I know it’s a difficult time at the minute (I’m sure nobody needs me to tell them that!), and not everyone has the disposable income to support small businesses in the way they might want to, but I wanted to tell you how you can support your fave small businesses without having to spend any cashola!
Obviously, a small business ultimately wants customers to spend money with them and buy their products, but I would always rather a person support me in other ways rather than spend money they don’t have with
- Comment and like social media posts
This one is probably the easiest and most effective. Building a community is a huge part of running a small business, so having people liking and commenting on your content is absolutely invaluable! Having like-minded people give their opinion, or some advice or even just have a chat makes running a small business much less lonely, and also helps us be stand out amongst the big guys who can’t interact the way we can. It also helps our posts to be shown to more people because of the way the Instagram and other social media algorithms work, they think posts with lots of likes and comments are more valuable and interesting to people, and some of those who see it might end up becoming customers!
2. Answer polls and questions on Instagram Stories honestly
Lots of small business ask for opinions and advice on stories and in their posts. This helps us create products that customers actually want and will buy, rather than just trying lots of different things out and seeing if anything works. If you see polls and question boxes on Instagram stories, it’s really helpful for you to answer them honestly. Whether it’s opinions of design, packaging, release times, rebrands, we want your opinions!
3. Share and recommend to your friends & family
If you have friends of family who you think would like our business, please recommend they check us out! Small businesses have a really limited marketing budget, and a lot of our customers find us through their friends who have shared something to tagged them in a post, you also know your friends pretty well, so if you’ve tagged them, they probably will like what we do!
4. Put our products on your birthday or Christmas lists!
If you’d like something from a small business but can’t buy it, you could ask for it for a birthday or other gift-giving holiday! This one won’t apply to everyone, but if you’re someone who is lucky enough to receive gifts for celebrations and are asked what you want, it’s a really good opportunity to support small businesses without having to spend a penny!
4. Tag us in shout out requests!
Sometimes influencers, celebrities or big businesses ask for small business recommendations, and we are always endlessly grateful when people tag us in these! It means all their followers can click through and find our pages, and if we’re really lucky we might get a shoutout from a really big name!
If you have done any of these, or have any other ideas of how to support a small business without spending any money, please let me know below!
Love,
Laura x
