Free Marketing Help for Small Business: What's Actually Free, and What's a Sales Call

If you are searching this, I can guess the situation. Money is tight enough that marketing is the line you cut, your online listings are somewhere between out of date and wrong, and you have already worked out that the “free” results are mostly a form.

So let me be useful about the word free, and then tell you about one specific route — which is mine, which is why I am going to be careful about how I describe it.

“Free” usually means one of four things

It is worth being able to tell them apart in about ten seconds.

1 · Free, and it costs you an hour. A free consultation, a free audit call, a free strategy session. Someone looks at your business for thirty minutes and then, reasonably, tries to sell you something. This is not dishonest — it is how consulting works — but it is a sales call, and you should walk in knowing that. If you have no budget this quarter, you are spending an hour you cannot convert.

2 · Free, and it costs you your email. A checklist or template behind a form. You will get the checklist. You will also get a sequence of emails. If the checklist is good this is a fair trade.

3 · Free, and it is genuinely free, because the platform is paying. This is the biggest and most ignored category, and it is where I would start if I were you. Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect cost nothing because the platforms want accurate business data. Your listing is sitting there right now, and whether it is complete is between you and about twenty minutes.

4 · Free, because somebody else paid for it. Grants, funds, community programmes. This is the category with the most confusion in it, so the rest of this post is about getting that confusion out of the way.

Almost nothing called a “small business grant” is a grant

Start with the body everybody assumes is the source. Here is the Small Business Administration, on its own grants page:

“SBA does not provide grants for starting and expanding a business.”

And who does receive them:

“SBA provides grants to nonprofits, Resource Partners, and educational organizations.”

Not businesses. Organisations that train and counsel businesses. So when a page offers you a “small business grant,” it is not that government money for your shop does not exist anywhere — it is that the default assumption about where it comes from is wrong, and a lot of what fills that search is a lead form wearing the word.

The practical filter: a real grant has an application, a deadline, defined eligibility, and a committee that can turn you down on paperwork. If a thing has none of those, it is not a grant, whatever it is called. That is not automatically bad news — some of the better options are not grants precisely because they skip the paperwork — but you should know which one you are looking at before you spend a week on it.

And “tax-deductible” is a second place people get caught

This one matters if you are the person giving, and it matters to you as an owner because it tells you whether an organisation is being straight with you.

From IRS Publication 526, in a section titled, plainly, Contributions You Cannot Deduct:

“You can’t deduct contributions to specific individuals.”

And the obvious workaround is closed in the same breath:

“You can’t deduct these contributions even if you make them to a qualified organization for the benefit of a specific person.”

Read that second line twice, because it is the one that catches people. Money raised for one named business is not a charitable contribution. It does not become one by passing through an organisation on the way. Earmarked for a specific recipient, and the deduction is gone.

Which means: if a community fund raises money for named local businesses and tells you contributions are not tax-deductible, it is not underselling itself. It is being accurate. The ones that imply otherwise are the ones to ask a question about.

The things that actually are free, ranked by what they return

Before the part about my fund, here is the honest list. If you do nothing else from this post, do the first one.

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. For most local businesses this is the single highest-return free hour available. Hours, phone, category, service area, photos. Google’s own guidance is public and it tells you what it wants.
Do the same on Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Smaller audiences, same principle, and almost nobody local has bothered — which is the point.
Check what the internet currently says about you. Search your own business name in a private window. Look at every result on page one, not just your site. The wrong phone number on a directory you have never heard of is costing you calls right now, and you can usually correct it yourself for nothing.
Ask your happiest customers for a review. Free, and it moves the thing that actually decides whether a stranger picks you.
Your local networks. Chambers, local business groups, neighbourhood networks. Slow, free, and the referrals compound.

None of that requires a budget or a consultant. Most of it requires an afternoon.

And one more route: get nominated

I run a community fund called Lift Up Local. It backs local businesses with the marketing work they cannot currently pay for. I am going to describe it the way I would want it described to me.

What it is not. It is not a grant — there is no application and no committee, so the word does not fit. It is not a charity, and the page says so in those words: “Contributions are business revenue — a neighbor, not a charity.” Contributions are not tax-deductible, for exactly the reason in Publication 526 above. If you want the deduction, this is the wrong vehicle, and I would rather you knew that here than later.

How it works. Four steps, published:

Anyone can put forward a local business they believe in. Just share the business name and city.

Then backers contribute and vote. Then the work gets done. Then it gets reported:

“Every month, we publish a running tally of every dollar contributed. Each round, we announce which businesses we lifted and why. For every business we lift, we publish a real before-and-after once results are in.”

On the obvious objection — “the business with the biggest following just wins.” That is the right question, and the page answers it directly:

“Backer votes decide who rises — but a popularity contest would just reward whoever has the biggest network, not the business that needs it most. So votes are weighed against a growth diagnostic that measures how much of a difference the help would actually make.”

So votes count, and they are weighted against how much difference the help would make. A quiet business with a genuinely broken online presence is not automatically beaten by a louder one.

What I will not tell you. I will not tell you what happens if you are nominated and not selected, because the fund does not currently publish an answer to that, and I am not going to invent one in a blog post. I have intentions. Intentions are not a promise, and a fund whose only real asset is a transparency promise does not get to pre-announce things. Status: open, and mine to fix.

What nomination costs the business. Nothing. A business name and a city. No form to fill in, no obligation, no follow-up they have to field, nothing taken from them if they are not selected.

The line almost nobody acts on

The nomination call to action reads:

“Put a local business forward — your own counts.”

Your own counts.

I have watched owners nominate a neighbour and not themselves. The reasoning is always some version of somebody else needs it more — said by a person with the wrong hours on their listing and no budget to fix it.

Putting your own name in is not asking for charity. It has already been established, on the page, in writing, that this is not charity. It is a business name and a city.

If somebody comes to mind, nominate them. If the somebody is you, that counts.

→ Nominate a local business

Sources

U.S. Small Business Administration, Grants — https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/grants
IRS Publication 526, Charitable Contributions, “Contributions You Cannot Deduct” — https://www.irs.gov/publications/p526
Lift Up Local Fund — https://ziplinecreative.io/fund
How the Lift Up Local Fund works — https://ziplinecreative.io/blog/how-the-lift-up-local-fund-works

All four read 2026-10-06. Tax treatment described here is general information, not tax advice — your accountant knows your situation and I do not.