How to promote your business locally for free, week by week

Your customers live within a few miles of your door, and the money for marketing is zero. Search for how to promote your business locally for free and you get lists: 6 ways, 11 ways, 15 ideas. A list leaves you with the hard part, which is deciding what to do first on a Tuesday evening when the shop is closed and you have half an hour.

This guide is that order. Whether you searched for "promote", "advertise" or "market" your business for free, the answer below is the same seven tactics, ranked by how much time they take against what they bring back, with a four-week schedule at the end.

What free costs

Free promotion costs time, and a tactic that costs an hour a week forever is not free in any sense that matters to a one-person business. So every tactic below carries a set-up time and a running time. Both are this guide's estimates for a single-location business, and so is the "what it is for" column; your numbers will differ, and the point is the order more than the minutes.

The order matters because each step feeds the next. A listing with no reviews is a name with no proof; a flyer with a QR code that lands on an empty review page wastes the print; a local-group post gets clicks that go to a listing, so the listing comes first.

Step 1: claim one maps listing and make the details match

If you searched for how to list your business for free on Google, this is the step. Google's Business Profile page says it plainly: "creating a Business Profile and listing your business on Google is free", and the profile is what shows on Search and Maps when someone nearby looks for what you sell (read 2026-10-05). The same page lists what the profile carries: hours, contact information, photos, customer reviews and posts for offers and events.

What Google asks for is set out in its guidelines for representing your business on Google, and the rules are stricter than the form looks. The business name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". Adding anything else to the name, and the page lists taglines, phone numbers, area names and service descriptions among the additions, "isn't permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile". The address has to be your "actual, real-world location": a PO box, a remote mailbox or a rented virtual office you do not work from is not eligible. The phone number should be one "that connects to your individual business location", with a local number preferred over a central helpline. For categories, "use as few categories as possible", picking ones that complete "this business IS a" rather than "this business HAS a". Hours are "your regular customer-facing hours of operation".

The rule that runs through the guidelines is consistency: represent the business "as it's consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding". So before you type anything, pick the one spelling of your name, the one form of your address and the one phone number, and use them on the listing, your website, your invoices and your window. A cafe that is "Nina's" on the sign, "Ninas Cafe" on the website and "Nina's Coffee House" on the listing has given itself three names, and the consistency rule above is why it should pick one. (That cafe is an example, not a real one.)

What a listing will not fix: a business that is hard to find in person. If the listing says you open at nine and the door is locked until ten, the review that follows will say so.

Step 2: ask your first customers for reviews

A listing with five reviews reads differently from one with none, and the first five are the ones only you can get, because nobody finds you yet. (If you have no customers at all yet, start with how to get your first customers and come back to this step.) Why that matters to a local business is covered in why reviews are important for your business; the methods, scripts and timing are in how to get more reviews.

The free version, for a business with no software and no list, is the ask at the moment of thanks. A plumber finishes the job, the customer says it was quick, and the plumber says "would you mind putting that in a review? Here's the link" and hands over a card with a QR code. How to make that code, and what to print it on, is in a QR code for reviews. A clinic asks at the desk after a second visit, when the patient has something to compare. A shop asks the regulars by name.

Two limits. Asking for reviews does not rescue a service people did not like; the review you get will be honest, and the fix is the service. And the ask is the only part you control: expect some customers to say yes and forget, and make the second ask a week later, once.

Step 3: use the shopfront you already have

A window card costs one sheet of card, and it reaches exactly the people who walk past. Three things go on it: what you do in six words, your hours, and a QR code to your listing or your review page. A trades business without a window puts the same three things on the van and on the invoice.

Flyers are free only where you can leave them without paying: your own counter, a neighbouring business that agrees (step 4), and community boards in places that permit them. Check the board's rule before pinning; this guide's advice is to skip any board that bans them, because the flyer they take down carries your name. Letterboxing a street costs a printing bill and a morning, which is low cost rather than free, so it sits outside this guide.

