Public relations is often a very demanding career. It’s even been labeled as the eighth most stressful job in America.
In many ways, it’s a 24/7 job. If the media needs something, you want to get it to them right away. If you wait too long (even by an hour), you could risk missing out on the opportunity to get your client or company’s name and knowledge featured.
And getting coverage is harder than ever. In the U.S., there are six public relations professionals for every one journalist. This means that getting journalists to bite can be even more challenging, requiring more precise research and pitching. And most of the time, journalists don’t respond, which means a lot of effort for little reward.
Meanwhile, the media itself remains in constant flux, stakeholders have new demands and PR is under greater scrutiny than ever to show ROI.
Public Relations Management (PRM) is a type of software designed specifically to help manage your team’s relationships with the media and measure success of PR activities.
PRM unites the traditional elements of Public Relations software—media database, monitoring, distribution and reporting—into a single platform built to boost team collaboration and efficiency.
If you’re manually researching reporters and creating lists, using one solution to distribute and track pitches and yet another system to measure and report ROI, you’re spending precious time doing tasks that Public Relations Management software could handle for you.
Whether you work on a team of many or a team of one, investing in a Public Relations Management solution can pay dividends in time saved, coverage gained, and the ability to use data to optimize each element of your PR workflow.
Source: 2020 Muck Rack State Of PR Survey
According to the State of PR survey, 83% spreadsheets and 37% use media databases. Only 5% use dedicated CRMs like Salesforce.
Spreadsheets are static by nature.
The media landscape changes every single day, but do your spreadsheets change with it? For example, if you use a spreadsheet to manage a large media list, how can you possibly ensure your data is accurate and up-to-date? As is the nature of the industry, reporters change beats and media outlets frequently. Similarly, if a member of your PR team moves on to a new role, can your spreadsheet give you valuable information about their journalist relationships? Manually tracking these types of changes is not practical.
Spreadsheets are not built for collaboration.
Yes, multiple people can work together in the same Google Sheet, but let’s be honest: it’s not the easiest way to scale. If you’re reaching out to a journalist, is there an easy way to see if one of your colleagues reached out last week? Maybe to a degree, but even then only with a lot of administrative work and data entry, which brings us to our next point…
You'll spend extra hours on admin.
As PR pros, time is something we all wish we had a little more of in our days. While working in a spreadsheet may feel like an effective way to manage information, it’s eating up more of your time than you think. Working in spreadsheets can often feel clunky—you likely spend hours reformatting, checking data and updating information.
It’s difficult to understand team relationship history and activity with journalists.
For decades, a PR pro’s greatest tool for earning coverage for their organization, or their client, has been variations of the media database. However, the bulk of legacy solutions on the market today have been pieced together by acquiring other companies, rather than focusing on how to make your team’s workflow more efficient.
Relationships are at the heart of PR, but building and maintaining meaningful relationships with journalists isn’t easy. Tracking all of the pitches sent, social media interactions, real life meetings and event invites is crucial to understanding who on your team has the best relationship with a journalist and avoiding any mishaps.
Legacy software makes it difficult to manage information efficiently and effectively, get new hires up to speed on projects and processes, and keep relationships moving forward—even when teammates go on vacation.
You can’t add your own custom data.
If you have a custom contact or information for a specific journalist, more times than not you’re adding it into one of your spreadsheets. As we’ve mentioned, spreadsheets are not built for managing the workflow of PR teams, be it media list creation and maintenance, activity tracking, coverage reports, and everything in between.
Still, thousands of PR professionals still try desperately to make them work “well enough”, as they have for decades.
You need a solution that allows you and your team to store all of your relationship data in one place, eliminating the need for media lists in static spreadsheets.
You’ll spend countless hours trying to keep information up-to-date.
