Wednesday, May 13, 2015

3 Essential Public Relations Tools From Which Every Client Can Benefit


By Megan Quinn

I previously discussed how to explain a public relations career to friends and family. In part two of this blog series, I discuss three tools that public relations professionals frequently use and explore the reasons why those services are valuable to our clients.

Media monitoring services.

Our clients need to see the results of their public relations campaigns and we need to be able to deliver those results in an organized format. In order to comprehensively summarize our clients' coverage in the news, we create media monitoring reports.

To compile those reports, we use several media monitoring services to track and collect media coverage. In the age of digital communication, it can be difficult to capture absolutely every story under the sun, but using the right services enables us to capture most stories involving our clients. We employ different services to monitor print, online and broadcast coverage.

Media database.

One other very valuable tool is a media database. Almost every day, we use an enormous database to search for reporters nationwide, including print, online and broadcast journalists. We use this database to research the right people to which we want to pitch our clients' news, knowing that all news is "local" and each media outlet has its own particular audiences. Custom-tailoring our clients' pitches to the right media outlets is one of the major ways in which we differ from PR firms that just blast out press releases to hundreds of (usually inappropriate) journalists at the same time.

Online press release publication.

For clients that want to focus on improving their search engine optimization (SEO), we employ one other important public relations tool, a service that can be used to issue press releases to a wide variety of online media outlets. Having our clients' news get picked up all over the web is one part of helping our clients' websites stay near the top of search results pages.

However, that is only one piece of the press release puzzle. In part three of my blog series, I will explore press releases in more detail.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nice to read this article will be very helpful in the future, share more info with us. Good job!Joe Tacopina