 Eric Doyle |
Aside from the effects on our personal lives, COVID-19 has upended countless aspects of our work as well. Most—if not all—PR teams are currently working remotely. The business climate is uncertain. Our routines have been unraveled. Feels like the end of the world, right?
Throughout the chaos, there can be opportunity. And one opportunity is to optimize your PR tech stack. New and innovative software tools can help you succeed during this pandemic and well beyond.
I’ve outlined five of the best PR tools to help you operate remotely, do great work and thrive during this extraordinary challenge.
Reporting: Coverage Book
One of the most annoying and time-consuming parts of a PR professional’s day is creating reports for clients or executives. Feel my pain? Well, CoverageBook may have you covered. This tool makes it much faster to create reports—we’re talking an order of magnitude quicker. Such reports have key metrics, such as UMV and social shares, and offer nice visuals. The value of this simple tool is its ability to significantly free up time: precious hours that can be allotted to more strategic work such as new business, story ideation and relationship building.
Media Discovery: Muck Rack
The basis of any successful relationship is two-way communication, right? Therein lies the uniqueness of Muck Rack, the media database with a portal for journalists as well as PR professionals. Journalists are given the ability to create profiles, share interests and input preferred pitch topics. For the often fraught dynamic between publicists and journalists, Muck Rack offers a breath of fresh air by actually giving a voice to those on the receiving end of pitches.
Attribution: Onclusive
In our data-driven world, being able to demonstrate ROI and directly correlate efforts with results is paramount to success. Enter Onclusive, the PR analytics software that helps you understand how your PR efforts are affecting business outcomes. With a variety of attribution metrics and methods, Onclusive helps you understand the impact of your articles and campaigns. For an industry notorious for its lack of ROI tracking, Onclusive offers an important service.
PRM: Propel
PRM, which stands for Public Relations Management, is a new type of CRM that unites the entire PR workflow under one roof. Propel’s PRM offers contact management, relationship tracking, pitching tools in Gmail and Outlook, business impact reports, a media database and media monitoring. Propel is the first tool to unify the PR workflow and integrate it into Gmail and Outlook. This offers new insights and efficiencies that PR pros didn’t have before. And in our new era of remote working, a PRM like Propel can help ensure smooth collaboration and data sharing without being in the same office.
Monitoring: Notified
Notified takes media monitoring to another level. While most monitoring tools display articles that mention your brand name or keyword, that’s where Notified just gets started. Once the results are in, the system then uses AI to recommend which journalists are relevant to the topics you want to pitch. It then enables you to distribute such pitches and press releases through an integration with GlobeNewswire. By taking the key monitoring element of the PR workflow and integrating it with discovery and distribution, Notified offers great synergy.
We all hate budgeting for new tech tools. With the right ones, however, you can become more productive and efficient. You can also keep your results and workflow at top-notch quality during the difficult work environment caused by our current pandemic.
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Eric Doyle is a tech marketing and PR executive with 20 years of experience—embedded in-house and at agencies—developing and managing campaigns for enterprise and consumer tech startup and Fortune 500 brands in blockchain, crypto, financial, advertising, AI, eCommerce and entertainment sectors.
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