Public Relations is an essential job with many moving parts. You need to have the best tools available to keep your day moving. PR professionals wear many hats, and every day seems a little different. One day you could spend hours trying to locate media coverage and mentions for one of your clients, the next day, you are out pitching newspaper stories.
The bottom line is, you might need some help, and we’re so lucky to have many incredible online tools at our disposal.
If you need help with checking out media mentions, finding writers, outreach, pitching, etc, you’ll want to check out these five tools that will help you perform those tasks faster and more effectively.
1.Anewstip
Anewstip is a great search engine tool that helps you find journalists and media influencers that have spoken about a certain subject on Twitter. With the tool, you can set alerts, filters, keywords, time, and topics related to your industry. The best reason to use Anewstip is that you can quickly find journalists who already write and research stories from your industry. It’s incredibly easy to find exactly what you are looking for online with this tool.
2. Transcription Services
What if you’re not currently looking for new business, but you’d like to improve your current workflow? A great way to do that is by hiring a transcription services company. With transcription, you can conduct meetings and calls, and instead of having someone take notes or taking them yourself, you can record the meeting and send it to be transcribed. Doing this ensures that no important details get missed and it saves you a ton of time and money in the long run. Transcription services are affordable, and they help tremendously with time management when you’re busy running a PR agency.
3. Public Relations Global Network
This public relations database has 50 different PR agencies in 31 countries. If you are interested in getting found faster by more people you might want to consider signing up for PRGN. This service works as a search engine. People looking for a PR agency come onto the website and type in their location. Based on their location they’ll get a short list of agencies within relevant distance from them. If you just so happen to be in that location, the search engine will display your agency listing, and the client will reach out.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that helps keep PR agencies in touch with the latest trends in their industry. With this tool, you enter a topic into their search bar, and BuzzSumo will provide you with all the latest and greatest on that subject. This strategy is a great way to find out what is currently popular so you can get ideas for content promotion and development. You can also use BuzzSumo to keep a close eye on your competition. This tool will locate influencers in your realm for you to build a relationship with as well. You’ll get statistics for how well their content performs based on how many shares and engagements it gets.
5. HARO
The last tool we have stands for “help a reporter out.” With this tool, you can get help locating media coverage opportunities. HARO connects you with journalists and experts on specific subjects. The goal of the tool is to help PR professionals find the people they need to get news stories and media coverage. HARO has a database of over 80,000 sources and 55,000 journalists. If you are looking for high-quality media coverage that will generate attention, you want to check out HARO.
Final Thoughts
We could spend all day talking about all the incredible tools you can utilize in your PR agency, but we would be here forever. There are so many avenues you can go in PR, and a little help goes a long way. Make use of all the tools above, most of them are highly affordable and easy to use.