7 PR Tools You Need To Be Using Every Day

You need tools that cut to the chase and reduce that workload.

Luckily, we’ve found a few.

The top PR tool for Project Management

Managing your time is vital in PR. This tool will help you do just that. It also supports team collaboration and helps you visualize your project progress.

• What does the Research & Development roadmap say about that product launch?
• When do I need to request those design assets?
• When does that press release need to go out?
• When should I research that evergreen content?
• Who, on my team, has availability to write this?
• When is that client proposal due?

Having a project management tool makes answering these looming questions a breeze!

Wrike

We’re big fans of Wrike here at Buzz. On your very first log-in, you’ll be given an intuitive tour of what will soon become your top tab.

Work through personal or shared to-do lists, create gantt charts to coordinate project timings / overlap, and even monitor your team productivity in analytics!

“Wrike is a unique tool where I develop all my work. It has multiple tools that make everything much easier, such as live chat and video calls and a data storage system with tagging and quick search. I like that it has integrations with other tools that unify all the work, and make it a little more agile.” Lyonne Daher, Director of PR & Marketing at JF Restaurants

Everyone’s an ideas person, right? If you’re inundated with suggestions from the rest of the business, we’ve found that creating request forms can be a big help.

Plan the best ideas into your calendar, when it works for you.

The top PR tool for Media Monitoring

Monitoring your brand and landscape is arguably the most essential part of PR.

Being the first to know about brand mentions, topical news and what your customers really think about your brand, will give you a significant competitive advantage and make you very popular with the rest of the business 💁‍♀️

Spotting new mentions can help you:

• Conduct outreach
• Build SEO authority
• Form new partnerships
• Generate some awesome new content ideas

Such an important task requires an impressive budget, right? Not always…

BuzzSumo Monitoring And Coverage Reports

Not enough PRs know about BuzzSumo Monitoring tools, and that’s a problem.

They’re missing out on link alerts that are 3x faster than competitors, mention data that’s more streamlined than many enterprise tools, and a price that’s extremely competitive ($99p/m).

BuzzSumo is the world’s largest bank of social engagement data, with over 8bn+ articles, and BuzzSumo Monitoring lets you hone in on this data, to find your most impactful mentions.

“I’ve been telling the PR sector for ages: “You do realise that BuzzSumo has excellent monitoring features? When I show people BuzzSumo, they think it’s amazing. In five minutes, they’re literally starting to outline a strategy." Andrew Bruce Smith, Digital PR Consultant, Escherman 

Easily report on all the coverage generated around your brand with BuzzSumo’s Coverage Report. This report tracks and reveals everything from mention engagement data, to how many times your brand is mentioned in a specific article. 

• Track brand mentions alongside competitor mentions.
• Find reviews by searching positive and negative sentiment keywords.
• Analyze secondary keywords alongside your brand name (ie. "brand name" + "product")

Put simply, BuzzSumo Monitoring helps you:

See how the we used our own tool to monitor different types of PR, and generate a 108% uplift in free trial signups.

You can also check out our latest comparison against Google Alerts for more PR monitoring use cases, or head to G2 and read our reviews.

Or test-drive BuzzSumo for 30 days, and see for yourself how our monitoring tools can support your PR strategy.

Top PR tool for Social Listening

Paying attention to conversation across social media can pay dividends when it comes to understanding your audience and promoting your brand.

Our friends at Brandwatch have social listening down to a fine art. In fact, Forrester named them a leader in this space.

Brandwatch

From social posts to blogs and forums – even comment sections – Brandwatch helps you track mentions of your brand throughout billions of conversations online.

Built around the Brandwatch Influence Score and Mozrank, Brandwatch is a formidable tool which enables PRs to prioritize their top people and mentions.

And when it comes to mentions, PRs can even track their brand’s logo. What a way to find new promotional opportunities!

Our favourite part of Brandwatch comes in the form of Iris, the personal AI analyst that shows you exactly what caused conversation to spike on social – from viral tweets, to hashtags and emerging news stories.

Pretty nifty.

“Brandwatch gives us the ability to monitor brand mentions, allowing us to preempt potential PR issues, monitor sensitive issues, and report on KPIs like SOV for campaigns.” Michael Yoder, Communication Specialist, Spectrum Health

Top PR tool for Influencer Outreach

Working in PR is all about who you know. But who is worth knowing?

Finding and building relationships with authentic influencers that generate real engagement and PR value (not just followers) can be key to distributing your content and brand message.

At BuzzSumo, we have just released our own journalist database and outreach tool. It lets you deep-dive into journalist interests, emails, and the publications they write for, in a quick click. You can find out all you need to know about it here ➡️ ✨ BuzzSumo Journalist Database ✨

Now for another influencer tool that our customers love using, to make contact with those key voices.

