In today’s digital age, public relations (PR) moves only as fast as its technology can carry it.
There’s a major overlap between PR tools and marketing technology, and we all know martech changes every quarter. Most tools will be superseded by superior alternatives in a few years, but there are those faithful few that provide indispensable help.
In the world of marketing, tools that simplify public relations efforts are a must have.
Public relations (PR) refers to the process or act of creating and delivering messages to the public to inform or persuade them. Most often PR helps generate publicity to promote a business.
Many PR campaigns focus on getting a business featured in magazine or news articles or getting it covered on a television show, podcast, or radio show.
Recently, the lines between marketing and public relations have been blurring together. Many public relations and marketing tactics are similar, except you don't have to pay for PR messages because they are often "earned media."
Earned media is coverage your team gets based purely on editorial content. This plays a significant part in the integrated PESO model, which merges the four main media types together.
Source: Spin Sucks
The four types of media include the following:
As you can see, the earned media you get from PR efforts is essential for building credibility and trust with your target audience. And with the right PR tools, you can take your strategy to the next level.
Public relations has a positive impact on the way the public views your business. Managing your public relations effectively can help your business remain competitive in your industry.
Here are some of the many benefits of using public relations tools:
It is valuable to know who is representing your brand in the media so you can track the messages being presented to the public about your brand. Internal PR tools help you keep clear records of which media representatives have interacted with your company and give you an accurate picture of what the results were.
This can help you build brand equity by having a sustainable database of all media interactions with your business.
As you identify and pitch your business to journalists or other media reps, you want to ensure there is no overlap in who your team members choose to reach out to. PR tools track who you reach out to and any correspondence you have with them.
This can help you to build good relationships with representatives in the media, which may prove to be invaluable as you grow your brand.
When credible media sources mention your business positively or feature your products or services, it can increase the trust between your business and your audience. Having proper public relations tools and teams to manage PR tasks assures that your business will avoid its fair share of negative PR.
If you successfully handle PR, then your business will transform into a credible organization.
Some successful PR efforts may be weaved into your brand story and marketing messages to attract more leads.
The more people who hear or read about your brand, the better. Your credibility as an organization helps lead potential customers seamlessly through the sales funnel to increase your profits.
Your business needs PR tools, applications, and processes to help PR campaigns run smoothly.
A good PR campaign involves more than writing and issuing press releases. You want to be using the right tools to connect with media reps and track data in one place.
Here are some of these amazing PR tools that help empower your team:
NinjaOutreach is a PR tool that helps connect you to influencers and bloggers. You can quickly find their email addresses and automate your PR outreach strategy. It gives you access to millions of leads, social media influencers, and bloggers.
All you have to do is search keywords related to your business to access their profiles and contact information. Then you set up email outreach campaigns to reach out to dozens of contacts for link building, content promotion, digital PR, guest posting, and influencer marketing.
You can manage all of your contacts through the contact relationship manager that allows you to schedule and keep track of interactions and follow ups.
Like an email marketer, a PR professional is only as good as his or her contact list. There’s a whole class of PR tools dedicated to verifying your data so you don’t waste time down the line. Mailtester stands near the top of the class among those data hygiene PR tools.
Mailtester is used in conjunction with your existing contact list or a third party database service such as Cision. It’s a speedy online tool that works to verify email addresses. It can even test a whole set of address combinations to determine which ones work and which don’t.
Digital PR has changed a lot of assumptions. Branded articles have displaced journalism at the top of the content heap, but newspapers and TV news still have a big role to play. MuckRack is an app that lets you leverage the news cycle by helping you connect with journalists.
Journalists are the original influencers par excellence, and that gives them a tough job. They have to fill their airtime or column inches every single day. Pass them a newsworthy story on a topic of broad public interest, and you can position your brand as a thought leader.
For a similar product with deeper influencer analytics, consider Anewstip.
BuzzSumo is already celebrated as one of the best digital marketing tools around. It’s a mainstay for SEO, content marketing, and link building. The key here is how its social media and content ecosystem tools can be used for public relations strategy.
As a BuzzSumo user, you won’t want to overlook how its Content Analyzer allows you to see at a glance who’s writing about what. You’ll also get a clear picture of how much user engagement each piece has earned and where gaps in the conversation are.
If you’re not using Slack in your office, you’re missing out.
Slack has raced to the top of the heap when it comes to collaboration tools for business. Mainly structured as a chat service that can incorporate private “rooms” based on function or project, it rolls communication, document management, and version control into a single package.
One of the reasons Slack has taken the world of PR tools by storm is its mobile compatibility. You can use Slack on virtually any kind of device. This makes it great for teams with remote personnel, whether they’re down the street or around the world.
That’s exactly the kind of app you need to keep you moving at the speed of news.
No list of PR technology is really complete without a dependable conferencing solution.
UberConference will keep you in touch with both your team members and your media contacts. Its main draw is the way it simplifies and streamlines the conferencing process. Contacts no longer need to worry about PINs, downloads, or other factors that can gum up the works.
The program also works with Slack and LinkedIn, giving you a good launchpad for your live events that most contacts will already understand how to use. You can even collaborate on documents while you are on a conference call. How’s that for cool?
Influencers are already lauded on the marketing side of the house. Now, their esteem in PR is growing. Partnering with influencers helps you gain trust by bypassing the public’s wariness about ads. If this is the linchpin of your PR strategy, you need an influencer management platform.
Traackr is the fastest way to find influencers in your niche in one click. All you have to do is enter keywords and you’ll get a detailed display of influencers: Who’s writing what, what their reach is, how well their content has been received, and how relevant they are to your audience.
Meltwater manages your brand by sifting through mentions of your business throughout articles, podcasts, social media posts, and more. They let you know what the public is saying about your brand, and they can connect you to the most relevant journalists.
This tool helps you send pitches and press releases while you maintain relationships with journalists and track performance analytics.
Prezly is an all-in-one solution that allows you to pitch your stories, manage your contacts, and publish your news from one platform. They also provide you insights and reports to show you what works and what doesn't.
This tool truly makes it easy to pitch every day by allowing you to streamline your communication workflows with organized contacts and a newsroom with all your stories in one place.
Brandwatch helps you track the health of your brand in real-time by monitoring any mentions of your brand online. You can also analyze key trends surrounding your business since this tool monitors key publications, influencers, and regions to identify opportunities and emerging issues.
You can also optimize your brand's messaging because Brandwatch measures the influence your marketing strategies. Your messaging should help you align better with changing consumer trends.
Tracking your PR efforts helps you to get a better idea of what marketing messages and campaigns you need to start working on to help you build brand awareness, loyalty, and increase your revenue. Start by using some of these PR tools to help your team crush your goals.