic and turn it into an eBook.

An Article: Let’s say you create an article about “Tips for living a healthy life.” These tips should be short and include facts, figures, and associated imagery.

Create five tips in three categories: food, fitness, and lifestyle.

Each may be a separate blog post or presented in its entirety.

A Slideshow: Present the three blog posts as slideshows.

A Pinterest Board: Create a “Healthy Life” board on Pinterest and turn each tip and image into a pin. Remember to edit each tip down to 50 words or less for the pin’s description.

You can also create separate boards for the food, fitness, and lifestyle tips.

A Quiz: Edit the three tip posts so that the content can be presented as an interactive quiz.

An Infographic: Design an infographic that includes all the statistics and facts about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. Create three separate infographics for each of the three categories.

Example:

A Video: Turn the infographic elements into an animated video with narration that mirrors the article.

Example:

A Facebook Post: Turn each tip into an individual Facebook post. Remember to create a call-to-action, driving your fans back to your website.

A Twitter Tweet: Turn your tips into tweets. Don’t forget to include your website URL and account for its characters within the 140 character limit.

Consumer-Generated Content (CGC): Create a call-to-action asking consumers to share their own health tips and insights on social media and your blog. Share the best ones on your social media.

SEE ALSO: How to Slice and Dice Your Content Creation 

In Conclusion

Don’t worry about shelling out big money to build your digital brand. Try to schmooze your way into a conference by volunteering.

Develop a partnership with another brand and create a co-branded piece of content. You can even reuse or repurpose and old piece of content for, as some may say, ‘Free.99.’ Get creative.

Do you know of any other hacks to get your brand more exposure? Tell me about it in the comments section below…