There’s no doubt that obtaining PR placements has become an increasingly difficult task, and sometimes, in life, when things get tough you need to rely on a little help from some friends.
In this piece, we’re covering seven of our favourite PR tools and software that we utilise day-in-day-out, to give you an idea of the kind of backup you need to crank your PR efforts up a notch in the new year.
Whether you’re looking to forge tighter relationships with local journalists, or you’re looking for a means to keep closer tabs on your overall PR performance – we’ve covered everything you need to know.
#1: HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a tool in which journalists send out requests to qualified experts, businesses and communities that could offer valuable insight into a story they’re working on within a certain deadline.
Once you set yourself up with an account, you will receive requests via email each day which relate to your chosen expertise and industry. Although these are mostly for a US audience, they are often ideal if you cater to an international client-base.
When you receive a request that you know you can answer succinctly, you can pitch your response, and if what you’re offering is of interest to the journalist they’ll get in touch.
While this is a valuable, and completely free tool, there are Advanced Plans available too. Some of the perks of paying for a subscription, include text alerts, choosing specific keywords to monitor for more refined opportunities, and the Head Start feature that allows you to get the jump on those using the free account and therefore more time to hone your pitch.
Plans:
Basic – Free
Standard – $19 p/month
Advanced – $49 p/month
Premium – $149 p/month
See what you can get with each package here >.
#2: Muck Rack
The Muck Rack PRM (Public Relations Management) platform gives you the chance to work with your team to find the right journalists for your stories, create custom pitches, and forge relationships that stand the test of time.
You can also monitor what’s in the news and what impact that might have for your business and the sector overall.
Muck Rack lets journalists compile a complete portfolio of their work, which means that you can track writers you’re most interested in collaborating with, collect their contact information, and refine your pitches to ensure they’re writing about subjects that reflect your industry.
As well as allowing you to track journalists, you can also monitor competitors, businesses and entire industries and receive emails each time new articles in your space are being published.Â
Plans:
You can request custom prices here >.
#3: ResponseSource
ResponseSource is one of our favourite PR tools here at Quibble, since it allows us to connect with journalists, media personalities and influencers as and when they need sources for their pieces.
According to ResponseSource figures, more than 30,000 journalists and content creators utilise the network to collect insights, data, expert analysis, and the connections they need from a range of only trusted and reliable sources.
The great news for businesses looking to gain PR coverage is that you can attract the attention of these journalists and content creators, by creating pitches in response to requests that come straight to your email everyday – similar to HARO.
The biggest advantage to ResponseSource is the range of categories which you can choose from to tailor the requests you’re receiving.
There are twenty-five different such categories to select from, such as business and finance, entertainment and arts and more niche categories like public sector and legal, medical, and pharmaceutical.
ResponseSource users on the top tier plans can also gain access to the Vuelio Media List. This list contains over a million journalists, influencers and contribution opportunities.
You can find everything about each opportunity, such as the contact name, their pitching preferences, covered subjects and what they do and don’t like.
This is ideal for those looking to create a database of close PR contacts, and certainly is worth taking a look at during the free trial.
Plans:
The Pay as You Go plan starts from as little as ÂŁ85 p/month and can be customised with categories and press release requirements. Find out more here>.
#4: BuzzSumo
We’ll start this with a question: how do you create successful content?
The answer is simply by first understanding what topics will resonate with your audience and the industry at large.
BuzzSumo is an ideal tool for this end, since it enables you to discover and analyse top-performing blogs, videos, and topics within your industry. Essentially, this means you can reverse engineer this data to understand why they’re working and then replicate the strategies you identify for your own content.
For instance, if your business operates in the catering industry and you’re seeing exponential growth on stories about food trucks, you can use this tool to see why this is trending, and do something similar on your own blog to take advantage of this upward trajectory.
Again, similar to Muck Rack, you can utilise the tool to monitor any big names and personalities in your industry too. The very moment they hit publish on a new blog, you’ll be notified through your dashboard to ensure you never miss a beat in your industry.
Basic – Free
Pro – $99 p/month
Plus – $179 p/month
Large – $299 p/month
See what you can get with each package here >.
#5: SparkToro
PR is all about making relationships, and no matter whether you’re putting out a piece to the local press or chasing a by line with one of big dogs, you first need to understand the audience you’re looking to connect with.
In order to really dig deep into the way someone’s brain works, you must first understand what gets them out of bed in the morning – enter Rand Fishkin’s SparkToro.
