By now, you’ve probably noticed that PR is evolving. Public relations today is much more about being a resource for your contacts and audience members, earning trust, and building truly authentic relationships than it is about blasting the message about how great your brand, achievement, or new products and services are.
PR trends will continue to force the industry to evolve, and keeping up isn’t always going to be easy. But building a modern PR plan and taking advantage of the right PR tools can make a big difference. Below are seven tools that can help your team earn and measure media attention in the age of modern PR:
1. Cision Communications Cloud
Any solid PR plan starts with targeting. This platform helps your team identify the right media contacts and influencers through a comprehensive global database. After you’ve targeted the right influencers and end consumers, Cision provides smart engagement with PR Newswire to distribute content across the world.
Cision Monitoring delivers your coverage across online, social, print, and broadcast channels, scanning millions of stories daily. Cision Analytics includes key metrics that illustrate how well a brand is positioned in news media coverage, such as prominence and sentiment analysis. And Cision Impact shows the actual audiences that consume your earned media and delivers reporting on how those audiences might have driven specific business results.
2. TVEyes
Earned media isn’t limited to digital and print publications, and the tools you use shouldn’t be, either. TVEyes allows public relations pros to monitor for television and radio segments. The platform allows you to pick up the broadcast coverage either by keyword or using sophisticated search logic and finds the coverage across national and global markets.
This tool will keep your clients and leadership informed of TV appearances, help them conduct media research and media-train executives, assist in creating reports, and alert account teams to new coverage.
3. OnePitch
When it comes to pitching journalists, finding up-to-date contact information can be a long and tedious process. Even after your media list is completed, there’s no guarantee that your pitch will be read when it is mixed in with hundreds of other pitches touting companies with “groundbreaking” and “disruptive” accomplishments.
This is where OnePitch comes in. PR professionals save time by sending just one pitch in an easy-to-use template to hundreds of verified media contacts from top-tier outlets and trade and niche publications. These journalists opt in to receive one email per day based on their selected writing interests, and they have the ability to contact you directly.
4. Propel
While we’re on the subject of pitching, I have to mention Propel’s platform. At the center of Propel’s tools is the idea of efficiency (which, honestly, we could all use more of). Sending tons of pitches a day can be time-consuming, not to mention the time it takes to look into whom to send your pitch to.
Propel is a management tool that helps you send personalized pitches (so you aren’t just sending the same, blanket message to every contact), set reminders for yourself so nothing goes dormant, mark your emails according to stage or account, and gain access to scads of analytics regarding your pitches and PR strategy to see what’s working.
5. Sorc’d
Knowing your audience is the key to success, and as Entrepreneur editor-in-chief Jason Feifer observes, offering specific examples to prove that you understand a journalist’s coverage can be the difference between having your PR pitch ignored or starting a new relationship.
You can use Sorc’d to easily save and recall interesting bits of information from a list of a target writer’s previously published articles and then share those bits when conducting outreach.
The outreach template can be customized with personal comments referencing existing content and why the journalist should include your pitch in his or her next article. It has been reported that personalization can yield five to eight times the ROI on your marketing spend and can boost sales by at least 10 percent, which makes an add-on like Sorc’d essential.
6. AirPR
Reporters and journalists are most interested in topics that are considered “newsworthy,” and one of the easiest ways to get attention (especially for a smaller brand) is to align your news with current events. When you need inspiration for pitching trending industry topics, AirPR is a solution you shouldn’t ignore.
AirPR makes it easy to search for trending topics based on article frequency and social amplification trends so that publicists can craft pitches around the topics that matter to their contacts and their target audience.
7. CoverageBook
Once you’ve done the hard work of successfully earning media placements for your clients or your own brand, the last step is to showcase all that hard work in a way that’s easy to consume and shows quantifiable evidence of ROI.
CoverageBook makes it easy for PR professionals to create custom data reports by simply copying and pasting the links of recent placements. The system then generates an automated report, which includes screenshots and key metrics to share with the client.
The PR industry is always growing, and new tools emerge all the time to help navigate those changes. The seven tools listed here can help you improve productivity today and make it easy to earn and measure the results of your media coverage.
