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At Prezly we believe that public relations should lean into technology and embrace the productivity and connectivity it brings! To celebrate this, we created an infographic that covers some of the most helpful categories in 

 with the biggest names in the industry (and some up comers who are making their mark). 

Without further ado, please enjoy this infographic! 😊 Also, scroll on past it to learn more about some of these tools in depth. 👇

Media and contact databases are the quickest way to build a media list and discover new journalists and stakeholders. Careful though! Using a database comes with a lot of responsibility to ensure that you are maintaining standards of GDPR, the CANSPAM act, and other regulations.

CRM stands for Contact Relationship Management. 

 take a media database list and make them personal. You can stay on top of interactions, add notes, and enrich contacts with new details and information. 

Publishing tools in PR have skyrocketed past Word Docs and PDFs. Think interactive online newsrooms, multimedia press releases, mobile-ready stories, and people finding and subscribing to your content without you lifting a finger. This is the future! 

, a whopping 92% of journalists prefer it. Email pitching has certainly turned into an art over the past years with developments in personalization techniques and pitching tactics. 

If you don't know what they are saying about you, you are already losing. Media monitoring is a crucial tool to understanding your reach and brand impact. 

Proving worth, creating a buzz, demonstrating reach, and understanding what really good coverage is for your brand comes with crunching the numbers. PR analytics are necessary to getting a real picture of what is going on.

The PR Tech Stack: Tools for Advanced PR Management [Infographic]

Working smarter, not harder in public relations means using tools, here are some of the best

5 tips for quickly finding PR tools that improve the workflow of your communication team

We’re already almost halfway through 2016.

Many of us began the year full of good intentions. Go to the gym more regularly. Eat more healthily. Read more frequently.

What remains of these resolutions now, months later?

, I met with many communication teams back in January and was aware of their good intentions. Improving workflow was high up on everyone’s list. Most teams recognized the need to get rid of old software and inefficient ways of working.

Four or five months later and some of these teams are well on their way to accomplishing better work in less time. Many teams, on the other hand, are no further forward.

What sets the more successful teams apart from the others? And, more importantly, what can you learn from them to help you turn your good intentions into positive action?

1. Know what you want from your PR software

The days of PR teams only being involved in media relations are long gone.

Stakeholders are now far more diverse and communication efforts need to be more wide reaching.

Modern teams also help manage the rest of the PESO model: Paid, Owned, Shared, and Earned media. And while there are various issues to solve in every area of expertise, there are plenty of tools to help .

Identify the greatest issues in your workflow and use these as a basis to list your tool requirements.

. You can find techniques to help identify problems in the chapter on workflow mapping.

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. 

 This wisdom is also relevant to management changes within organizations. 

You don’t have to change your entire communication strategy right away. 

It’s all about seeing what works first.  So avoid large committees and long meetings. 

Appoint one or two people to look into possible solutions. Choose a number of representatives and make them ambassadors of the improvement project.  Let them find out quickly if a tool or way of working is the right solution.

It’s easy to find communication software.

 containing a wealth of solutions. However, the most extensive overview specifically relevant to PR is 

. This is a crowd-sourced catalog, listing over 250 communication tools.

PRstack’s overview is arranged nicely according to area of expertise and objectives. You can make a shortlist of tools in no time at all.

There are a myriad of tools out there to help you improve your workflow.

Take social media monitoring, for example. You could quickly end up with a long shortlist of tools like 

What is the most efficient way to choose between them?

One approach is to ask the software teams themselves to help. PR software providers usually offer online demos. Take half an hour per tool to understand the product’s worth.

If you want to be sure that your questions are covered, share your checklist with providers upfront.

The time it takes to research and then implement a tool is often where things go awry.

Following their research, many communication teams want to make the perfect choice right away and spend months deliberating their options.

Take the various public relations tools on a short speed date with a small, easily implemented project or task. This way you save time and avoid having to roll out a tool to the entire team from the outset.

Avoid interference from IT. Briefly go off the radar to discover whether or not the tool is useful and convenient.

