Whilst we might all be conducting ‘business as normal’, the global situation continues to be far from it. Working remotely is possibly something you’ve always dreamt of under different circumstances but this reality is more challenging.
One of the key things we’ve learnt though is that, locked in our homes as we might be, and difficult as it may be to navigate, life does not stop, and recruitment cannot afford to wait this one out. So, what do you do?
If like us you have your content plan laid out for the full year ahead then it’s time to go through it and decide what is and isn’t still going to be relevant. Some content that would usually have high levels of engagement may be better saved for another time when it will be fully appreciated. What’s needed right now is timely, helpful and in most cases new content.
6 free tools that may come in useful for content planning
- Trello lets you create boards shared with your team where you can group content into different cards, assign tasks and set due dates. It’s also compatible with lots of other applications via zapier
- Evernote is a tool for making lists but it’s so much more than that, you can also add audio notes and take photos of content ideas to save them for later and access them across multiple devices
- Answer the public does just what the name suggests, you put in a topic and it tells you what people have been searching for that you could answer
- HubSpot blog topic generator asks you for up to five nouns then gives you five suggested blog titles
- Quora is a question and answer forum that you can use to see the key questions your target audience is asking
- HubSpot’s buyer persona tool lets you flesh out who your clients really are and what they are looking for
Free social media advice and tools
Along with updating your content plan, social media is a critical area to get right during this time, if not always.
7. Our own recruitment social media guru Dan Stobbs is offering his time up for free consultations for anyone who would benefit from some advice during this challenging time. The last thing anyone wants right now is to say or post the wrong thing, best case scenario it could be seen as insensitive and worst case it actually offends.
Here are some of Dan’s favourite free social media tools
8. Buffer is a social media planning and scheduling tool
9. RiteTag suggests hashtags for images and text posts
10. Hashtagify lets you analyse the best hashtags to use on Twitter and Instagram
More free tools for recruitment marketers
While we’re listing free content planning and social media tools, we thought, why not share some other free marketing tools we love?
11. Google Analytics is free tool from Google that you can use to track your website performance
12. mailchimp offers lots of paid options but the free version is great for email marketing for up to 2,000 contacts
13. infogram is an infographic and chart maker
14. Canva is a design tool for creating graphics for social media and an other marketing campaigns you may wish to create branded imagery for
15. Gimp is an image editor a little bit like a free Photoshop
16. Yoast is a search engine optimisation plug-in for WordPress websites
17. HubSpot – HubSpot offers its CRM free of charge along with a free version of its sales and marketing tools
18. And as always we offer a wide range of free on-demand recruitment PR and marketing webinars and e-books.
Free tools for working remotely
No list of recruitment marketing resources would be complete right now without including tools to help keep you in touch with your clients and colleagues.
19. Zoom is a video chat tool that is hugely popular at the moment especially for arranging virtual team drinks – remember to switch to gallery mode!
20. join.me is another free virtual meeting and screen sharing tool
21. Slack is a collaboration or instant team messaging tool
I hope you found this list of 21 free resources useful for progressing with your recruitment marketing activities during the coronavirus crisis. Stay safe, stay well, and don’t forget to book in a free recruitment social media consultation.