20 Best Online PR Tools (The Ultimate List)
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS INDUSTRY is constantly changing and evolving, even more so in the digital age. Social media is rapidly taking over the print media, and as the influencers have moved online, that’s where the most action takes place.
New media channels appear daily, and old PR methods just don’t cut it anymore. Whether you work in a PR firm or an in-house public relations department, the message is clear: to benefit from the flood of information, you must step up your game and take advantage of all the amazing PR tools available.
We have compiled the ultimate list of free and paid online tools every publicist should consider in order to plan, execute, manage, monitor, and analyze their PR efforts like a pro.
Psst… This list got our marketing team pretty excited. What do you think?
Management & Collaboration
Mustr
Your network of journalists and bloggers is a highly valuable asset. But are you making it work for you?
Mustr helps you and your team organize your network of journalists and bloggers. That way, you can concentrate on improving your relationship with them.
Top features:
- Know who your friends and detractors are in the media, and what is your history with them.
- Target exactly the journalists and bloggers you need with your PR campaigns.
- Keep ownership of your media and blogger database, even if you work with an agency.
- E-mail press releases with high res images and attachments.
- Have access to your network of journalists and bloggers at all times.
Pricing: From $54/month with a free 15-day trial.
Scoro
Scoro PR software gives you all the tools you need for efficient PR project management and team collaboration. Manage projects, clients, and finances in an all-in-one work management solution.
Top features:
- Overview of each client and influencer with linked projects and communication history
- Task management, to-do lists, notifications, and reminders
- Budgets & invoicing
- Detailed reports in real-time
- Integrates with your favorite tools
Pricing: From $22/user with a free 14-day trial.
Prezly
Prezly helps corporate communication teams speed up their workflow with a platform for newsrooms, contact management, and outreach: the better way to do stakeholder communication.
Top features:
- Get to know your brand’s stakeholders with a CRM made for PR.
- Get better results and reach stakeholders quickly with beautiful multimedia emails.
- Create slick, attractive and super-functional online newsrooms.
Pricing: From $150/month.
Cision
Cision is a full-featured PR software. It’s database contains more than 1.6 million journalists, influencers, and editorial contacts. The platform provides advanced distribution, tracking, and analyzing features to makes sure you never miss a mention or fail to prove the value of your agency’s PR efforts.
Top features:
- Access in-depth media profiles
- Monitor digital, broadcast and print outlets
- Send press releases via web, wire & email
- Gauge effectiveness with real-time reports
Pricing: Upon request.
Planning
Answer the Public
“Consumer insight for PR in the Age of Google.”
Answer the Public is a simple yet valuable tool with one purpose – understanding the questions people have about a certain topic.
When you start typing into Google (or Bing, if you’re into that), it tries to guess what you’re thinking about before you’ve even finished. The recommendations are triggered by two things: search volume, and mention volume. These suggestions are the data points which feed Answer the Public. You type in a concept or a topic, and it visualizes questions people have around that topic.
Top features:
- Search for questions related to a keyword
- Find out which questions people are asking from Google
- Filter by country, popularity, type of question or preposition
Pricing: Free
Mashfeed
Mashfeed helps you cut through the clutter of the top social media sites so you can focus on the content that matters to you most.
Top features:
- Create your own collections that include your favorite feeds from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube & Facebook (even the ones you don’t follow).
- Browse through thousands of quality collections created by other users when you are looking for new content to enjoy.
- Track all of your campaigns across social media in one place through collections that include relevant hashtags and keywords.
Pricing: Free
Meltwater
Meltwater is a media intelligence tool for strategic planning, connecting with the audience, and measuring success. The PR solution helps to stay on top of billions of real-time editorial, blog, and social media conversations, and extract the insights you need to understand and drive brand perception for your company.
Top features:
- Track your brand, your competition, and relevant news in real time.
- Discover news, media contacts, competitors, trends, and more.
- Build and maintain meaningful relationships, whether you’re connecting on social or distributing press releases to targeted influencer lists.
- Analyze which campaigns worked and which ones didn’t. Build dashboards and measure success.
Pricing: Pricing on request
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is designed to help you discover content that your audience wants to engage with and identify influencers to reach out to.
Simply enter a topic into the search bar, and BuzzSumo delivers recent top articles on the subject. The sharing information for each article provides good insight into what articles people think are worthwhile, making it an excellent resource for content promotion, curation and article development.
Top features:
- Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor
- Find the key influencers to promote your content
- Break down each person’s influence by domain authority, the number of followers, etc.
Pricing: From $99/month
Pitching Notes
Pitching Notes (the Yelp or TripAdvisor for media relations) is an online community offering PR pros the chance to share experiences and tips on how to pitch specific journalists, in the form of reviews.
Top features:
- A growing directory of journalists’ contact info (including major publications like the Huffington Post, Mashable, and TechCrunch)
- Reviews and notes on how to best pitch certain journalists
- Create an online profile for yourself where you can display your (or your clients’) expertise. Your profile can then be searched by reporters looking for expert sources and story ideas.
Pricing: Free. In order to gain access to the full database, you need to add one review.
Writing
Hemingway App
Hemingway App is an interactive editing tool that calls out grammar errors, the use of passive voice and improves the overall readability of your writing. It’s an excellent tool for improving outreach messages.
This post got a readability grade of 9. Yay!
