Creating PR content is always a daunting task, no matter how skilled you are, no matter how many times you have sat down and completed content projects in the past.
By following this PR content strategy, you can ensure that you operate productively and make the best used of your time whilst making sure your content is perfectly written for your cause. Here, we list a number of tools and techniques that you can use to inspire yourself and make the entire process from start to finish a lot easier, enabling you to create content to a much higher quality.
We’ve always found, from personal experience, that it’s a lot easier to start working through a checklist than it is to sit down and start whilst looking at a blank page.
Content planning
One of the most important processes in creating informative and engaging pieces of content, planning. This means staying organised and one step ahead at all times. Establishing a content schedule is one of the easiest parts of the content PR processes but one of the hardest to maintain.
By creating a strict schedule to stick to, you can remain organised at all time, know when articles are due for release and what’s next to work on. Here are some tools that we enable to organise and maintain your strict schedule.
Google Calendar: A fantastic free tool operated and owned by Google that allows you to plot and plan your promotional PR campaigns.
Google Trends: Allowing you to analysis and view the latest trending content on Google is very useful to your PR projects. This tool is especially useful when trying to think of ideas for stories and articles which tie in with ongoings around the work at that particular moment.
Pixabay: Whether you’re writing an article or blog post, imagery can really help make your articles stand out from the rest. If you are unable to create your own photos or looking for a cheaper alternative to hiring a professional photographer, Pixabay allows you to find license and copyright-free images you can use anywhere!
Feedly: Feedly is an amazingly helpful news aggregator tool. It’s completely free to use and helps you to make sure that the content you plan on posting is relevant at the time in the eyes of your readers.
Evernote: As we said in the introduction, being organised and working from a list will help you create content effortlessly. By using Evernote, a free to use application that is available on all kinds of platforms, you can create and share lists, allowing you to brainstorm and share ideas quickly and easily.
Beegit: This is a very helpful tool if you are working in large groups to create your PR content. Beegit allows you to sign up and use features that make teamwork and collaboration an easy process to undertake.
Content creation tools
When creating content for your PR campaigns, it’s vital you get the content perfect. Any kind of grammatical error or typo will push people away from your posts, as will poorly written content that just does not grab the reader’s attention.
Plagium: If a member of your writing team or hired writer has submitted work to you, ensure you have it checked through Plagium for piracy issues. If you are releasing content which contains plagiarism, you will get into a lot of trouble and possibly fines if caught.
Academized: Similar to Plagium, Academized is a fantastic tool used for checking articles, blog posts and any kind of written content for plagiarism.
Write my paper: If you’re looking for a way to create engaging articles, blog posts or press releases, why not hire the help of professional? This platform allows you to set your requirements for your content in which a professional will set out to fulfil.
Cite It In: Citations are vital when it comes to PR content as it ensures readers your work and informative is reliable and from a good source. Use Cite It In to create comprehensive and good looking citations that match the presentation of your content.
Big Assignments: Similar to Write my paper, Big Assignments allows you to upload any content you have written by you or a member of your team and have it proofread and edited by a professional writer. This ensures you are releasing content with well-structured sentences and is free from errors.
Pitch and content distribution
It’s absolutely vital that you are pitching your content to the audiences that will appreciate it most and return the best feedback. Audience research is a key process to undergo in the content industry, matter how you are delivering your content.
Linkedin: Renowned as the Facebook social media network of the business world, LinkedIn enables you to connect with over 100 million users with whom you can share your releases with people in your area or around the world.
PitchBox: Predominately used as an influencer outreach platform, PitchBox enables you to receive automated follow-up templates, allowing you to send your readers and users a personalised touch when attempting to content with them.
BuzzStream: This tool can be used directly in your web browser and is a fantastic tool when trying to source contact details for people who are potentially interested in your latest press release. This handle toolbar add on enables you to search entire website directories for email addresses you may want.
Help A Reporter Out: Commonly referred to as HARO, PR journalists frequently used HARO to explore what the mainstream journalists are looking for when it comes to content. If you are able to connect and communicate with a journalist that is looking for information that you are trying to present, then you are already well on your way to completing a successful project.
Response Source: Response Source is an incredibly helpful piece of software that gives you ability to send and distribute your latest press release to an incredibly extensive range of journalists and writers simultaneously.
Vuelio: Vuelio is one of the best tools for the PR industry, allowing its users to search a comprehensive database of journalists, all in one place. Vuelio gives you the ability to search by topic or by each individual publication ensuring you are able to discover the exact kind of people that are interested in your story.
Analysis and follow up tools
By having the opportunity to analysis your press release statistics and the ability to follow up with journalists is so important to the success of a PR project. By reading back through the exactly kinds of people who are reading and interested in your content will benefit you massively in the future.
SideKick: SideKick is a great tool when it comes to saving email templates quickly and sending them to multiple contacts in your mailing list. The massive positive you get with SideKick is the ability to track emails, allowing you to monitor how often your emails are opened and how many people engage with them.
Mention: Mention gives you the opportunity to track, in real-time, what brands and companies are mentioned across the entire Internet, including social media. This includes all websites in over 40 compatible languages and you can quickly respond to ‘mentions’ from the platform’s dashboard.
Shared Count: This is an incredibly helpful tool that is designed to fulfil a unique purpose. Shared Count allows you to track how many instances a certain URL has been shared over social media platforms alongside the ability to check and assess the URLs overall engagement rate.
Twitter: Twitter is home to over 310 million users and PR companies must use this tool to get across and deliver their content. It’s renowned as every news site, household name, and business has Twitter so there is no reason why you shouldn’t.
Google Alerts: Google Alerts allows you to receive comprehensive email alerts stating when a website or feed indexes a new result that features your content or chosen topic, allowing you to pinpoint sites that are of interest to you and your cause.
All in all, the vast majority of these tools are free and so easy to learn how to use but at the same time, they can help boost and dramatically improve the success of your PR campaigns. By utilizing these tools into your everyday projects, you’ll soon notice your workstreams becoming more and more streamlined, deadlines completed earlier and the ability to complete more workloads and your teams becoming more productive than ever before.
Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. She is also a consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs.
