Digital PR spans multiple platforms and requires a good strategy to achieve success. Finding the right digital PR tools to manage and support you through a campaign can make all the difference in achieving success.
If you’re looking to improve the way you conduct your PR campaigns, read on and discover the best digital PR tools to support you through the whole process.
A digital PR tool can be software or an online platform that empowers businesses and marketers to conduct digital public relations efforts. It is designed to streamline and enhance the various aspects of a successful digital PR campaign.
There are many digital PR tools in the market today, and choosing the right one can come down to a matter of purpose and necessity. This can likewise make it seemingly overwhelming. Fortunately, there are a variety of software and apps digital PR professionals can use in the different phases of PR to conduct both proactive and reactive digital public relations.
Many of the digital PR tools in the market today support the many phases of PR campaigns, including:
Media monitoring involves monitoring media coverage to better understand your audience’s brand perception, also called public sentiment. This includes tracking related keyword mentions and product and brand mentions on websites, blogs, forums, and social media platforms.
Tools for this digital PR phase allow you to track keywords and monitor social media, keeping you on top of emerging trends.
At its core, Hubspot is essentially a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that ensures you can keep track of potential customers at different points in the buyer’s journey. However, the beauty of the tool is that it works just as well as a social media monitoring and content management tool, which can eliminate the need for another subscription and save you time learning how to use another platform.
Combine your media monitoring priorities with CRM. When you use Hubspot for multiple phases of digital PR, you get a diverse range of features in one significantly powerful tool.
Hootsuite is an all-in-one, user-friendly social media monitoring platform that offers easy integration. This tool allows you to seamlessly launch your digital PR campaign and monitor its performance and audience perception.
Small to medium businesses and marketing professionals can use the Hootsuite platform to schedule social media posts and automate media monitoring. Audience insights and social listening analytics can shape the direction of your digital PR strategy.
Agorapulse allows teams to oversee brand mentions and maximize social listening for relevant conversations about your brand and product. Using the platform as a digital PR tool gives you a pulse on how well your brand is performing while showing your competitors as well.
The platform offers standard media monitoring tool features at a more reasonable cost than its competitors. Use it to post content, track performance, and analyze social listening and competitors. However, teams must check if the platform supports your preferred social media platforms.
Sprout Social is a tool that offers real-time quantitative and contextual data and insights on all social media interactions, mentions, and conversations. It enables you to monitor your media coverage and respond to any relevant social media site from the platform itself.
Social listening tools are Sprout Social’s biggest asset. The platform’s boolean operators allow you to better understand the most relevant conversations as they happen.
Talkwalker is a product of Hootsuite, which offers access to millions of media data sources to get the most robust insight into relevant conversations. The platform also provides the most accurate data analysis, covering conversation clusters, engagements, comments, and influencers.
As a consumer intelligence platform, Talkwalker can help you make more informed decisions in your digital PR strategies with English-based audience insights. Some valuable insights offered on the platform include brand perception, audience behavior, and preferences.
Press release distribution is important in any digital PR campaign, ensuring your content is visible to the right audiences. Press release distribution tools share your messaging with a targeted list of journalists, bloggers, and media outlets who can attract the right attention. Some can even aid in optimizing your PR for SEO.
Newswire is an online platform that allows businesses to distribute press releases to major news outlets. This highly-rated PR tool adheres to a meticulous editorial process that ensures your content is of the highest caliber as soon as your audience reads your press release.
The Newswire platform helps you expand your audience by offering domestic and international distribution lines at a more affordable rate than most PR distribution competitors. After your press release is distributed, your team will receive a comprehensive analytics report to help you gauge your campaign’s success. Aside from this, you can use the tool to optimize content, pitch media, and monitor media.
Meltwater is a well-known platform for media intelligence. It provides a full suite of features that cover many aspects of digital PR, including press release distribution, media management, and analytics.