Cision

If you need another outreach tool which helps you store and contact journalists all in one place, you can't go wrong with Cision.

With 850K pitchable media contacts across 224 territories, it is a seriously expansive directory of some of the world's most important journalists and influencers.

PRs love Cision since it incorporates all of the elements you need to earn quality coverage, from a PR newswire, to a journalist request service (HARO), to its database – it's a one-stop shop for creating campaigns and reaching out to journalists.

So you know how to contact journalists, but do you know how to contact journalists? 😉 We've released our journalist pitching report, where we've analyzed 600K journalists across numerous industries, and surveyed even more, to get to grips with what journalists really want from your PR pitches.

Top PR tools for SEO

SEO is becoming more ingrained in PR as the days go by.

After all, why stop at landing a mention, when you can also generate a link?

Getting links back to yours or your clients’ website not only boosts traffic, it signifies to search engines that it’s an authoritative and credible source.

And that is very important in modern day search, where semantic relationships, knowledge and user experience continually trump the SEO tactics of the old guard.

Pi Datametrics

When it comes to monitoring the authority of the content you create, Pi Datametrics is a solid choice.

It shows you backlink data, enables you to track the rankings of any content on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, and gives you copywriting assistance to create optimized articles.

But what is truly brilliant about Pi is its share of search monitoring. You can track hundreds of terms related to your brand ecosystem, and get a top-level understanding of your PR efforts in context of the search landscape.

Imagine showing your boss or client how your PR efforts had enabled them to level-up in rankings across hundreds of searches, against thousands of competitors.

That sounds like a PR metric to shout about!

“Pi is one of the best tools I have ever come across for helping with analysis, and I would recommend it before any other tool." Jennifer Garside, Audience Growth, Conde Nast

Top PR tool for Trends

Jumping on trending news is the bane of every PRs’ existence. Am I wrong?

PRs need to know what’s going on in the world to align their brands with things that people actually care about, and create content that generates actual engagement – otherwise, what’s the point?

Jumping on trending news is one of the best ways to do that.

But other than scanning the headlines every morning, and checking out what’s trending on Twitter, what can you do to hone in on topics that are rapidly building momentum?

Introducing…

Exploding Topics

With the sheer scale of digital content produced every day, it’s so easy for your story to get lost in the noise – unless you’re first to the trending party, that is.

Exploding Topics, founded by SEO whizz Brian Dean (Backlinko), allows you to do just that, using AI to show you topics that are snowballing across the internet.

The ET team curates these topics, organizes them by category and sends them straight to your inbox in one handy newsletter, to help you get the jump on the growing topics before they take off.

And, if you combine your chosen topic with trending headline tools like BuzzSumo, you can check what’s already out there to make sure your angle is unique, and your stories never get buried again!

“The Exploding Topics newsletter is worth checking out — it tells you about up-and-coming trends, with a nice synopsis of each one — team is doing cool stuff that I’m a bit jealous of, TBH” Dr Pete Myers, Marketing Scientist, Moz

Top PR tool for automation

You’re busy people. You need to cut straight to the insight, and cut out the heavy-lifting.

And for that you need automation.

At BuzzSumo, our PR customers love extracting our headlines, engagement and mention data with third-party automation tools, to custom monitor breaking stories and brand mentions.

And the top tool they use to do this is…

If This Then That (IFTTT)

I’m sure you’ve probably heard of this powerful freebie! It helps you set up rules and trigger bespoke actions between applications, based on your unique set of objectives.

And there’s basically no end to the things you can automate with IFTTT.

In the PR world, you can use it to do a whole host of things, like integrating your PR tool with Google Sheets and Data Studio to create bespoke reports.

Check out this neat dashboard that Andrew Bruce Smith, Founder of agency Escherman, created using IFTTT and Google Data Studio.

Using BuzzSumo Monitoring data, he generated a list of mentions that could be searched by keyword, author or date range. This automation helped him:

• Quickly find important client news
• Apply a date range to explore brand mentions during campaign timelines
• Look at top-level trends in mentions, and explore peaks
• See how domain authority changed based on his filters, helping him to prioritize the most important articles, and dig out fake news
• Quickly find associated journalists to contact
• And more…

For some other handy PR IFTTT automations, have a read of this article from PR Stack and this one from Seer Interactive.

So, there you have it. Seven awesome PR tools to help you shapeshift your way through one of the most versatile roles in digital.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and recommendations on what you think make for some of the best PR tools. Let us know on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

And if you heard anything you liked about BuzzSumo, be sure to grab your 30 day free trial to try it out for yourself.