Digital PR is an online marketing strategy with several stages that must all be done perfectly for a campaign to be effective. At every point of the process, from ideation to follow-ups, there is a wide range of tools accessible to augment and optimize the process for digital PR experts.
This digital PR continues to be the top marketing strategy used by marketers. Digital marketers use it to bring and nurture new and existing customers as it helps them heighten their marketing campaigns.
Digital marketers still face many challenges in creating the best PR for their campaigns. It takes a lot of valuable time to communicate with clients in the language that will make them take action—purchase your products.
Many brands or companies continue to face these challenges. They are not ready to invest in digital marketing tools to help research their product and draft the best PR strategy with adequate KPIs to generate sales. However, your business does not necessarily have to use an expensive digital PR tool to see functional changes. Many free tools can help you save time and drive conversion.
To help you make a good decision, we have compiled a list of the best digital PR tools, but first, we need to define what PR tools are.
What are PR tools?
PR tools are software or apps that make your brand or business communications more effective and efficient. These apps or software ensure that your press release and writeups meet your organization’s goal. PR tools usually perform different needs, such as videos, images and content creation for specific business needs.
15 Best Digital PR Tools
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most used digital PR tools in the content marketing niche. If you’re into SEO, this is an excellent tool to use daily. It helps you check your website and client websites’ by providing you with the necessary backlinks to help you monitor website ranking and visibility among relevant pools of keywords and phrases.
With SEMrush, you can comprehensively see national and locally searched keywords and run technical SEO audits, all of which work hand in hand with digital PR in a broader digital marketing strategy.
SEMrush is primarily known as an advanced and comprehensive tool that marketing agencies can leverage to help them create the right content at all times and better understand where they can improve their digital marketing strategies.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the marketers’ most powerful digital PR tools. This PR tool has the ability to conduct various valuable research needs for the successful launch of your product and can also help you draft a compelling research report for your client.
BuzzSumo tool highlights some of the top news and trending topics in your niche in an accessible and detailed way, with data on the rate at which this news is gaining popularity across various social media platforms. It also helps you deliver keyword alerts for the type of PR campaign with relevant keywords, helping you keep up to date with all your competitors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a digital PR tool used in the marketing industry to audit and optimize websites, conduct thorough competitor analysis on the site, and figure out what customers want and how to best generate leads and traffic, helping you rank better on search engine results pages.
One of the most valuable factors of using Ahrefs for digital PR is that it allows users to conduct domain and backlink analysis, which is extremely useful when deciding which keywords to target and measuring the success of your marketing campaign from an SEO point of view.
Canva
One thing you need to ensure when sharing your press release on social media is that you have an associated sharing image that stands out and attracts the needed attention to your brand. It’s ideal if your team includes a designer or if you run a Photoshop side business. If not, you’ll need a tool that will enable you to get a professional finish in most cases.
Canva bridges the gap between doing it yourself and hiring a pro. It offers a safety net for less design-savvy people by letting you combine images and text in a finite number of styles while giving you enough flexibility to produce the shareable image you require.
Prezly
Prezly is another digital PR tool, an online newsroom platform that digital marketing agencies can use to create and publish a groundbreaking press release. The medium enables marketers to add high-resolution multimedia like videos and images and helps optimize these media, making them ready to use.
The sophisticated tool makes press releases sleek and seamless, making them more likely to get picked up by the desired publications.
Prezly also enables you to share videos and photos in a single click and provides analytics on each click, opens and reply rates. While these characteristics of Prezly may seem invasive, they are what a brand needs to ensure that it is improving and reaches the right audiences.
HARO
HARO is an abbreviation meaning Help A Reporter Out. It is a helpful tool for digital PR agencies, used to connect various agencies with thousands of journalists across the globe who are actively seeking expert content and sources.
HARO enables agencies to respond directly to demands and even supply professional opinions on behalf of each client to help their brand gain visibility. This tool allows digital PR agencies to find great link-building opportunities and scope for their clients.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions is also a standard tool used in digital PR. It is precisely used to measure and track mentions of brands and clients to keep tabs on customers’ feedback.
BrandMentions tool is also used to maintain coverage and track the mentions of every client’s social media activity. Marketing agencies use this tool to help to know what competitors are up to and what is working for those competitors so that they can replicate it for the brands they work with. Any good digital marketing agency knows that competitor analysis is crucial, and using this tool helps make tracking and measuring efficient.
