Curious about how you can elevate your content marketing game to help more shelter pets get adopted or rescued? Keep reading to discover five essential content marketing tools (with free plans) that animal shelter and rescue volunteers should know about.

Most of us know that to network, promote, or market an animal shelter’s or rescue’s dogs and cats, we need eye-catching photos of them along with compelling bios to highlight their personalities that we can then post on social media. But if animal shelters are full and rescues are full and adopters are scarce, this approach may not be enough to help get adoptable pets into their forever homes. We’ll have to take our marketing to the next level and create captivating content that stands out from the crowd and reaches potential adopters or rescues at just the right time.

Here’s how…

Canva for Designing Captivating Images

An easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tool that offers a wealth of customizable templates through even its free version, Canva lets us create sleek, professional-looking designs for our social media channels and websites – from images and animated posts to videos. With it, we can make the photos we take of shelter pets go even further: We can add vibrant colors or animated elements to help them stand out on social, or we can create videos to tell a cat’s story or share a dog’s journey.

But Canva’s offering doesn’t stop there. The platform also provides templates for infographics (think educational posts about heartworm prevention, fostering, or adopting) and lots of templates for print material, such as posters and flyers and even weekly planners and to-do lists, which we could use to keep up with volunteer tasks.

What’s also nice about Canva is that we can simply pick the kind of design we want to create for social media without having to worry about the recommended size and resolution for posts on each respective channel – the tool handles that for us. Yay!

Hootsuite for Scheduling Posts and Managing Social Media Accounts

Hootsuite is a user-friendly, powerful social media marketing and management tool that makes it easy to post to social media profiles, either immediately or via scheduling, from one dashboard. The free version currently allows us to connect and monitor two social media accounts and schedule five messages.

To learn more about the best times to post on social media, check out this post on the Hootsuite blog and this article on Sprout Social.

Grammarly for Correcting Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar

Spelling and grammar are important for credibility. If our social media posts, messages, or emails contain typos, punctuation errors, or grammar mistakes, our audience may lose trust and not engage with the content we worked so hard to create.

Think about it: If an educational post is scattered with typos, would YOU trust and rely on the information? Would you submit personal data or make a donation on a website with lots of grammatical errors?

This is where Grammarly comes in handy. The free version offers basic writing suggestions to eliminate spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. Sure, this tool won’t catch absolutely every mistake we could ever make in our writing. But it helps. And it’s available as a convenient browser extension, so we can easily check the spelling and grammar of our social media posts, messages, and emails before we publish or send them.

SEMrush for Search Engine Optimization

Creating amazing content does little good if people won’t see it. To help get shelter dogs and cats into their forever homes, we need to make sure that prospective adopters will find them. How? Through search engine optimization (SEO).

If we have a website where we post adoptable pets, then we want to make sure that we get the most out of our content creation efforts – the high-quality photos of the dogs, the story-telling bios about the cats, the educational blog posts. One way to do this is by optimizing our websites’ pages with relevant keywords, so that they’ll show up when people search for these terms on search engines.

SEMrush offers a free limited version of its powerful, feature-packed tool that we can use to research keywords, discover competitors, and explore our top-performing pages. Plus: SEMrush Academy has a range of free courses we can take to learn about SEO.

For more SEO tool inspiration, check out this blog post I wrote as a course assignment while studying digital marketing at UCSD Extension.

Mailchimp for Sending Emails and Newsletters

Email marketing is an essential element of content marketing, and it can be a great way to build a relationship with an animal shelter’s or rescue organization’s audience or audience segments while marketing and networking adoptable pets, sharing educational resources, or finding fosters and donors.

A good option for this is Mailchimp. The cool thing is, this tool has a free version that probably offers plenty for distributing the monthly newsletter or pet-of-the-week feature – especially if we’re just getting started with email marketing. As of the time of this writing, the free version is limited to 2000 subscribers, with 10000 emails sent per month (and a daily limit of 2000).

Are you planning on trying any of these tools or are you already using them? Do you know of any other tools you’d add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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