Good public relations (PR) requires lots of research and outreach to connect with the right people to share a story. You might have the perfect journalist or publication in mind for a breaking news story but need a way to reach them, or you might want to share a story with every food magazine in the country. That’s where digital PR platforms like Cision and Meltwater come into play.
Most PR agencies and internal teams rely on one or more of the following platforms to assist in research, strategy, and outreach—three of the most important facets of the industry. Without these platforms, PR teams would be limited by what’s publicly available on the internet and would be beholden to old data. Read on for our four favorite PR platforms to reach U.S.-based audiences.
1. Cision And Muck Rack
Overview Of Cision
Cision connects you with the right people, saving your PR team valuable time. It keeps track of the people talking about you and makes you aware of what your target market thinks about you. It is an excellent way to analyze to what extent your PR campaigns have been successful.
Cision also enables you to provide stakeholders and executives with the complex data backing up your efforts, which helps you further improve your investor relations. It effectively presents your PR campaigns to your stakeholders. It also makes pitching easier by providing tons of publication data, like editors’ and journalists’ names, emails, and phone numbers.
Overview Of Muck Rack
Similarly, Muck Rack is another very effective PR platform designed to help you search for and pitch to relevant media personnel. It automatically updates your media lists and saves you precious time. It also has news tracking functionality, and you can receive email notifications whenever journalists tweet or write about your business, campaign, rivals, or other keywords.
You’ll know who to connect with, the stories you need to publish first, and the hot topics that will impact your business immediately. Muck Rack converts your PR campaign information into professional reports, and it has a feature that exports PDFs and does data entry in Excel. Both Cision and Muck Rack are excellent all-in-one PR solutions.
2. BuzzStream
Overview
Whether you’re a team of one or one hundred, BuzzStream is an end-to-end outreach software that helps you stay organized and improve your digital PR and link-building efforts. Link-building is essential in a competitive market because it allows you to emerge as someone who is honest and enables you to create valuable connections with media and other strategic partners.
BuzzStream helps you build a database based on historical data, making it easier to attract traffic toward your website. Your data is regularly backed up and kept in several places, making BuzzStream a trustworthy option for PR reporting.
3. Newswire
Overview
Newswire is another excellent PR platform designed for press releases. It promises to deliver your press release to the right audience and on time.
Newswire tracks important news and also identifies industry trends. It connects and engages with journalists to generate media coverage, which is also helpful in quality link-building. It selects the right journalists and engages them in valuable conversations, improving relations. Finally, Newswire enables you to pitch directly from the platform and provides its users with newsrooms where they can share your releases. You can reach out to thousands of powerful national editors who can help your article gain immediate attention.
4. Brand24
Overview
The main focus of Brand24 is to manage your organizational reputation conveniently. You can get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, and podcasts. The platform has a sentimental analysis ability which will tell you whether the remarks about your brand are positive or negative. If there is a negative mention, it will notify you instantly so that you can easily manage before it becomes a crisis.
Brand24 focuses on customer satisfaction and social listening. It is designed so you can know what your customers like or dislike; this will help you to improve your communications over time. It tracks how many people have seen your mentions, and it also provides its users with automated reports.
5. Meltwater
Overview
Meltwater has radically changed PR and press outreach. It is fast and efficient, which helps users gain a competitive advantage. Meltwater’s news monitoring program detects keywords associated with the subjects important to them and compiles any writing and open network content that includes those keywords. It gathers valuable data for your team so they can utilize it to personalize their sales and PR outreach. Meltwater saves teams precious time by offering custom reports, too.
PR Platforms Are The Key to Better Public Relations
Good PR campaigns can become great with the support of systems that aid research, data-gathering, outreach, press release distribution, and post-campaign analytics. Save your team valuable time and reallocate your resources to where you need them by employing one or all of these tried-and-true PR programs.