Find out before rather than after you have persuaded your entire team to use the tool.

Most software packages offer a test version lasting between two weeks and a month. Use this time to carry out a pilot project. If this is successful, you can work in phases with other clients and projects. If not, then it’s easier to try out a different solution.

You can no longer avoid software tools if you want to work efficiently.

Now that communication teams are expected to manage more and wider areas of expertise, it is also necessary to test and use more specific tools that are fit-for-purpose. Following these five steps will help you quickly get an insight into what works for your team.

5 tips for quickly finding PR tools that improve the workflow of your communication team.

PR software speed dating

Just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should. The number one reason our prospects are ultimately not buying Prezly is:

After all, when a company or agency has specific needs and a talented staff, it’s reasonable to build something inhouse or using external help.

That choice is made on the assumptions that 1) a custom system will better suit their business 2) their data is “safer” and 3) it will be more cost effective. We think the real question is:

Do the pros of building your own PR platform outweigh the cons?

In our experience, most of the time the answer is 

 is too essential for your business to risk failure.

If you are currently on the fence about whether to buy or build your own solution, consider these factors first:

There are some undeniable benefits to building your own solution. First you can have exactly the features you want and need for your business without any excess. But at what cost ?

Before you start knocking down walls with your programmer or development agency, think about usability, performance, integration capabilities and reporting features. These are all areas that SaaS companies are good at, so why reinvent the wheel if the solution is already out there ?

“Matching the business needs” is usually one of the top arguments for building your own system from scratch. Not only will it have a feature set that matches your business, it can be engineered to work with all your existing tools and current processes.

 (CRM) should always have the option to customise. Whether you build it or buy it. Because if your company changes, the CRM should be able to change right along with it.

every software development project will result in bugs and errors. 

Programmers and coders are only human and they make mistakes. Funny thing is most of the bugs will only appear once you are using the new tool. At this point major mistakes will have real consequences. Pitching a story to a blogger that has already unsubscribed 3 times ? Good luck explaining him there was a bug in your system.
 

 doesn’t mean there will never be bugs. But it does guarantee you that the platform has been tested by a lot of companies and agencies before you start using it. And when something does go wrong, an entire team is ready to roll out a fix because that product is their only priority.

Depending on the skills of your programmer or development agency and the assigned budget, your first deliverable could be a really good and useful product.

The challenge is that technology is changing so fast it is very hard to keep up. Making your news room fully responsive to look good on mobile devices ? Integrating instagram for your fashion clients latest collection ?

It takes a lot of discipline, attention and technical expertise to keep up with trends and the worlds innovation. A software-as-a-service product will have the advantages of scale: the subscription fee of all clients will be used to keep up with todays PR digital trends and innovations.

So your in-house developer or external agency did an excellent job creating a platform that makes your life a lot easier. Now it’s time for your users and PR consultants to start using the system, but what about support ? For the developers this project was temporary and they are now off to the next big thing. That leaves you without a structure to support the users.

Instant is a big word in Public Relations. What if people get stuck using the system ? What if a user can’t publish a story due to the format of an attachment, an incorrect contact list or a missing password ? That’s when you need people to count on. A support team that’s always around.

Ok. So you have made a comparison between your own budget exercise and the subscriptions listed on the vendors pricing page?

Truth is: while the vendor pricing looks expensive, your own custom build development budget is likely to be incorrect. Calculating the TCO of a software project is an extremely difficult challenge. Here is 

Software development is complex. Period. Even when painting a wall or a fence you may come up with unexpected extra work that needs to be done to make it right, but at least the number of things that can go wrong is somehow limited.

In software development the spectrum of potential issues is almost infinite, especially when it comes to creating a complex application. In such conditions, every, even the most experienced developer, will be prone to make errors and the estimates will be inaccurate. 

Source: 

Worse yet. Most software projects will be over budget and most of the time they will be late.

Still convinced you will somehow deal with these unexpected costs or delayed timing ? What about long term costs such as hosting, bug fixing, licenses, training and support ?
 
