Best Low Cost Marketing Tools

There is no such things as "free marketing" because it takes time to create material for marketing. However LOW COST is another story and can be very effective for small businesses. Here are some tools that I've used in my small business consulting (they depend upon your industry as to which you should apply): 

• Social Media (Facebook Groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Blogging)- These provide you a great place to post discounts, sales, keep people appraised about what you're doing, drive customer interaction, etc. You need to have INTERESTING content that people will want to share. 
• SEO- You can spend some time learning the simple/beginner SEO steps from amazing blogs online written by experts and use a lot of the free tools on SEOMOZ.com to test your site. No need to hire an expert if you don't have the budget, but there is stuff you can do now on your own to help your sites SEO. 
• YouTube- Highlight your business, culture, etc through fun videos that are engaging! (It can't be boring but rather needs to be helpful) 
• PARTNERSHIPS- One of the best things you can do is find businesses that are complimentary to yours and ask to partner wit them! Offer a % of sales or referrals that come from them (typically 5-10% is good pending your margins). This drives referral businesses and you reciprocate back to them. It is one of the easiest and least used forms of marketing! 

Those are some simple ones to start you off! You can also do Word of Mouth campaigns, ask for feedback via Yelp or CitySearch, etc. Happy to talk more with you or your small business if you'd like to look more into this!