Love it or hate it, marketing is one of the core functions of every staffing and recruitment firm but it’s often the department with the least amount of dedicated resources, especially with the planetary crisis of COVID-19.
When you’re short on budget, staff or resources, your options for expensive marketing tools are thin. The good news? There are quite a bit of amazing and free marketing tools that you can deploy for your 2020 marketing initiatives.
Here’s our list of six powerful (and free) recruitment marketing tools that you can start using today to help your business grow.
This website analytics power tool is one of your best friends in recruitment marketing. The best part? It’s 100 percent free and even offers complimentary training programs. If you haven’t already, be sure to download Google Analytics and dive into the beginner’s course to get the basics down.
While we could easily write an entire blog series on Google Analytics and the many recruitment marketing ideas it offers, let’s take a gander at three questions that Google Analytics can help you answer with data.
*For this example, we used screenshots and video from the Google Analytics test account
Q1: Which of your social media platforms are driving the most traffic?
Q2: Which of your pages (excluding the homepage) is driving the most candidates to your website?
For this example, we’re going to look at the Behavior tab and under Site Content, look at the Landing Pages section. This will show you where your traffic is “landing” or entering your website for the first time. In the Google Test Account, we can see that the redesign/apparel page drives the most traffic. Using this information, you can tell what source(s) brings traffic to your website and what pages don’t, helping laser-in on which pages to spend the most time optimizing.
Q3: In terms of geography, what US state brings in the most users?
Select the Audience tab and go under Geo. Drilling down even further, select location. A map will appear of the world, click United States (or whatever country you’re recruiting in) and then look at which state has the most users. In this example, California has the most. If you click California, you can zoom in further to discover which cities bring in users. Having this geographic knowledge allows you to run more targeted ad campaigns.
Surprise! Another Google tool. This time we’re looking at Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. In a nutshell, Google Trends helps recruiters (among many things) determine:
In this example, let’s say you’re a multi-branch professional staffing firm that’s looking to fill a copywriter position. Using Google Trends, you want to find out what title resonates better with candidates. Will job seekers search for “copywriter jobs” or content specialist jobs”? After entering the comparison, you discover that copywriter was the clear winner. Having this information makes it easy to post jobs with terms job hunters are actually using.
In the next example, let’s say you’re looking to fill a remote copywriter job. Using data from the previous example, you know that the job title, “copywriter” is more searched but now you want to take it a step further and see which state has the highest number of people searching for copywriter jobs.
In Google Trends, you enter the query, “copywriter jobs.” With one quick search, you notice most searches occur in New York, which empowers you to have a more targeted search area. While this example is very basic, exploring around with Google Trends will help uncover meaningful marketing data – all for free!
This free tool powered by the folks at Google gives your website a quick snapshot of how well it’s performing. Using four areas of measurement, Web Dev uncovers how well your website supports its users and offers suggestions to improve its overall performance. The only caveat is you’ll need a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to fix the addressed problems.
The four areas of measurement include:
Performance – Includes site speed, loading time and more.
Accessibility – How accessible your website is according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Performance – Looks for everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios.
SEO – Makes sure your website has everything Google needs to crawl your website effectively.
Go to web.dev.com and plug in your website to get a near instant view of how it stacks up.
Recruitment chatbots are a phenomenal way to connect with candidates, streamline the recruiting process and drive engagement on your website. Drift is a chatbot tool that’s easy to install (just a copy and paste of code to your website) and allows you to interact with website visitors – all in real time. The best part is that you can start Drift for free.
Canva is a fantastic free design tool that’s super easy to use and even better for making quick advertisements. Best part? You don’t need graphic design experience to make masterfully crafted ads. The example below literally took 45 seconds to create a professional graphic for social media that highlights a job opening.
This free tool is something you probably already have (assuming you have a business Facebook account). Insights is simply a platform where you can monitor your competitor’s social presence, create Facebook ads, and get basic analytics on your social posts. It’s easy to use and helps track ROI on social advertising.
All of these free recruitment marketing tools can be used individually or collectively for powerful marketing results. If you’re familiar with Avengers Endgame or Infinity war, think of these marketing tools as infinity stones. Once you’ve collected them all, you’re virtually invincible in your marketing efforts. Just be sure to measure ROI on your recruitment marketing so you can tell what’s working and what’s not.
If you need more recruitment marketing ideas, check out our blog on 8 Marketing Strategies Your Staffing Firm Can’t Afford to Ignore for more ideas.
Surprise! A bonus recruiting marketing tool! Soapbox is a free Google Chrome extension that simultaneously records your screen and yourself. This is a fantastic tool to record, edit and share your videos in minutes. Whether it’s a video job description or a personal video outreach or even a how-to video for internal use, Soapbox is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to create personalized videos.
About Avionté
Avionté is a leader in enterprise staffing and recruiting software solutions, offering innovative end-to-end staffing solutions to over 900 customers and 25,000 users throughout the U.S. and Canada. Avionté delivers a robust platform for clerical, light industrial, IT and professional staffing firms to maximize profits and boost productivity.
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