As a consumer intelligence platform, Talkwalker can help you make more informed decisions in your digital PR strategies with English-based audience insights. Some valuable insights offered on the platform include brand perception, audience behavior, and preferences.
PR Newswire is a platform owned by Cision, which covers both online and print distribution, making it a holistic approach to a PR campaign. The platform enables businesses to connect with leading publishers in various industries.
PR Newswire shines within the bigger US market as most of the news outlets in their database are American. This makes it an ideal platform for growing and expanding your brand to a US audience.
PR Web is another press release distribution platform owned by Cision, a PR software company. This service connects press releases, images, and videos to journalists and news outlets in your selected categories.
The platform offers capabilities that are very similar to PR Newswire. However, it does provide a more affordable price point for multimedia press releases. This can be a worthy option for businesses seeking to expand their audience base with smaller budgets.
Business Wire is a news distribution platform covering press releases and investor relations. It is a world-renowned voice in media, offering access to publications in 162 countries and industries.
Business Wire is an ideal distributor for the financial services industry specifically as it has built its following within this space. This makes it a great option for businesses that want to expand a following that is interested in finance.
Identifying and connecting with influencers in a specific industry or niche who can help promote a brand or product. Keep track of interactions and relationships with journalists, influencers, and key stakeholders with relationship management tools. These tools often include databases of influencers, contact information, and engagement metrics.
Connectively, formerly known as HARO (Help A Reporter Out), is every SEO and PR professional’s well-known secret. This platform makes it easy for journalists to find sources for their topics.
When a journalist asks a question, experts (SEO and PR professionals) can pitch their content and knowledge to a reputable source they can use. You can, in turn, obtain high-quality backlinks to your own website.
Obtain high-quality backlinks to your website with Connectively, which can help establish you as an authority in your industry.
JustReachOut is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help you reach out to journalists for more media coverage.
Identify the type of journalist and industry you need to connect with. JustReachOut uses AI technology to create your pitch in seconds. You can then schedule when and how often you want to follow up with the platform.
Use this tool to obtain journalist emails. This information can help you build links immediately with US brands and audiences and build your media lists as your brand grows.
Prowly is primarily a media relations tool offering media contacts and features to help you run your digital PR campaign. These include creating and sending press releases, social listening, and crafting media reports.
Find the right journalist by searching for their name, the news outlet, or keyword. You apply filters to narrow down results and get the most relevant journalists. The search results will show you all the necessary information you need to connect with them.
Use the platform to send bulk outreach emails to the most relevant journalists. In this way, you can streamline your outreach processes without repeating the writing process.
PressPage is an AI-powered online platform offering a media database where you can pitch your content to media professionals from one place.
Store and manage your media database and assets in PressPage. The platform can help you craft an impressive pitch for journalists with AI.
Use the platform’s templates to create your pitches and build your brand’s newsroom. You can also view your published content’s performance metrics to evaluate your campaign and optimize your strategy.
Buzzstream is an end-to-end outreach platform that allows you to centralize your outreach efforts to journalists and influencers. From email segmentation to crafting messages with templates and pulling detailed outreach reports, you can effectively manage the process.
Build your prospective media lists with Buzzstream’s database. Quickly compose and send effective emails with professionally made templates on the platform. Analyze your outreach reports to optimize your future PR efforts.
Automate your outreach process with templates, scheduled send-outs, and bulk emails.
Tools in this category are designed to assist in creating, scheduling, and publishing content such as articles, blog posts, and social media updates. This helps maintain a consistent online presence that can continue to engage and intrigue your target audiences.
Google Trends is a free tool that lets anyone see what topics are trending on the Google search engine.
Enter a keyword to analyze. The search will provide you with a graph showing you an overview of the term’s popularity over time.
You can interpret data from Google Trends in several ways, such as topic relevance, geographical relevance, and other related search terms. This information can be used to conduct keyword research, build topic clusters, and strategy optimization.
Google Alerts is another free tool that has been around for some time. This service enables you to monitor the most relevant web activities, all based on a simple keyword or phrase.
