Published on August 4, 2020
Tracking your firm’s marketing and PR brings valuable insight into how the goals of your company measure up against quantifiable data.
A good public relations agency, working with an in-house marketing department, can give an emerging company the boost it needs to emerge into the public eye, brand an established company as an employer of choice or communicate why any company is important to potential clients. However, it can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign. Luckily, a host of tools exist to help you monitor and manage your public relations efforts. In this post, we’ve listed our top 10 tools for public relations measurement.
These media monitoring tools measure the results of your own internal marketing and of your PR agency, providing a complete overview of how they are performing at any given time. The information provided by media monitoring services helps keep marketing resources organized and focused, and it prevents your business from idling by identifying problem areas.
- Meltwater is an all-in-one marketing and public relations solution that allows you to stay on top of online conversations about your company. Meltwater’s services include global news media monitoring, media reporting and analytics, messaging to media contacts, social media monitoring, and media search and outreach tools. This covers the wide range of tasks performed by a PR agency, such as media outreach, brand and reputation management, crisis communications, research into consumer insights and competitive intelligence, social media engagement and social influencer management. Whatever your preferred PR method is, Meltwater has tools that allow you to see the impact PR efforts have on your business, online news, social media, print, broadcast, or podcasts. Pricing: $4,000 per year
- Agility PR Solutions is a streamlined media relations service that allows you to efficiently keep track of not only your traditional media efforts, but also online and social media. Their services cover a wide range, including media monitoring, media database generators, a newswire service and media intelligence services. An easy to use report tool will let you create data based on numerous items beyond brand mentions, including geographic reach, media types, sentiment, potential audience and share of voice. Pricing: Custom
- Brandwatch helps you understand your company’s virtual presence and be aware of the way consumers talk about you online. Brandwatch’s goal is to enable you to make quicker, data-based decisions regarding your PR efforts by providing insight on the performance of your PR campaigns. Brandwatch’s use cases go beyond the basics of media monitoring to include crisis management, brand management, competitor analysis, customer experience insights, content strategy, and influencer marketing. Pricing: Starts at $550 a month
- Critical Mention provides metrics to justify your company’s PR spending. Intuitive tools allow you to search faster, customize your reports for their intended audience, share content instantly, measure sentiment of coverage, amplify positive coverage, manage PR crisis, measure your brand against your competitors with share-of-voice metrics and improve your analytics. An application programming interface (API) grants custom access to data and media clips. Critical Mention offers real-time alerts and in-depth analytics to ensure that you never miss a mention. Pricing: Custom, starts at $30 a month
- Cision helps business marketers identify influencers, draft press releases and measure the impact of your PR content on multiple levels. Cision’s services include targeting the right influencers to broadcast your message, engaging with your audience, analyzing your coverage (online, in-print, and on social media), building relationships with the media, providing audience insights, understanding earned audiences, connecting PR to your bottom line and validating the reach of your media coverage. Cision not only ensures you are aware of your company’s online presence, but also allows you to send your content to a relevant and active audience. Pricing: $7,200 a year
- Coveragebook is a reporting tool that creates reports of your website, media links or social media pages. All you have to do is upload your links to their software and beautiful, easy to analyze reports are produced in minutes. Reports provide vital information about your company’s PR efforts, including search engine optimization (SEO) impact, publisher site placement, screenshots of your coverage, domain authority of publisher sites and coverage views or shares. Their goal is to make the lives of hardworking PR professionals easier. Pricing: Starts at $99 a month
- Awario is a brand monitoring and social media tool that gives business marketers access to insights on their customers, market and competitors. Awario allows you to engage with customers, track word-of-mouth about your company, keep tabs on important online discussions, perform sentiment analysis, compare alerts, analyze geographical presence, uncover sales opportunities and determine the success of your PR campaigns. Awario also offers non-stop monitoring, powerful analytics, searching in any language, organization tools, Boolean search and white-label reports. Awario’s mission is to make social listening affordable for businesses of any size, and their pricing reflects that. Pricing: Starts at $29 a month
- Buzzsumo helps you identify high-performing content that and collaborate with influencers who matter. Buzzsumo goes above and beyond with insight into what content is working, why it is working and which influencers can broadcast it. Its features include key message penetration, quality of coverage, SEO tracking, API and audience engagement analytics. Buzzsumo allows you to easily track your company’s public relations and maximize your successful PR campaigns. In summary, Buzzsumo operates on four key components: discovery, research, influence and media monitoring. $79 a month when paying yearly. Pricing: Starts at $79 a month
- Keyhole is a hashtag tracker and social media analytics service that provides sharable, client-ready reports regarding the online impressions your PR campaign is making.With Keyhole, you can easily identify the most effective hashtags relevant to your business and find online areas of opportunity. You can also boost your marketing ROI by identifying influencers relevant to your campaign using social media reporting, social mentions, keyword tracking, historical data, audience engagement, influence measurement and comparisons, crisis management, sentiment tracking, and social media analytics API. Keyhole Keyhole is custom built for public relations agencies, nonprofits and media. Pricing: Starts at $29 a month
- TVEyes analyzes content aired on television and radio. The platform can identify and report on logo and product placement appearances in video, track advertisement placement in broadcast media and create custom applications using object recognition from any video feed. TVEyes features include keyword and phrase alerts, global coverage, analytics about frequency, placement and prominence paired with advertising rates and audience demographics, and competitor comparisons. TVEyes makes it easy to prove the value of your broadcast PR efforts by providing an excellent way to monitor and report on them. Pricing: Custom, usually around $500 a month