What is the best PR tool?

What is one PR tool you use the most, and what’s the benefit you enjoy?

To help you discover the top public relations tools on the market, we asked PR experts and business owners this question for their best recommendations. From using tools like Prezly to staying active on socials, there are several PR tool recommendations to help you find your next best PR strategy and boost impressions.

Here are 12 public relations tools that boost impressions:

01

Prezly: Control Your Narrative

Although providing interviews to news agencies and media outlets to bolster PR can be helpful, it does have the drawback in that you don’t fully control the narrative, which is why I enjoy using Prezly. Coverage by media encompasses several aspects such as images, videos, and audio that are generally edited to meet the outlet’s needs first, sometimes leaving much to be desired in what you wanted to be shown in your outreach strategy.Prezly is a unique online newsroom tool in which you are given complete control over everything from high resolution images, to video footage and sound quality, to create media PR media tailored to your needs. The program can produce eye-catching professional pieces that are easily dispensed and more readily picked up by the media. Prezly’s ability to give me complete control of the creative process makes it the PR tool I most enjoy.

02

Google Trends: Keep Your Messaging On Topic

The fast paced world of social media and digital news outlets can change the landscape of what is popular and what is outdated in a millisecond, and knowing how to navigate that is critical in the PR world and is why I find Google Trends extremely useful. Keeping track of the many social media platforms and distribution channels by simply surfing them, is not only time consuming, but does not provide a full picture of the hot trends, which can lead to outdated messaging, or even worse, unpopular takes.Google Trends is a unique tool that measures topic frequency, what people are searching for, the timing of those queries, and even their geographic location. These up-to-date metrics, allows me to construct informed PR releases, and even in some cases, provides a jump on the competition. Google Trends, through its measurement abilities, gives me the knowledge to be effective in our messaging, by always keeping me on topic.

03

Terkel: Share Your Industry Insights

The PR tool I use the most is Terkel. It’s a great way to find journals and blogs with which I can share industry insights. The interface makes it simple to find the right outlets to share with, and I enjoy that I can more easily build relationships with key journalists and bloggers.

04

Buzzsumo: Find Popular Niche Content

I use a tool called BuzzSumo the most. It allows me to see the most popular content in my niche and then share that content with my audience. The benefit is that I can quickly and easily find content that my audience will love, which helps me to grow my blog and business.

05

Pitchbox: Find Bloggers in Seconds

PitchBox is a tool I use to automate the process of finding and reaching out to journalists and bloggers. The benefit I enjoy most is that it helps me save time by automating the process of finding contact information and sending pitches. This allows me to focus on creating content that will be of interest to journalists, rather than spending time trying to track them down.

06

Cision: For Those Who Need Awareness Not Promotion

Our business is completely internet-driven, making keeping track of media and other PR outlets a challenge, and for this reason, we chose a tool we felt had the greatest reach, which is Cision. Many businesses need PR as a promotional apparatus, however, if you’re like us, a business which holds a unique market space or is a new kind of product, awareness is the greater need.Cision is one of the largest and most well known tools with a massive database of over 1.5 million journalists, editors, and influencers, with full descriptions to best determine who can advance your messaging. It has excellent analysis tools that can track your campaigns, and even has the ability to bolster future outreach. Because of its massive network, user friendly platform, and most importantly, it’s seamless pairing with awareness efforts, Cision has been an excellent choice.

07

Help a Reporter Out (HARO): Contact Journalists Directly

HARO is the PR tool our business uses the most. The feature I like best about it is how you can find topics related to your niche of business. You can quickly contact journalists, and you will be alerted with new queries through email daily, giving you a wide selection to choose from. You can expand your efforts for getting quoted and provide an opportunity for your website by answering as many queries as you want.

Hubspot: Manage Email Outreach

Our PR efforts are geared towards the implementation of our outreach strategy. Email marketing is essential in nurturing our customer relationships and ensuring that our brand message is appealing and impactful to our target audience.

Using HubSpot, we can manage all our contacts in one place, plan and implement our email campaigns, and optimize them further. HubSpot also consistently offers us better suggestions on maximizing our coverage opportunity or improving the reach of our news releases each time. We can try out these suggestions through A/B testing in the same CRM. Paired together with Google Alerts, this tool will be a long-term success driver in our PR efforts.

Ryan Yount, Luckluckgo

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08

Meltwater: Gather Insights on Target Audiences

One PR tool I use the most is Meltwater. This software provides services for media monitoring and social listening. It’s a great tool for gathering insights on our target audience, competitors, industry, and campaign performance.With this tool, it’s easier to work in a data-driven environment that makes beneficial progress towards bettering our own services and spreading our clients’ brands. Meltwater is a platform with a structured way to gather all data that is relevant to our business and industry, which helps us analyze and improve.

09

Subjectline: Test the “Clickability” of Subject Lines

Approximately 35% of email recipients will open an email based on how appealing the subject line is. If your subject line is off, the probability of your intended audience opening the email decreases drastically.That’s why I use SubjectLine- a free PR & marketing tool that checks the ‘clickability’ of my subject lines i.e. how appealing it is. The tool breaks down the subject line, shows you the weak and strong elements, scores it, and offers recommendations on how to improve it. Since I started using this tool to analyze and improve my subject lines, my email open rates have increased by 6.2%, which is an incredible achievement in under a year.

10

Repurpose User Generated Content

Regurgitating user-generated content is a great PR tool and PR outreach strategy. Whether the user is a key influencer or a no-name, watching for those social media releases and recycling the useful ones on your social media platforms, blog or website is a nifty tool to generate PR. This will establish mutually beneficial relationships between your business and your customers, who will get excited to see you reusing their content and will feel loyal to your brand.

11

Stay Active on Social Media Platforms

We stay active on our socials. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok provide video marketing and connection opportunities. We often post captivating videos that highlight how consumers use your product. Videos are easily shared, and they provide information about your brand faster than long-form content. Social media makes connecting with influencers and other brands simple. It offers greater visibility and engagement, and we use it to answer customer questions. Above all, it doesn’t break the marketing budget.

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