Connect your Google account to the platform and add a keyword or phrase you want to monitor. Customize your notification settings to choose how frequently you want to receive alerts through email.
Use this tool to stay alert about your press release’s activity. You can also maximize it by setting up notifications when relevant news, products from competitors, or content that mentions your brand pops up.
Answer the Public is an online platform for search listening that delivers valuable audience insight based on a single keyword.
Enter a keyword and select the region in which your target audiences are based. The platform will pull hundreds of questions and long-tail keywords that people in your chosen location search. You can additionally do a deeper dive on specific keywords.
Discover what questions your target audience is asking. Use your findings to inform your ideation and content strategy as they share more than just questions about your topic.
WordPress.org is a content management system (CMS) and platform for hosting all your content. It’s a powerful tool that can help you keep up with your blog articles if you want to establish your brand as an industry authority.
Enter your articles and allow the platform to do all the coding. Website builders, themes, and plugins are available to ensure your page looks just as expected.
Choose the most relevant WordPress plugins, such as Hubspot, Yoast, and Rank Math, to manage and fully optimize your content effectively.
Grammarly is a useful writing tool that checks your grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Install the plugin on your chosen browser or desktop. Customize with your brand’s writing style guide and add any niche terms unique to your brand and industry. Once you’re ready, use it to check your content as you write.
The plug-in allows you to review and edit content in real time. This helps keep the tone of your copy consistent and on-brand for any platform.
Descript is a video and audio editing tool that simplifies the content editing process. It can significantly help transform video and audio content into transcripts so they become easily shareable media.
Upload your audio or video file. Artificial intelligence and machine learning translate the audio into a highly accurate transcript in 25 languages.
Use Descript to turn audio or video files of press releases, interviews, and other valuable content into accurate transcripts. You can repurpose this copy for other social media platforms.
Loom is a screen recording tool that lets users take footage of their desktop’s screen for communication.
Once you’ve installed Loom, set up your desired screen and use the recording button. Choose the setting you need to record before showing your intended content. You can additionally record your voice and use drawing tools to enhance the communication experience.
Loom is a valuable tool for information sharing. Use it for your team’s internal communications and to create educational videos to supplement learning articles, which your audiences can use as a resource.
These analytics tools provide insights and data on the performance of your PR campaigns. Metrics include media coverage, engagement, website traffic, and sentiment analysis.
Google Analytics is one of the most used analytics tools among digital marketers. This platform offers a wide range of insights into your website traffic, conversion rates, and user behaviors.
Make well-informed decisions based on actual data on your digital PR strategy and optimization.
Ahrefs is the SEO professional’s most valued tool for growing website traffic. The data offered on the platform can drive your digital PR campaign to success.
Conduct deep-dive analyses to extract actionable information on Ahref. For example, you can check a site’s domain rating and traffic to see if it can boost your SEO.
Birdeye is a platform that helps manage a business’s online reputation through analytics, making it a useful tool for digital PR.
Use the Birdeye platform to monitor how audiences view your brand. Quickly respond to reviews and manage your brand image.
Most social media platforms offer insights that help you understand your follower demographics, post engagements, and overall performance. The features offered can vary per platform.
Conduct regular reviews, weekly or monthly, to analyze performance. Data offered can help you identify optimal posting time, audience demographics per platform, and what type of content your audiences respond best to.
Using digital PR tools offers numerous benefits that can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your digital public relations efforts. When you choose to use any of these tools, you gain many benefits, including:
The list of digital PR tools can go on, considering how many ways you can innovate and run successful PR campaigns that positively impact your brand. While that means the cost can continue to rise as you invest in more and more of these platforms.
Fortunately, there is also another way to ensure your campaigns run smoothly. You can work with a PR link-building service that provides you access to all these essential tools.
Ethical SEO can help your SaaS business’s digital PR campaigns. Schedule a demo with us to see how we get your brand recognized.