Gorkana
Gorkana is yet another groundbreaking tool for digital marketing agencies. It connects agencies with a comprehensive database of journalists, enabling them to reach hundreds of journalists efficiently and quickly. Digital PR experts using this platform can find contact details for thousands of media and publications.
Gorkana digital PR tool also has an integrated press release distribution function which plays an essential role in getting your press release to the right journalists and publications.
Email Hunter
Email Hunter is a must-have tool for digital marketers. This tool provides contact details for researchers, journalists and other people within an organization that are sometimes difficult to find. Email Hunter is simple to use, as all you need to get the desired result is to enter a domain name and access a list of numerous relevant emails under that particular domain. So, if you need to contact someone for business but do not know how to ask them for it, use this handy digital PR tool.
Hemingway Editor
As many agencies know, nothing is more terrible than sending out a press release with grammatical and factual errors and awkward sentence structures. When this happens, journalists who read your press release will interpret the writing style as indicating poor content quality from your brand or organization. A quick and straightforward proofread is usually a good idea to give your press release the best chance of being picked up by publications. The ideal tool for this is Hemingway, which helps to rate the writing on readability, grammatical choices, and tone. With this free tool available to you, there can be no justification for miswriting press releases.
Google Trends
Keeping up with the most recent trends is one of the most crucial skills for any digital PR agency, particularly given that media outlets look for new and developing content before their rivals do. Google Trends is a helpful and free tool in your toolbox if you want an accurate and real-time picture of what people are looking for. The tool offers various characteristics and measurements to assess search trends, from timing to location. With Google Trends, you can compare interest over time and immediately identify problematic patterns for PR campaigns because it cleanly maps out interest over time for specific search phrases.
SparkToro
The best insight tool available, SparkToro, gives customers extensive data on their target market’s online behavior, including what they link to and how they interact. Digital marketing organizations may make well-informed choices about what content to produce and how to offer it, thanks to this wealth of information. You can do a thorough and complex analysis of what your audience reads, watches responds to, and follows using the options offered on this platform.
Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a fantastic tool for those looking to understand which content is most sought after by the public and those that deliver content. Despite being one of the more simple tools in the Digital PR toolbox, Answer The Public compiles a list of recommended topics, questions and subjects based on both search and mention volumes and gives a clear and timely insight into consumer demand and interest. Some of the tool’s main features are that it enables you to discover some of the main questions people ask relating to a specific keyword. For further insight, the tool also enables users to filter through results by country, popularity and preposition, meaning you can get a more accurate reflection of your desired market.
FollowUpThen
FollowUpThen is a simple tool that can be used on any device and was created specifically to automate follow-up emails for your press releases. It is used to schedule email reminders as and when you need them. This very straightforward but handy tool can be quite helpful for companies that frequently utilize follow-up emails to optimize their outcomes. You can use the follow-ups to remember yourself, email up to 15 people without revealing that you are using an email reminder service, or email yourself and up to 15 others. Although this technology may be used for digital PR, it also has the potential for more extensive organizational uses.
MixMax
MixMax is a digital PR tool that schedules, monitors, and tracks email receipts for digital marketing campaigns. One of its most prominent features is the ability to set up and schedule an outreach email for a press release. This ensures the readability and timing of the release as it is optimal and can dramatically improve the efficiency and acceptance of your campaign by the general public. Once the press release is made public, the MixMax tool also tracks how publications have responded to your email, making it easier to identify what works and what doesn’t work with your customers or readers.
Pexels
Every successful digital PR campaign needs royalty-free visuals, especially for startups still trying to find their feet in the market. However, getting the right pictures for your brand can be challenging, with ownership and copyright regulations protecting most visuals online. This is where Pexels comes in as one of the best free photo providers used by digital marketing agencies. Pexels hosts thousands of free photos licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which permits brands to edit, copy and distribute the images for commercial use. You can easily search their website for free pictures relevant to your brand needs.
Final Thoughts
You can choose from many digital PR tools specific to your niche, each helping you at every stage of the digital PR campaign. Study these different tools to see how you can use them to maximize reach, monitor campaign success, achieve results, and lots more!