Although SparkToro is a relatively new to the PR intelligence tool market, it’s certainly worth considering adding to your marketing arsenal, not only for PR purposes, but for social and content marketing too!
The SparkToro search feature allows you to explore websites, podcasts, social accounts, and blog posts that mean the most to your audience through the terms they’re searching for. You can build lists of the accounts that you’d like to monitor and track, to keep an eye on up-and-coming microtrends before they blow up!
SparkToro have also developed a range of unique tools to gain an understanding of how your brand is perceived. For example, using the Fake Follower Audit you can identify any bot, spam, propaganda or inactive accounts following you, and you can therefore disregard these accounts when analysing your true social following.
Free
Basic – $38 p/month
Standard – $112 p/month
Agency – $225 p/month
See what you can get with each package here >.
#6: Grammarly
We’ve sung the praises of this tool before, and although it’s not strictly a direct PR tool, it is absolutely invaluable. Â
There’s nothing worse than spending the time to craft the perfect email pitch, only to discover you’ve left uncorrected typos in your copy.
Okay, sure, it’s not the end of the world, but remember you’re trying to leave a lasting message with your recipients and spelling errors and grammatical mistakes are certainly not the way to do that.
By utilising Grammarly, you can ensure that your content is concise, effective and, crucially, free from errors.
Grammarly analyses your work, so you can ensure that you’re hitting a variety of quality markers, such as spelling, grammar and punctuation, sentence structure, vocabulary, engagement and much more.
The handy plagiarism checker also allows you to check whether any of your writing is similar to anything already published. The tool analyses thousands of search results to pinpoint exact match words and phrases so you can rejig your sentence structure.
Free
Individual – From $30 p/month
Business – From $11.67 a month per user
See what you can get with each package here >.
#7: BuzzStream
No outreach process should be an arbitrary one. If success is your goal – which obviously it is – you’ll need to carefully plan and monitor what is and, indeed, what isn’t working.
Fortunately, BuzzStream is capable of storing outreach contacts, tracking every click and monitoring every email open. This way, you know precisely what is working and what needs to be tweaked.
You can also utilise BuzzStream analytics to identify which team members are working on which campaigns, how many emails they’re sending out and ultimately which areas of your outreach programme may need further work.
You can even manage your relationship status to let everyone know what stage you’re at with each placement. By creating customised templates, you can split each campaign down to ensure you’re targeting the right influencers and journalists with the right stories of interest.
What’s more BuzzStream University has tonnes of great information to refine and perfect your PR efforts.
Plans:
Starter – $24 p/month
Growth – $124 p/month
Professional – From $299 p/month
Custom – From $999 p/month
See what you can get with each package here >.
Bonus PR Tools
Many would never consider Twitter as an invaluable PR tool, but we certainly do!
When you’re looking to run a PR campaign, Twitter should be at the very top of your list of platforms to check out.
For starters, when used correctly you have an entire media database of journalists from all kinds of publications, in any niche you can think of, and it’s completely free!
Not only can you find what journalists are looking for when they’re writing their pieces using the Journo Request hashtag, but you can also connect with them too.
By checking in every now and then and offering them important insights for their articles, you can create a relationship that is beneficial for both parties.
Buy Me a Coffee
This one comes from left field, and won’t be applicable for every campaign. That said, it is a good way of opening a dialogue with content creators.
Creators in a range of niches, such as journalists and influencers use Buy Me a Coffee so their audiences can contribute towards their artistic endeavours.
The service allows users to give tips and donations, links to which can now be regularly found in the Twitter bios of journalists and writers.
As we mentioned, this isn’t necessarily the right strategy for every journalistic contact. However, if you know that a journalist works with a niche publication that you’ve been looking to get featured in, donating through the app can be a great way to get a conversation going.
Takeaways
We live in a world of 24/7 news, and everything you need to know is at the tips of your fingers at any given moment.
This just goes to show you how difficult PR is these days, and how increasingly difficult it is to make a splash in modern society.
This is why the latest tools and software’s can give you that leg up you need to create strong relationships and find those niche publications that hold an interest in what you’re trying to say.
The list we’ve put together are just a few of our favourite tools, and is therefore not an exhaustive list – it’s really up to you to explore your options and put together the arsenal of tools that work for you.
If you have any questions about our PR approach or would like to know more about any of our other services, please get in touch with our team of experts.
Source: quibble.digital