Some smart people (Gartner) have calculated that the real cost of a software application is generally four times the initial purchase price.

In the end, just because you can design, build, manage or mash-up 

It’s important to do your own analysis and select the option that’s best for you. Just don’t forget about some of our considerations that might be easy to miss.

Gijs Nelissen

Do the pros of building your own PR platform outweigh the cons? Prezly tells you what you need to know.

Build vs Buy. Tough question. This article explains the pros and cons of both approaches.

Building your own PR CRM platform?

 they use and you’ll get more blank stares than knowing smiles. 

Excel is still the global PR industry standard

 when it comes to dealing with traditional media as well as the newer fields of blogger outreach and influencer engagement. And that, my friends, is a genuine tragedy. 

we did, we found out that PR pros using a spreadsheet lose 2 hours every week managing their contacts vs PR pros using a CRM 😱

In the mainstream, building a media list is the domain of the fresh-faced account executive or office manager. Sell-ins are left to junior members of staff and valuable records of contact with influencers are either left languishing in emails or on scraps of paper.

Imagine a world where you have a record of all your contact with a journalist, what time of day they like to be contacted, their wife and kids’ names. All that useful stuff that helps you 

See what the most effective pitches are made of, based on 15,976,113 emails.

Download your free pitching pack

There are no real shortcuts here. You’ll need to put in some legwork. There are a few tools that will help you get started but having someone’s email address isn’t the same as successfully pitching a story.

JustReachOut provides PR tools alongside the expertise and knowledge of strategists who understand outreach. Man + software ensures your deliver the right pitch.

This is a different approach as you have a helping hand with your PR goals and action plan. By working with the JustReachOut team you can harness knowledge of previous successes within your industry. 

Once all of the above is completed, seeking and finding the correct contacts for the story begins. 

Gorkana provides detailed and up-to-date contact details of journalists in different sectors. Especially in the UK market, their database of media professionals is really strong. 

“Where journalists and sources connect.” Muck rack is a social network that brings together people who have news with the people who want news. 

Journalists can create a profile where they can state which topics they’re interested in, people who have news can pitch it to the right influencers. 

Sometimes it just makes sense to fish where the fish are. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) was designed to connect journalists with sources of information. 

A reporter might be looking for industry-specific data or information, while other times he or she may be looking for a relevant spokesperson, quote or case study. 

 for your chance to weigh in on hot topics and increase your likelihood of securing coverage while helping a reporter out. 

LinkedIn is a goldmine if you’re looking for contacts. It’s pretty easy to guess someone’s e-mail if you know his or her name and company. 

Again (can’t repeat this enough), just an e-mail address buys you nothing. 

2. Understand What’s Important for your Contacts

Seeing what your contacts are doing and saying online helps you to know what, when and how to pitch a story. These services help you get better at understanding your contacts.

Fullcontact feels like magic: you give it an e-mail address or a twitter handle and it will give you all social profiles associated with that e-mail or twitter handle. 

Example of an Enriched contact in Prezly.

Originally designed for sales and marketers, Clearbit is also a powerful tool for filling in missing contact information. 

Building a successful relationship is a two-way street. So you need to make sure you keep in touch with your contacts, even if you don’t need anything from them. 

They might throw you an opportunity to pitch something from your clients. Pro-actively keeping in touch with your media contacts is key.

Helping you keep in touch is exactly what Nimble does, it reminds you to contact potentially interesting people that you haven’t contacted in a while. 

Capsule is a CRM tool for sales. It’s not a CRM for PR. It does however allow you to add notes to contacts, make deals and it has a nice BCC dropbox and a chrome plugin to archive all conversations you’ve had with your contacts. 

But best of all, it will help you to get rid of Excel as your contact database. All your contacts remain up-to-date in a tool you share with your colleagues. 

As a starting point here is an articles on 

Snapengage is a simple Live Chat tool. You can get in touch with your site visitors in real time. 

