If you want to see the best PR tools in one place, then you’ll LOVE this (updated) guide.
Finding something that actually works for startups isn’t always easy. To help you out, I personally tested and reviewed the 25 best PR tools on the planet.
These public relations tools will guide you with virtually every part of PR, from finding journalists to improving outreach.
I have also added a list of 7 public relations channels and activities where you could use these PR tools.
If you are in a hurry, jump to the tool you want to read about first by clicking on the PR tool name.
Let’s get started.
7 Public Relations Channels and universal PR Activities
25 Top PR Tools to Grow Your Brand
- JustReachOut
- PitchPress
- NinjaOutreach
- ProfNet
- HARO
- SourceBottle
- Cision
- AnswerThePublic
- Critical Mention
10. Mention
- Brandseye
- . Buzzsumo
- . Sparktoro
- . Subject Line
- . Prezly
- . Grammarly
- . Crystal
- . GlobeNewswire
- . PR.co
20. TrendKite
- Onclusive
- . CoverageBook
- . Buzzstream
- . Upbeat PR
- . PRGloo
Over To You
7 Public Relations Channels and Activities
Before looking at the tools, let’s understand the different public relations channels and press release activities where you could use these PR tools.
1. Media relations
Media relations or public relations is all about relations with journalists and managing how your company is covered in the media.
2. Advertorials
Advertorials allow you to advertise your brand through news stories or reviews in print media.
3. Social Media
Social media is the perfect channel to directly interact with journalists as well as determine what they are interested in.
4. Business Events
Business events are a great opportunity to personally interact with journalists and build a relationship with them. If you exhibit, it’s a great platform to get them to notice your brand.
5. Speaking Engagements
Speaking engagements are also a good way to build credibility with journalists and interest them in stories or expert quotes.
6. Community Relations
Community relations involves contributing to the community – in terms of monetary contributions or offering a helping hand during drives. Doing so can help you get a mention with journalists who are covering such events.
7. Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is the process of getting your employees to actively advocate your brand on social media. It’s a great way to share press coverage on social.
25 Top PR Tools to Grow Your Brand
Here are the top 25 PR tools for you to explore.
21. Onlcusive
24. UpbeatPR
1. JustReachOut
JustReachOut combines robust PR software with the expertise of outreach strategists to help you get the media exposure you need to grow your business.
You can use your JRO outreach team to develop a comprehensive PR strategy and action plan.
The JRO software indexes millions of articles written every day on specific trends, topics, niches, industries, or companies. It can be used to find the most relevant journalists for any given topic based on their past writing and send them the perfect email pitch.
The software also monitors daily press opportunities (daily queries from journalists to quote an expert in their article) on various platforms such as ProfNet, SourceBottle, ResponseSource, Reddit, and Quora to identify the most relevant ones for your business.
Finally, JRO also has tons of new features that can supplement your current PR strategies:
- A broken link finder: to identify broken link opportunities where you can get a mention.
- A guest post feature: to identify guest post opportunities in an instant and optimize your submissions.
- Labels: to filter and sort your campaign outreach.
- Academy and training: to help train you to be the best PR professional you can be!
Pricing: JRO plans start at just $199/month.
2. PitchPress
PitchPress is a niche PR service that helps fashion brands get product placements in print and digital media.
Most fashion brands fail in their first year.
According to ValueLine, “The apparel industry is fragmented and highly competitive. There are a number of major players, but there are also countless niche stores and private companies that cater to specific demographics.”
How do you navigate through this highly competitive landscape?
Just share your product images, branded line sheets, and dedicated press samples and let the PR team at PitchPress do all the heavy lifting. They connect with fashion journalists, create a media strategy, and amplify your brand’s reach.
Pricing: $3000
3. NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach helps you find influencer email addresses and automate your PR outreach strategy. It has one of the world’s largest outreach databases with access to over 25 million leads, bloggers, & social media influencers.
All you need to do is type your keywords and you can access millions of profiles and their email addresses. You can then automate your email outreach campaigns for link building, guest posting, influencer marketing, digital PR, and content promotion.
The Contact Relationship Manager is one of its key features. Each strategy would require you to reach out to dozens of bloggers. After creating an email list of possible targets, simply schedule it to keep track of their interactions. Connect Ninjaoutreach with your email id to get notified when a lead has replied or a follow-up is due.