Top features:
- Highlights long, complex sentences and common errors
- Helps with conciseness and suggests more descriptive words
- Calls out “Readability” and gives you a grade
Pricing: Free. Desktop version $9.99
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
The Headline Analyzer will score your overall headline quality and rate its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value. Chances are, if you have a catchy headline that speaks to users, your outreach message will get a click!
Top features:
- Measure the quality of a headline or subject line
- Preview how it will look like in an email
Pricing: Free
Canva
Canva is a simplified version of Adobe Photoshop and InDesign geared towards generating social posts, blog graphics, Twitter headers, Facebook ads and the like. Create stunning visuals with no design skills needed.
Top features:
- Choose among design templates or create from scratch
- Create beautiful flyers and Facebook ad designs
- A library of more than a million icons, fonts, and photos
Pricing: Free & paid from $9.95/month
Pexels
Pexels is a free, CC0 License (to be used for any purpose) stock photo resource of beautiful photos from various categories.
Top features:
- Find free photos for both personal and commercial use
- Modify, copy and distribute the photos if needed
- All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source
Pricing: Free
Reaching out
Pitchengine
Pitchengine allows you to take control of the presentation of your pitch. Upload your images, video, and embeds into Pitchengine, choose a style that fits your content, and Pitchengine optimizes it for the best presentation on desktops and mobile devices.
Top features:
- Create a beautifully designed pitch with no skills
- Optimized pitch for the best presentation on desktop and mobile devices
- Embed the pitch on your website or blog and share it
- Track the pitch and learn what type of messages get the most engagement
Pricing: Free with ads, ad-free starting from $79/month.
MailTrack.io
MailTrack.io is an extension for Gmail that enables you to quickly scan whether your messages were opened and how many people read the email right within your normal inbox interface.
Top features:
- Know who and when opened your email, even among multiple recipients.
- Real-time desktop notifications.
Pricing: Free with MailTrack.io signature, a signature-free version from $4.5/month.
Followupthen
Followupthen is a simple email address that alerts you when you need to send an email response. Use it to set up to-do lists for others, send reminders to yourself, and clear clutter from your inbox. When you’re sending a message, bcc 7days@followupthen.com (or any other date) so you’re automatically reminded to send a follow-up a week later!
Top features:
- Schedule the right information to appear at exactly the right time – contact info, links, boarding passes, etc.
- Use a response detection feature to make sure your email doesn’t get lost.
- Scheduling automatic reminders for as many as 15 people at once.
- Delegate tasks, or automatically follow up only if they don’t respond.
- Placing one FollowUpThen email address in the ‘bcc’ field is all you need to schedule a follow-up reminder.
Pricing: Free & paid from $2/month
Email Hunter
Email Hunter finds email addresses across the web via the company’s website domain.
Top features:
- Just enter a domain name and find out the available emails on that domain
- API for developers
Pricing: Free & paid from $49/month
HARO
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) provides journalists with a robust database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage.
Top features:
- Get query emails broken down by topic/industry in your inbox 3x a day
Pricing: Free & paid from $19/month
Anewstip
Anewstip is a tool for finding relevant media contacts from the world’s largest database, indexing more than 200 million news articles and 1 billion tweets from more than 1 million media contacts.
Top features:
- Search for relevant media contacts by what they have written or tweeted.
- Monitor news articles & tweets from global media influentials
- Build media lists to organize all your media contacts
- Reach out to relevant journalists with personalized pitches
Monitoring
Mention
Mention lets you monitor social mentions and sentiment online to better understand how your / your client’s / a competitor’s brand is being talked about and perceived online. Mention’s influencer scores show you the most important people talking about any of your keywords. Find subject matter experts, future brand ambassadors, and grow your community.
Top features:
- Monitor keywords in real-time
- Identify influencers
- Track and analyze your performance and easily create a report
- Assign tasks and sharing alerts to your colleagues within Mention
Analysis
Simply Measured
Simply Measured analyses awareness & engagement across all social channels, compiles data from every major social network, unifies business metrics, and enriches data to make analysis easy and clear.
Top features:
- Cross-channel campaign measurement
- Competitive analysis
- Hashtag & keyword tracking
Pricing: From $500/month & some free resources
Presentation
Coverage Book
You worked hard to earn that coverage. So when you succeed, you want to show off and get some recognition. Coverage Book compiles your coverages into beautiful coverage books in minutes and creates reports that your clients/managers will love.
Top features:
- Collect and present media mentions
- Upload offline coverage or simply input the URL of the article and Coverage Book will create a screenshot
- Dashboard that shows combined views, shares, and inbound links resulting from PR efforts
Pricing: From $99/month with a 28-day free trial
In case you need a quick recap, here are all the tools
Management & Collaboration: Mustr | Scoro | Prezly | Cision
Planning: Answer the Public | Mashfeed | Meltwater | BuzzSumo | Pitching Notes
Writing: Hemingway App | Headline Analyzer | Canva | Pexels
Reaching out: Pitchengine | MailTrack.io | Followupthen | Email Hunter | HARO | Anewstip
Monitoring: Mention
Analysis: Simply Measured
Presentation: Coverage Book
Further reading
- How to Find the Best Software that Suits Your Needs
- 79-point Guide to Getting Started with New Software
Publicists, what PR tools do you use to monitor and track the performance of your campaigns?