Many legacy PR databases fail to regularly update their listings for freshness and accuracy, while others lack the crucial customization and personalization features communicators need to navigate this ever-expanding media landscape. These issues cause PR and comms professionals to dig outside of their database, searching across Google and LinkedIn, or guessing emails and running them through email validators. Not only are you wasting time and money on manual tasks that you should be automating, there’s a likelihood that you’re falling victim to the broad targeting and spam tactics that these providers promote. Journalists loathe traditional PR solutions and you don’t want to end being publicly shamed by them on Twitter.
Static media list spreadsheets become outdated in the blink of an eye.
Other departments have had dozens of CRM-like solutions to choose from—for decades
CRM stands for customer relationship management. In all of its forms, from simple digitized contact cards to the robust variety of solutions on the market today, CRMs enable companies to store information about a given audience from one centralized location.
Over the past couple of decades, software has revolutionized the workflows of other departments ranging from sales and customer support to marketing and talent acquisition. These solutions have radically increased productivity and collaboration, becoming as fundamental to daily work as coffee and email (or Slack/your messaging app of choice).
It seems like a simple question. If there have been relationship management solutions around for years and there are hundreds of products on the market for a variety of departments, why aren’t PR pros just using solutions that were made for their peers in sales and marketing, like Salesforce or Hubspot?
The top reason is that current solutions do not address the main problems that every PR team knows costs thousands of hours per year -- outdated information about audiences and content that are prone to constant change, and an inability to understand past success and failure, while seizing opportunities and mitigating potential crises as soon as they arise.
When it comes to PR, a relationship management tool without up-to-date contact information or context of journalists’ recently published articles and posts is useless—and likely a ton of extra work.
In the same way that other departments use relationship software to centralize their workflow, PR pros have a lot to gain by finding a similar solution that reduces siloed communication, internally and externally, while increasing overall efficiency.
You’re going to run into significant challenges if you try to maintain your own data in spreadsheets or by way of flagging inaccuracies in the legacy database you pay for.
With fewer journalists than ever before PR pros need to be even more careful to ensure they are finding the most relevant journalists and sending thoughtful but concise pitches. Otherwise, they will be tuned out (after all, according to our State of Journalism Survey, lack of personalization is the #1 reason why journalists reject otherwise relevant pitches).
Searching for journalists purely based on the beat they cover or title they have will no longer cut it in today’s climate. You should be able to find journalists and publications based on the articles they’ve written, what they’ve shared on social media, where they’re located, what topics they’re interested in, and more.
Then, for each journalist you choose as a fit for your campaign, you should also be able to access accurate contact information and context such as pitching preferences, as well as the ability to read their past articles and what they post most about on social.
In a PRM, you should be able to add contacts to your media lists directly from the point of your search, rather than switching back and forth between tools.
Timing is everything when it comes to finding new PR opportunities and identifying potential crises. Your media monitoring solution should enable you to track your company and competitors as news breaks and identify which journalists are already interested in topics related to your campaigns. Also crucially, the solution should notify you any time a journalist is looking for a source on a given topic or sharing relevant information on social media.
When integrated with both a media database and reporting system, monitoring provides the context you need for meaningful and productive media outreach, and a way to seamlessly build coverage reports from your monitoring workflow.
Public Relations Management must be built to help teams work better together. Whenever you go to a journalist’s profile, you should be able to easily view any activity that your teammates have logged, giving you a full picture of your team’s interaction with them.
Ideally, there should also be an easy way to keep track of your colleagues’ media lists, notes, call logs, and pitches all in one place, helping prevent overlap and saving duplicative work. You should also be able to quickly see who on your team owns a particular contact to help further avoid any pitching missteps.
As a PR professional, reporting can be time-consuming and even intimidating. PR professionals need reports that are usable and easy to understand. While data is essential, PR pros aren’t data scientists.
Reporting should be simple. PR professionals don’t need the broadest swath of features, but instead, need simple tools to build impressive emails and reports they can send to C-suite executives that show the value of PR.
Learn how Muck Rack can help you find the right journalists, monitor news, build reports and collaborate with your team.