Pricing: Starts at $49/month
4. ProfNet
ProfNet connects you to journalists who are looking for experts in their news releases.
Instead of actively searching out for journalists, let them come to you.
After you subscribe and set your topic preferences, sit back and wait for media leads. If you are a blogger yourself, you can search through their database to find a qualified expert for your article.
The ProfNet Connect forum gives you access to an interactive online community for journalists, bloggers, and PR professionals. Showcase your expertise and make yourself search-worthy by posting photos and videos and tagging them with relevant keywords. This makes it incredibly easy to stand out and catch the eye of a journalist you’d like to interact with.
Pricing: Starts at $1650
5. HARO
What if you’re not an expert in a particular field?
You can still help a reporter out, with HARO (Help A Reporter Out).
Registered Journalists send out a source request – a brief synopsis of their story, required source qualifications, and a pitching deadline.
After you set up your account, you will receive regular source requests via email (three times a day) that are relevant to you or your industry. You can pitch to these journalists with the answer and your bio with your information. If they are interested, they’ll reach out!
If you subscribe to their Advanced Plans, you’ll get an awesome perk that gets you to the front of the line. You’ll receive a message the instant the HARO team approves a media opportunity. This way, you’re not waiting for the daily email like everyone else and can start crafting the perfect pitch before anyone else gets started!
Pricing: Paid plans start at $19/month
6. SourceBottle
SourceBottle operates in a fashion similar to HARO. Journalists and bloggers can post regular ‘call-outs’ for industry sources on their pieces through SourceBottle.
However, there is one distinction.
Sourcebottle is more geared toward product reviews and securing sponsorships. If you’re looking for opportunities where you can be featured as an expert, HARO is a better option.
You’ll receive daily ‘Drink Up!’ email alerts that summarize all your relevant call outs for sources.
You can search for experts and journalists from all fields – nonprofit organizations, tech industries, fashion houses – it’s up to you. Sourcebottle also allows you to choose bloggers and journalists from specific countries.
For added convenience, journalists can select how they wish to be contacted – through phone or email. This makes it easier for you to reach out to them and receive a favorable response.
7. Cision
Cision is another popular tool to connect with journalists from top-tier publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and more.
You can also use the same platform to distribute press releases through PR Newswire – the world’s most trusted press release network.
With Cision’s monitoring feature, you can monitor the latest industry news and keep track of competitors in real-time across millions of stories over online, social, broadcast and print media.
With their advanced analytics, you’ll be able to see how well your brand is positioned in news media coverage. They arrive at your ‘prominence score’ by figuring out how often your brand and product keywords are mentioned in relevant news pieces. It’s a simple way to determine if what you’re doing is working or not.
Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tool
Pricing: $20/month for basic tools
8. AnswerThePublic
Ever wonder what your audience is thinking about?
With AnswerThePublic, you’ll be able to take a deep dive into customer minds to find out what they think about.
Just enter a topic, PR and you will be presented with hundreds of content ideas that you can use to connect with your audience. Use these ideas in your PR campaigns to address what they want and build a stronger connection. For example, you can type in “video games” and find out what your audience is interested in and what they’d like introduced.
AnswerThePublic also supports data visualizations to showcase all possible questions, comparisons, and related topics that can be used in your PR strategy. You can also convert these lists and visualizations into a handy, exportable .csv file. This makes it easy to transfer this data and work on it together with your PR team.
Type Of Tool: Customer Analytics Tool
Pricing: Paid plans start at $99/month
9. Critical Mention
Is your brand getting the recognition it deserves?
You can keep tabs on your brand mentions in real-time with Critical Mention. Used by brands like VH1, CBS, and McDonalds, it’s one of the leading forces in earned media tracking. The app scours through countless TV channels, radio broadcasts, social media accounts to find mentions of your brand and assess your media coverage.
For example, if your brand was mentioned on a radio show, you’ll automatically be informed of where and when it was mentioned. You won’t have to monitor anything manually – the tool does it for you!
You can gain essential media insights by quickly identifying audience sentiment and trends with its in-depth visual reports. Luckily, these reports are easily shareable – making it simple to include clients and team members. As these are also mobile-friendly, you can share them on the go.
10. Mention
Mention is one of the most user-friendly tools on this list.
You can use real-time tracking to monitor your brand, PR campaign, universal press release target keywords, etc on the web and social media with Mention. With Mention, you won’t have to do anything manually – just log into the app to find out what’s been going on!
