*original article posted by PRontheGo via @Medium
We asked PR & growth experts to provide Resources That’ll Improve Your Public Relations. Which resources do you use to develop and implement PR strategies? Which tools are out there to improve the performance of PR campaigns? Which resources give entrepreneurs a better understanding of PR? Here are their answers:
1) Find the right contact
“In PR it’s all about who you know — or more importantly, who you can reach. Today, with massive turnover of media staff and the push towards online communications through DMs and social media, people may find it actually harder to reach key gatekeepers (media, editors, event planners, podcast hosts, etc) who can put them and their message front and centre. Hunter.io is an online ‘email hunting tool’ that allows you to search up anyone’s email as long as you have their company URL. This has come in handy say, when searching for a specific Huffington Post editor whose contact info wasn’t displayed online, but by using the email search in Hunter.io — we were able to figure out his direct email and craft a personalized message that didn’t land in a general inbox. This can be a life saver when you’re under the gun!”
— Amanda Sutton, Owner at Catalyst communications choreography
2) Do your homework
“Before you approach any journalist you must make sure you do your homework. If you’re an early stage business you really want to start picking up the phone and building relationships with journalists covering your sector. However, any approach must be tailored. Muck Rack is a great tool to find out what journalists have been writing and tweeting about, where they are based and what they are interested in. Always prepare properly for your first contact with the journalist. The more relevant you can make your initial pitch, the better chance you’ll have of getting some coverage for your business.”
— Mark Di-Toro, Head of PR at iwoca, one of Europe’s largest small business lenders
3) Target relevant influencers
“I can’t stress how important it is to know your target audience and not just send out a few generic pitch emails to vaguely relevant websites. Ahrefs is an invaluable tool for targeting the right websites. We search for similar campaigns to the one we’re pitching then use Ahrefs to find all the websites linking to these campaigns. We then not only have someone who will be potentially interested in our campaign, but we also have a great conversation starter for our pitch: “Hey, I’ve seen you’ve shared X campaign before, we thought this might be of interest…” — Will Craig, Managing Director at LeaseFetcher
4) Get the subject line right
“In any pitch you send via email, the subject line is the first thing a journalist will see. SubjectLine is a free, easy-to-use online resource that evaluates an email subject line to help you craft the perfect subject line that will get your pitches opened and read. The platform rates your subject line with a score out of 100, and provides you with marketing feedback on how to improve it for the best chances of success. I personally use this every time I send a pitch to ensure my subject lines are clear, direct, and don’t read as spam.”
— Devynne Honsa, Managing Partner at BLND Public Relations
5) Provide your expertise
“When it comes to your public relations efforts, HARO (Help a Reporter Out) offers unparalleled opportunities that would be difficult to match in other ways with such minimal time constraints. To sum it up, writers post queries to HARO, and in turn, site users can reply with beneficial, well-thought-out quotes. When your quote is selected, it will be published, along with full quote attribution and a backlink right back to your site. There is no simpler publicity method that can be implemented.”
— Angela Hope, Marketing Manager at UpFlip
6) Listen to your audience
“We use an app/website tool called Mention, it allows us to listen to conversations in and around our industry, and in particular unlinked mentions of our brand name.
We always reply to any tagged mentions on social media, but until recently we were missing out on complaints or conversations around our brand when we weren’t tagged in.
This allowed us to see what our customers were saying about our services and react accordingly and take the information on board to provide a better service. We also respond to complaints as we try to resolve the issues with the customer, 1) to keep them as a customer and 2) to prevent them from damaging our rep on-line.” — Sean Clancy, SEO director at Edge Marketing Australia
7) Track brand queries
“Online PR is all about raising awareness about your brand and earning attention for it. Alongside tracking earned media, inbound links, offline coverage, and social engagement, start tracking month-over-month brand searches, and their growth. That’ll help you see the real effect of your PR campaigns on your brand visibility. You can find this data in Google Search Console. Also, you can measure an online ‘Share of Voice’ by comparing the number of acquired inbound links between you and your competitors. A tool that can help with that is MOZ.” — Ana Casic, Media Relations at TalentLMS
Thank you!
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PRontheGO.com — The Creative Entrepreneur’s source for PR hacks.