Marketing has never been more important to talent access. This industry is all about connection, and in the new, digital World of Work, we can connect at a greater scale than ever before.
But marketing can be intimidating for some recruiters, who see it as the domain of skilled creatives with specialized training. And while we do need those kinds of marketers, today any recruiter or firm owner can take advantage of accessible, free online tools to start promoting their brand more effectively.
Here are a few of our favorite free marketing tools to help you enhance your professional communications, grab the attention of your audience, and stand out with your own personal identity in the crowded search space.
Mailchimp
This free, cloud-based email marketing tool lets you stay in touch with up to 2,000 contacts for free. With Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop templates, you or your team can create a professional-looking email or newsletter quickly and easily. You can even design bold, branded graphics right in the app thanks to their integration with Canva — more on that below.
Mailchimp’s option to segment your audience into targeted lists is particularly useful for talent access professionals. You can group clients and candidates separately, then segment both even further by factors like industry or location.
For many search firms, it would be difficult to justify hiring a designer or marketer to maintain an email list manually. Tools like Mailchimp provide an achievable way to keep your network up to date on your activities.
Google Alerts
Staying up to date on news, trends, and developments in your industry is crucial to promoting yourself as a subject matter expert. With Google Alerts, you get relevant new content sent to your inbox on a regular basis — there’s no need to spend time manually searching and browsing the web.
Tailor alerts to your industry, location, key topics, and even client names, then let this free tool do the work of keeping you up to date. In addition to keeping you informed, it’s a great way to collect information that could be useful to your audience — perfect for unwinding the headlines.
MRI members have access to Pulse, our proprietary news aggregator tool, which is more powerful than Google Alerts in terms of customization, and gives you the option to share the best new content to your firm’s website at the click of a button. However, Google Alerts is still an indispensable, free tool to keep up with your sector and collect important news to share — especially when you’re first starting out.
Canva
A consistent and cohesive brand builds affinity and trust with your target audience. Over time, this will help your marketing efforts become instantly recognizable to your clients and candidates, keeping you top of mind as a trusted source of information and opportunities.
That’s why we recommend Canva, another free tool that makes graphic design quick, easy, and accessible. Particularly well-suited to making graphics for email, blog posts, or social media, one of Canva’s main assets is its library of customizable templates.
Canva allows you to design all your branding assets and sales collateral in one place. That gives your online brand cohesion, consistency, and an elevated approach that stands out.
Google Analytics
Your website activity is a snapshot of your audience and what they care about. Google Analytics is a free, sophisticated tool to help you understand your website’s activity — and get to know your audience better.
Traffic analysis shows you how your audience is finding you and where they’re located, while the most-visited pages on your site can indicate which of your offerings are in especially high demand. You can also track your applicant conversion funnel, and assess the ROI of any paid digital advertising campaigns.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it’s built to be easily navigable without a coding or web development background. All the complex, detailed information you have access to is broken down into clear, intuitive charts and graphs, and you can also filter your activity by date to get reports on specific time periods.
Buffer
Regular social media activity is essential to building a following — but as a busy talent access professional, posting every day isn’t always the best use of your time.
Scheduling tools like Buffer make it efficient to batch out large quantities of great social media content. As ideas for social posts come to you naturally, jot them down in a notebook or note-taking app, and then hold time in your calendar once per week to turn these loose ideas into posts. Using Buffer, these can be easily scheduled across the next week, or even two, so that you don’t feel pressure to be active on your social channels every day, but are still regularly sharing content that brings your audience real value. Pre-scheduling your content means that you can spend time on creating it when you’re feeling most inspired, instead of taking time away from other important tasks.
Grammarly
If your goal is to build credibility and establish yourself as an expert, then clear, professional language is everything — but luckily you don’t need flawless spelling to be a great writer anymore. Grammarly is an AI-powered application that provides suggestions for spelling, grammar, and word choice to help your ideas and experience shine through.
Grammarly integrates into your browser, helping you improve your writing wherever you need it, including email and LinkedIn. While the Premium version includes style, tone, and clarity suggestions, the free version is perfectly sufficient to check for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and conciseness.
Great Marketing, Within Reach
Marketing might sound like new territory for a talent access professional, but it’s already in your DNA as a recruiter. You’re building connections, putting yourself out there, and communicating your value every day.
Give these free tools a try and watch your reach, network, and audience grow. In the new World of Work, powerful branding and a strong professional voice are within your grasp. Remember, marketing is just communication with purpose — and communicating is what recruiters do best.