For independent trainers and small studio owners, some of the most valuable marketing opportunities may already be within reach: your existing clients, professional relationships, local community and the expertise you share every day.

Early in my career, I didn't have the finances to invest in advertising, which meant I had to get resourceful about my marketing and brand awareness strategies. I knew I needed to reach my target audience in ways that didn't simply ask people to hire me. Instead, I wanted my marketing to provide something of value.

Over time, I developed an approach centered on three simple ideas: Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Read.

Here are eight ways you can put that approach into practice to build your brand and attract clients without breaking your marketing budget.

This is a phenomenal way to position yourself as a subject matter expert, validate your brand’s credibility as well as generate leads for your business. These can include, but are not limited to, appearing on your local news, podcast guest segments, appearing in local or national print media as well as online publication features. As these features are earned, they are not paid so there is no cost involved outside of time pitching yourself and your topic ideas to various media outlets.

Consider partnering with another professional within your industry that could provide a complementary service to yours. For example, a nutritionist partnering with a personal trainer. You could promote one another’s business, do co-lives together on social media to promote one another’s brand. If you picked a new person every week for two months, that would provide you the opportunity to get in front of the audiences of 8 colleagues.

You could incentivize your current clients to bring in additional leads. This could include anything from prizes, free branded swag or even cash rewards. At one of my live events, we paid cash for any referral our audience brought in. That day we handed out envelopes filled with hundreds of dollars in cash, but actually net us thousands in return.

You should seek to entrench yourself within your industry and within your community. What events, meet-ups, social groups exist within your niche? Don’t just become a member, become an active participant.

Turn your social media channels, and your website if you have one, into a platform that allows your audience to binge your content. Your content marketing plan should be educational, inspirational or entertaining (or a combination of those). For example, if a photographer were to find my social media page they would find lots of tutorials on lighting and photography that they could binge. It is a great way to provide value to your audience and honor our desire to consume lots of content in a short amount of time.

This is a fantastic tool for businesses as your consumers are doing a lot of the marketing for you. Using tools, such as Google My Business, you can encourage your clients to leave reviews and comments on their experience. This can prove to generate a substantial amount of SEO leads.

Encourage trainers to collect email addresses through their websites, free resources, workshops or consultations, with appropriate consent. A simple monthly email featuring helpful training advice, client success stories (with permission) and available services can help keep a trainer top of mind without relying entirely on social media algorithms.

This can mean a few things. If you create content on your social media channels that has a tremendous amount of value (education, entertainment or inspiration) you may find your audience sharing it and thus marketing you to their respective audiences. That is why I’ve found such benefit in having my own podcast. It gets shared constantly.

Another opportunity to create sharable content is to provide your current customers with content and instructions on how to post that content. For example, at one of our events, when someone purchased a ticket, they immediately received social media graphics that they could share to let others know they were attending our event. We incentivized this further by offering a prize to several who posted these graphics to their feeds.

That is one example of many of how you can customize, combine, mix and match these ideas into your own marketing campaigns.

Ultimately, just because you might have the budget to run advertisements, does not mean you have to in order to build the brand awareness that generates qualified business leads.