Free ways to advertise communities and groups

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Is it possible to promote a community in VK without a budget? Yes. Here are some free ways:

Mutual PR. You can negotiate mutual advertising with administrators of other communities. It is important to choose a group with your target audience, which will not be your direct competitor.
Contests. Most often, VK uses simple contest mechanics, when to participate in the drawing you need to fulfill basic conditions, for example, put a “Like” mark and repost or subscribe and repost. But if you have a large active audience and you are going to give away a valuable prize, the mechanics can be complicated: give creative tasks, reward the most active participants for a certain period of time, come up with puzzles.
SEO promotion. Content in VK communities is indexed by search engines, and this can be used for promotion. Publish posts and longreads in the group that will be interesting to your target audience, and use key phrases in the texts by which this audience will be able to find you. But remember that the competition in search results is high. For frequent (that is, the most popular) queries, the first positions will most likely be materials from other sites. Choose low-frequency key phrases (those that are less common).
Read also: Keyword Statistics Guide
VK Clips. The service has a recommendation system. Algorithms analyze the user's interests and reactions (watching to the end, "likes", comments) and select video content for him in real time. The personal feed includes videos that:
similar in content to those he liked;
are liked by users with similar interests.
As a result, each viewer forms their own endless feed. If you make a video that your target audience likes, it will get high engagement and viral reach (and this can be used to promote the group).
Read also: How to increase VKontakte reach
Mailing list. In VK, you can send subscribers a personal message advantages of truemoney database on behalf of the community. For this, internal applications are used (look for them in the Business section of the app store) and third-party services. Most of them have a free plan or a promo period.
Read also: How to set up VKontakte mailings
Tips for Advertising VKontakte Communities
Determine the goal of advertising: increasing brand awareness, increasing the number of subscribers, increasing engagement, direct sales.
Decide what promotion methods you will use: paid or free? Which ones?
If you have chosen paid promotion, decide on a budget and find a convenient service that will help you pay for advertising conveniently and safely. For example, in OneSpot you can pay for advertising on seven main platforms, including VK Advertising, with cashback, closing documents and other benefits.
To set up targeted advertising, create a target audience in advance. Create ready-made audiences in the advertising account (then setting up advertising will be faster) or upload ready-made lists (this way you will be able to contact people from your database).
Test different options for targeted advertising: change ad placement platforms, audience, and creatives.
Set up retargeting to reach users who already know your brand with ads.
Agree on advertising with major bloggers that your target audience is subscribed to, and place promotional posts in major public pages.
Send out a newsletter with a special offer for users (for example, a promo code for a discount on your products or services).
Use other promotion methods: mutual PR, contests, VK Clips.