In your PR outreach, securing meaningful coverage and connecting with your target audience can be challenging, but what makes it even harder is not having the right tools to do it effectively.
Whether you’re new to PR or you’ve been doing it for years, the right tools can make all the difference. So, here are five platforms you can use to get the most out of your PR efforts.
As the first step in any PR project, ideation can make or break your campaign. This stage isn’t just about throwing out relevant ideas and hoping for the best, you need to know what’s trending in your industry in order to generate compelling and successful story angles.
That being said, 30% of PR professionals believe that ideation is the most challenging aspect of PR. It’s not always easy, but there are a number of tools that can help in the ideation stage of your campaign building. Here are two of our favourites.
BuzzSumo is great for identifying trends and understanding what resonates most with those in your industry. Using BuzzSumo, you can analyse trending topics, find out which content formats are most popular, and spot subjects that are gaining traction within the media.
There are a selection of pricing plans available, including:
Which one is best for you will depend on factors, such as the size of your team and your PR goals.
Meltwater is a social listening tool that offers real-time insight into what audiences are talking about across multiple platforms. Instead of just guessing what people are saying about your industry or your brand, you can get a comprehensive view of what’s actually happening.
This allows you to spot emerging trends and hop on them before your competitors, see how your brand is performing against your direct rivals, and identify brand crises quickly.
Meltwater, along with other social listening tools like Sprout Social or Brandwatch, offers a highly effective way to monitor your brand’s reputation and gain valuable insights that can help inform your strategy.
Meltwater has three packages available:
The platform doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, so quotes for these packages are customised based on your requirements.
Once you’re done brainstorming and you’ve found the perfect angle for your story, you need to get it in front of the right journalists. Outreach tools help ensure your message lands in the right places, and here are two that we’d recommend:
Muck Rack is a popular media database offering not only a global journalist database, but also media monitoring, analytics and press-release distribution, all in one platform.
Relevance is everything in PR, and Muck Rack holds hundreds of thousands of media contacts that can help you target the right people and improve your pitch success rate.
Like Meltwater, Muck Rack pricing is customised and there are three packages available for both brands and agencies:
Cision is another popular tool in the world of outreach as it combines media lists, sentiment analysis, distribution services, and reporting all in one place. Cision makes it easy to manage contacts and measure performance, so it’s ideal for larger teams or brands running integrated campaigns across a number of platforms.
Cision has four solutions with different pricing options:
Measuring impact is often considered the most challenging part of PR. Connecting results to your broader business goals can be tricky, but it is crucial - no PR campaign is complete until its success has been measured.
The right tracking tools will tell you whether your message has reached the right audience, how it was received, and what effect it had on brand perception. These insights not only allow you to evaluate the success of your current PR efforts, but also provide strategic insights into your next campaign.
While Google Analytics and Google Search Console aren’t considered traditional PR tools, they are essential when it comes to gathering key PR metrics and measuring the impact of your campaign.
Using Google Analytics, you can put steps in place to track referral traffic from earned media, showing you how much traffic a piece of coverage drove to a website along with how long users stayed and whether they took action, i.e. completing a form or making a purchase. These metrics allow you to connect PR activity to wider business goals and demonstrate ROI (return on investment).
Google Search Console can provide insight into how PR influences a site’s organic visibility. With GSC, you can see which queries are driving impressions and clicks, monitor keyword rankings, and identify backlinks gained from coverage.
Both of these tools are entirely free to use, and when combined, they’re a great way to track the effectiveness of a PR campaign.
With the right PR tools, you can generate worthwhile ideas, connect with journalists who matter, and understand how your coverage contributes to the goals of a business.
If you need expert help managing your digital PR campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today!