What if we would place a live chat on a news release we’ve just published? Journalists can immediately ask further questions, you – 

 – can get feedback on your content pitch right away and make updates in an instant. 

A rating is one of the simplest and best known ways to give feedback. 

Why shouldn’t your news release be rateable?

 Getting feedback (positive and negative) and learning from it is essential in becoming a better PR pro. 

Through temper.io it’s really easy to setup basic rating questions like “

Do you think this is something you would write about?

These ratings can be integrated in your online news release or even as your e-mail signature in a content pitch e-mail. 

Following up content pitches with a phone call can be a powerful tool. But you need to make sure you get something out of it and learn from each conversation with your influential. 

Close.io is like your personal phone central: it will record your conversation and transcribes conversations if possible. 

Pitching content is also about building an audience. Buffer allows you to schedule status updates on all popular social networks. 

It’s also a solid tool to manage social accounts in teams. You can’t be active on social the whole day, at some point you’ll need to get some stuff done. Buffer allows you to manage your time and schedule your posts. 

The mother of all analytic solutions does tons of  stuff, but if we need to pick one thing we would pick “Referral Traffic”. It shows you where the people looking at your news release are coming from. 

Check out these 25 PR Tools to help you escape Excel and better manage media relations.

Learn how a solid PR CRM setup can make a heap of difference for your media relations.

CRM for PR: 25 PR Tools that Help Manage Media Relations

Learn how PR professionals can harness the power of PR software that is specfic to their daily duties and needs.

PR Software | PR Academy

Iceberg Interactive case study cover

Episode 1: What can we learn from gaming PR?

Watch our expert PR roundtable

The Sojourn game from Iceberg Interactive

Whether you’re running PR in-house or are part of a big agency, we have all the tools you need to ensure you deliver the right story to each contact, every time.

Spend less time updating contact lists

pax nova iceberg interactive

Create beautiful online newsrooms, publish your stories, embed galleries, livestreams and more, and build your audience without relying on your tech team.

Send better campaigns with Prezly

campaign opens and clicks gif

campaign personalise send animated gif 180319

Control who sees your data and use our built-in tools to comply with the GDPR

Security & compliance 

mass untagging feature

This year's survey focused on the topic of Contact Management, tapping into the experience of 412 PR professionals from across the world, identifying their biggest pains and finding that most PRs can save hours each week by making one simple change

Results of the Global PR Survey 2020  

Find out how Prezly's all-in-one PR software helps bring your games news to life

Prezly for Gamedevs

PR stack – tech to optimise your PR workflow

With more than 50 games on the market, Iceberg Interactive had to find a way to manage its contacts and gain insight into campaign performance, fast. Learn how they did it in our new case study.

Iceberg Interactive case study card

Iceberg-Interactive-logo

An interview with Iceberg Interactive's Chris Bond and Nefeli Gkoni.

How a serial games publisher used Prezly to conquer its database

News

During the last few months, we've been working on Prezly's 

, a place for our features that aren't quite ready yet but are available for testing.  

So, why create a space like this instead of just releasing these features when they're ready? 

Well, as much as we'd love every feature idea to be built to a tee, sometimes we face issues here and there, and features don't work as intended, so it's back to the drawing board. These things can take time – re-evaluating features based on the number of requests from our customer base, feature usage, and bugs that happen around the feature.

As such, it doesn't feel right to enable a feature that we know is not up to our standards just yet. With Feature Labs, we invite Prezly users who are interested in testing certain features to help us improve them and, ultimately, help us make a decision on their futures... for*beta* or worse. 😉

Learn more about the features available in Feature Labs ↓

Feeling adventurous? Get early access & help us test out new features

Feature Labs | Help Section

You can now test drive new Prezly features, for *beta* or worse

New Feature Labs page

How we decide what to build next has always been based on two things:

As product builders, it's been incredibly exhilarating to see people use Prezly in ways that we'd never even imagined. One example of this evolution is Prezly Stories. 