Step 4: team up with the business next door

The business two doors down has regulars you do not, and may want yours. A swap costs a conversation: the cafe keeps the florist's cards by the till and the florist keeps the cafe's loyalty card on the counter; the hairdresser and the nail bar refer across; the plumber and the electrician pass each other every job they cannot take. Pick a business that shares your customers and sells something you do not, so neither of you loses a sale by sending someone on.

Write down what each side does, in two lines, so the swap survives a busy month. The limit is the neighbour's enthusiasm: if their cards have not reached your counter after a month, drop it.

Step 5: post in a local group, rules first

If you searched for how to promote your business on Facebook for free, or on a neighbourhood app, the answer is a post in a local group, and the rule of the group comes before the post. A group that allows business posts may restrict them (a promotion day, a members-only thread, a limit per month), and a post that breaks the rule can be deleted by the moderators with your name on it, so read the pinned rules of yours before you write a word.

Write the post the way a neighbour would say it, because the group reads it as a neighbour's post or scrolls past: "We've opened on the high street, the first week's coffee is on us for anyone who mentions this post", with a photo of the real place and the real people. Answer every comment, including the one asking whether you do decaf, because the reply is the advert.

A group post is where "online" and "local" meet for a business this size. Do the listing and the group post before you think about a website.

Step 6: give the local paper a reason

This guide's rule for local press: give the paper an event, because an event is what a short local piece is made of. An opening, an anniversary, a charity collection, a new owner, a shop that has been there forty years. "We are great" is a boast, so send a hook instead. The tactic is the hook plus a photo: an email of five lines to the named editor or the "send us your news" address, with what happened, when, one quote from you and a photo taken in daylight. This guide gives it forty minutes because a piece that runs can stay online long after the paper is recycled.

The limit is the calendar: you need a real event. If the only news is that you exist, wait for the first anniversary and send it then.

Step 7: a referral nudge

The customer a friend sends has already heard about you from someone they trust, which is why this guide rates the nudge the cheapest step in the table. The nudge is one sentence at the end of a job: "If you know anyone who needs this, I'd be glad of the introduction." Said in person, it costs nothing; printed on the invoice, it costs the ink. A reward for the referral turns it into a scheme, with rules and a cost, so this guide keeps it to the sentence.

What not to do, and the US rule behind it

Three shortcuts look free and cost more than money. Paying for a review that has to be positive, writing reviews yourself from a second account, or threatening a customer to get a bad one taken down: in the United States, all three fall under the Federal Trade Commission's rule on fake reviews and testimonials, announced in the FTC's release of 14 August 2024 (16 CFR Part 465). The release says the rule covers reviews "by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews", reviews "written by company insiders that fail to clearly and conspicuously disclose the giver's material connection", and "providing compensation or incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative". On suppression, it covers "unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations" used to prevent or remove a negative review. It also bans buying "fake indicators of social media influence, such as followers or views".

Read the release and the rule it links before offering anything in return for a review, because the wording on incentives is precise and this guide is not legal advice. Outside the US the rules differ by country, and the review platforms have their own terms on top. This guide's advice, wherever you are: ask, offer nothing, and leave the bad review where it is with a calm reply underneath it.

How to promote your business locally for free in four weeks

This is the schedule, at about 30 minutes a week after the first one. It is this guide's suggestion, built from the set-up times above; a business with a slow Tuesday can compress it, and one in a busy season can stretch each week to two.

After week four the running cost is the table at the top: a listing check and a group post each month, and a review ask every week. A business that keeps those three going has the base that any paid tactic would need anyway, built at the speed its own customers set.

The one thing to do this week

Pick the spelling of your name, your address and your phone number, and claim the listing with them. Everything else in this guide points at that page. When it is live and the first reviews are on it, the tools that do the monitoring and the asking at scale are listed under reputation and review management software and local SEO software, each compared on the same checklist of features, for the day the 30 minutes a week stops being enough.