Why you should read this post:
· To understand the importance of PR tools
· To learn about the PR tools that will simplify your job
· Because technology is awesome
Public Relations 101
Earning good press and visibility for your brand is the ultimate goal of all the planning and strategy that goes into every PR action you take.
So much work goes into managing your public relations effectively to help your business remain competitive in your industry.
Needing to be 5 steps ahead of trends, breaking news, scandals, disasters and staying on top of your relationships, media lists and d-list blogger guests for events makes the job grueling, exhilarating, and humbling all at once.
To stay on top of your game you will need more than a magnetic and charming personality to maintain the best relationships with journalists, your bosses, and your clients….
Here’s a list of five PR tools you might need to manage, track, and monitor your brand’s PR efforts, plus a few alternatives for each:
Your Design Tool - Canva
This is my top pick for creating shareable assets for social media. It’s easy to use, it has a ton of free templates, and free stock pictures, and it will give you a professional finish.
Canva is the perfect tool when you don’t have an in-house designer on your team, and you happen to be less design-savvy.
You don’t need to master illustrator or photoshop to create eye-catching media kits and press releases. Canva is a complete tool for anyone who isn’t an experienced designer, but it’s also convenient for more experienced designers.
Other design tools to consider:
· Prezly – press releases
· Infogram - infographics
· Visme – for your infographics, presentations, charts and graphs.
· Pablo – social media posts
Your Media Monitoring Tool – Meltwater
When working in a small city like Winnipeg or with a small brand you might find that subscribing to your local newspapers will prove more valuable than getting an expensive media monitoring tool that would sometimes get you irrelevant publications.
However, bigger brands need a brand management or media monitoring tool. My top pick for this kind of tool is Meltwater. This tool will help you monitor and analyze mentions across multiple online news, social media, print, broadcast, and podcasts.
Meltwater is great at determining the tone of the coverage you're getting, maintaining relationships with journalists and tracking performance analytics.
Other Media monitoring Tools to consider:
· Google Alerts - it’s free!
· Coverage book - keep records of your coverage for your reports
· Brandwatch - Keep track of yours and your competitors’ PR focus
· Critical Mention - Full control over online presence, great for broadcast monitoring
· Mention - Online media monitoring, social media listening, competitive analysis
· Cision - Media Monitoring, Journalist Outreach
Your Content Planning Tool - Buzzsumo
If you’re looking for a tool to help you curate and develop new content, this tool is perfect for you. By looking up a topic on Buzzsumo, you find the most popular content on the internet under that topic.
You can also keep an eye on what your competition is publishing, as well the amount of engagement they’re getting. This tool will always analyze and provide insights to help you create better content.
Buzzsumo will not only help you keep in touch with all the latest trends in your industry, but it will also identify key influencers in your industry, revealing their social following and engagement rates. This knowledge can help you build strategic relationships with these influencers.
Other tools for Content creation & development:
· Quicksearch – spot trends in your industry and find content ideas (it’s free!)
· Ahrefs – Content ideas, keyword research and SEO
· SEMrush – Perfect tool for keyword research and competitor analyses, and blogging (SEO)
Your Social Media Management Tool - Hootsuite
My top choice tool for social media management is Hootsuite. This easy-to-use dashboard hosts a centralized feed of all your brand’s mentions, comments, and tags across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
This tool easily helps you schedule your social media posts. However, considering that each platform has a different audience, always revise your posts accordingly to ensure you're not posting the same thing across multiple platforms.
Hootsuite also has an advanced listening tool that provides Insights, digging into audience segments and trends, benchmarking your brand’s strength against competitors, and tracking real-time conversations across blogs, forums, and message boards.
Other Social Media Management Tools
· Streams – day-to-day content publishing, and media monitoring
· Buffer – social media publishing, entry-level analytica and monitoring
· Digimind – Holistic social media listening
· TweetDeck – Twitter’s media monitoring dashboard
Your Distribution and Outreach Tool - MailChimp
MailChimp is a user-friendly tool that you can use to send out news releases, emails to members, newsletters - you name it. It always gives all your outgoing correspondences a nice, branded look.
It makes it very easy to create outreach lists based on your audience. It’s true that regardless of your business or the type of industry you operate in, an email list is the most important element of successful marketing strategy.
With Mailchimp, you will quickly learn how to quickly build a list from scratch. You will also be able to keep track of your progress and learn exactly how many new people join your email list from the automatic welcome emails that are sent out to new subscribers.
Other distribution and PR outreach tools:
· Business wire – press release distribution
· MuckRack – helps you build powerful, targeted media lists
· Anewstip: Media monitoring, PR outreach, and identifying media opportunities
· SourceBottle – PR outreach and identifying media opportunities
· NinjaOutreach – outreach to online leads, bloggers, social media influencers,
Take control of your PR efforts
You may have amazing things to say about your company, but it’s tracking your PR actions, controlling your message, and evaluating its impact once it’s out there that helps you build brand awareness, loyalty, and increase your revenue. Start using some of these tools to boost your PR performance.
Do you have any specific tools you would like to share with other PR professionals? Be sure to let us know through the comments section below.