Where we'd designed Stories to make publishing multimedia press releases easy, 

. You used them to make stunning newsrooms for 

 and investor updates, crisis hubs and portfolios, newsletters and blogs.

And this made us realize that it isn't up to us to decide how people use Prezly. Our job is to build a product that lets you publish and share stories the way 

So, that's what we're doing. And we're starting with Open Newsroom Themes.

While there are many ways to use your Newsroom straight out of the box, Open Newsroom Themes will make the possibilities endless.

Simply put, these are templates you can use to determine how your newsrooms look and function. They will give you the tools to communicate with your network the way you want, in a fast and simple way.

 your newsrooms however you want using the 

You will no longer have to go through us for custom work, as clients like 

You will be able to code custom newsrooms for yourself and share them with others, use Prezly as a backend for your website, or even as a frontend for a site you host on Vercel, Netlify or anywhere else. 

All without losing any of the benefits that drew you to us in the first place.

You can use our open Prezly API to power parts of your site, for example a changelog, learning resource or help center.

As a first step, we've created three designs that you'll soon be able to activate for your Prezly newsrooms, and we have many others planned.

Some will be oriented around images and be best suited to visual-rich industries, like fashion, travel and gaming. Others will prioritize text, and work better within a corporate context. Some will highlight individual writers, others place focus on the organization behind the text.

For now, I invite you to meet the first three Newsroom Themes: Bea, Marcel and Syrah:

Bea is an evolution of the classic Prezly theme and provides a clean layout suited to any sector.

Marcel is a more traditional blog theme, perfect for corporate news or technical updates.

Syrah prioritizes visuals, with bold header text, elegantly curved edges and plenty of white space.

Soon you'll be able to transform the layout of your Newsrooms

Announcing Open Newsroom Themes

Thank to everyone that joined us for Friday's live demonstration of the new Belga–Prezly integration, which allows you to automatically sync your Belga.press coverage into Prezly, and distribute Prezly Stories via PRpro as you publish them.

(For Anglophones, the English demonstration starts at 6:32 😊)

Belga–Prezly launch webinar

How can we work together to make our clients even better?

Prezly's Jesse Wynants and Patrick Lacroix, Belga's CEO, begin by stating that both Prezly and Belga have PR at the very heart. 

While Prezly already offers a purpose-built PR CRM, newsrooms, and distribution through campaigns and pitches, the integration with Belga adds two further things: 

The latter includes both French and Dutch media, with the option to add more regional press or even international partners. 

The integration gives you the ability to track your coverage in real time while linking it with your contacts and newsrooms, effectively pulling that data together to give you an overview of which journalists are engaging the most with your stories, and which of your stories are getting the most traction. 

And because it's automated, there's no extra work required from you.

Belga integration demo

What is the added value for communication agencies?

Jesse: Prezly always focused on PR agencies. In one account, you can manage clients and newsrooms; coverage is linked to press releases. The same will be offered to Belga clients. You'll get a report in Prezly which you can share with your client, who can easily see the coverage that resulted from your press release. Next to that, the coverage is also linked with your CRM, so you'll be able to see who is most engaged with your content.

Patrick: I think the added value is also that Belga.press clients can monitor their coverage in Prezly, which is more efficient. For those who don't do the monitoring yet in the Belgian press database, I would strongly advise to use Prezly to discover this. And you can post the press releases from agencies directly in the systems of the involved news media via PRpro.

Can you see the reach & AVE from the coverage?

Details from the Belga–Prezly launch event, including demo and Q&A

Contacts

Stories & Newsrooms

Campaigns

Coverage

What is Prezly?

Prezly for different industries

Company type

Industry

How a serial games publisher used Prezly to conquer its database

From the blog

PR Academy

PR Software

Learn how PR professionals can harness the power of PR software that is specfic to their daily duties and needs.

The PR Tech Stack: Tools for Advanced PR Management [Infographic]

PR software speed dating

Building your own PR CRM platform?

CRM for PR: 25 PR Tools that Help Manage Media Relations