As an added bonus, public relations practitioners can also respond to social media mentions directly from the app.
With Mention’s Competitor Analysis, you’ll be able to compare your PR efforts with what your competitors are doing. You can compare key metrics, analyze which competitor has the most share of voice, who’s performing well in a region and so on.
Keeping tabs on your competitors will inform you of what’s working in your industry and what’s not. You can use this data to shape your PR campaigns for more success.
Type Of Tool: PR Tracking Tool
Pricing: Paid plans start at $25/month
11. Brandseye
Your brand might be trending, but do people really like it?
Brandseye allows you to analyze the public sentiment regarding your brand. The tool gives organizations with an in-depth understanding of what’s causing positive and negative sentiment around them.
However, algorithms can’t accurately understand human conversation because of tonal subtleties, slang, and sarcasm, right?
That’s why Brandseye uses crowd members to review, verify and categorize the AI’s analysis. You can even use Brandseye to address customer concerns before they become an issue.
Brandseye can mine tons of user-generated content, and route the right contact opportunity to your customer service team. Your teams can react to the situation at the right time, saving or winning a customer in the process. Remember, word-of-mouth marketing can make or break or your brand – keeping your customers happy will keep your reputation intact.
Pricing: Starts at $10/month
12. Buzzsumo
What’s the best way to create successful content?
By understanding what topics work in your industry.
Buzzsumo is a tool that can help you find and analyze to top-performing blogs and videos in your industry. You can use the tool’s data to decode what they’re doing and replicate their strategies for yourself.
For example, if a blog has been growing exponentially recently, you can use Buzzsumo to identify the root cause of that. You can then try and replicate that with your blog and achieve similar growth levels.
You can even use this tool to keep tabs on any prominent personalities and blogs in your industry. The moment they publish new material, you’ll be notified of it on your personalized Buzzsumo dashboard. This ensures that you don’t miss out on the latest developments in your field and can always keep up.
Pricing: Starts at $79/month
13. Sparktoro
If you want to make a connection with your audience, you’ll have to understand them.
And what’s the best way to do this?
By understanding what inspires them.
Sparktoro is an audience intelligence tool made by Rand Fishkin – a prolific digital marketer who is the founder of Moz.
Sparktoro lets you discover the websites, blogs, podcasts, social accounts that reach your audience through various search terms. You can build lists of accounts to monitor and track, to spot trends before they happen.
Sparktoro also has a unique feature to gauge the actual impact of your brand. With the Fake Follower Audit, you’ll be able to identify any fake followers on your channels – be it bots, spam, propaganda or inactive accounts. You can then discount these accounts from your monitoring to analyze who your real customer base is.
14. Subject Line
Your subject line is the most important part of your pitch.
Why?
Around 35% of email recipients open an email based on subject line alone. So it makes sense to spend some time perfecting it, right?
To ensure that you always create a good first impression, use this free email marketing tool. Subject Line can evaluate your subject lines based on ‘clickability’ – this is how attractive it looks to a reader.
Subject Line will also breakdown your subject line to show you what’s good and what’s not. This can help you identify what aspects of your subject line needs work.
To help you further, the tool will also give you tons of helpful tips to improve your subject line. You can also access its list of trending topics to check out what’s viral at the moment and leverage that in your subject lines.
Pricing: Free
15. Prezly
Prezly is a powerful all-in-one PR software that’ll handle all your media coverage needs. You get a PR CRM, online newsrooms, story editors to create stunning visual press releases and targeted PR campaigns.
Used by companies like Reebok, RedBull, and Shopify, it’s a centralized platform for all your PR needs.
With the CRM, you’ll be able to keep track of all your press contacts and instantly identify the best journalists to reach out to. It’s a great place to take stock of your connections and build a useful contact database.
The story editor can help you create attractive visual press releases that journalists can’t say no to. You can add multimedia to your press releases to accurately convey your message in an easily understandable way.
You can then use these features together to create a powerful PR campaign that can reach and engage the right people in no time.
16. Grammarly
Another way to leave a lasting impression on a journalist is by crafting flawless emails. If your emails are written beautifully, you can rest assured that they’ll be taken seriously.
Luckily, Grammarly makes sure that everything you type is clear, effective, and free of mistakes. It can analyze your content on a variety of different criteria such as sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, engagement and more.
With Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, you can verify if your content is original or not. The tool looks through search engines for millions of websites and academic databases that have matching words and phrases.
It then gives you a plagiarism percentage and a breakdown of where the material has been copied. This is a good way to instantly verify if the work you receive is 100% unique or not.
Type Of Tool: Writing Tools
Pricing: Paid plans start at $29.95/month
17. Crystal
How do you persuade an influential journalist or personality?
By speaking their language (metaphorically speaking).
But how do you know what kind of style a journalist wants?
Just use Crystal.
Crystal analyzes your target influencers’ communication style from their social media posts or PR sample texts. You can use this information to craft personalized emails and pitches for these targets. By redoing them in a style that the journalist prefers, universal PR you’re increasing the chances of them liking your pitch.
Crystal also offers you the unique feature of ‘relationship reports.’ These reports explain the possible dynamics between two people based on their unique personalities, even if they have never interacted before.
You can use this data to improve and prepare for press release your interactions with PR professionals and target influencers. Your interactions are bound to go well since Crystal has already walked you through them!
Pricing: Starts at $19/month
18. GlobeNewswire
Tons of companies are now flocking towards new distribution channels such as social media and blogs. It’s up to you to update your press releases to reach all these platforms. However, universal PR manually doing this can be difficult.
Luckily, GlobeNewswire is a PR tool that distributes your press release through online newsrooms to give you a huge reach. You can customize which outlets and audiences you want to target. This allows you to only reach out to publications and platforms that align with your aspirations.
If that wasn’t enough, GlobeNewswire allows you to curate custom press release feed for your website with direct-from-source news and content issued on behalf of global companies across all industries.
Pricing: Starts at $460/release
19. PR.co
Your PR strategy isn’t solely dependent on your press releases.
You’ll also have to spend time on brand storytelling to truly get your message across. While you can publish visual press releases with PR.co, that isn’t all you can do.
PR.co allows you to create a structured digital newsroom (or landing page) for all your company press releases. This allows readers to tie together different press releases and understand what your brand stands for.
You can even use the Embargo feature to give certain journalists access to press releases before they go public. This can help keep them updated on everything to ensure that they’re always one step ahead.
PR.co also supports delegating press releases to local teams to translate announcements to fit their local markets. You can choose to give them full or partial upload access to maintain your security while capitalizing on international markets.
Type Of Tool: Journalist Outreach Tools
Pricing: Starts at $699/month
20. TrendKite
When it comes to PR Analytics, TrendKite has quite a lot to offer.
You’ll have everything you need to keep up with your PR campaigns with customizable dashboards on competitor analysis, monthly measurements and product insights.
Instead of spending hours generating PR reports and analyzing your reach, simply click a button and TrendKite has everything ready for you!
TrendKite’s most interesting feature is ‘Attribution.’ It helps you understand your PR’s impact on your website traffic.
How?
The tool tracks readers from over 4.7 million publications. It also shows you how many of those readers visit your website after reading an article about your organization. This helps you learn the actual results of your mentions – instead of analyzing potential metrics.
21. Onclusive
Companies spend around $30 billion on PR per year!
So it is only fair that executives should be able to see the return on investment, right?
Luckily, with Onclusive (formerly AirPR), this won’t be an issue. The tool helps you gauge your ROI, social amplification, reach and more. You can also discover trends in real-time, including article frequency trends, universal press release social amplification, which publications are writing about a topic, etc.
However, that isn’t all.
Onclusive combines AI, machine learning and data science to give you access tons of detailed metrics such as:
– Brand Awareness
- Brand Reputation
- Narrative Adoption
- Customer Interest
- Sales
- SEO
This way, you get a holistic view of how your digital stories can help you reach your business goals.
Pricing: Not available
22. CoverageBook
Want to show off your PR campaign results to your clients?
CoverageBook combines all of your results and condenses it to visually stunning reports within minutes. Used by over 1000 PR teams, the tool automatically calculates metrics and displays easy to understand figures to woo your clients.
It’ll crank out detailed reports that aren’t just data-rich – but are also easy on the eye. You can add multiple data points to your reports to illustrate campaign effectiveness and results.
CoverageBook also gives you ‘Accessible Reports.’ This allows them to share a report from any internet-enabled device to make any last-minute changes. It’s the perfect way to always stay prepared for a client meeting.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month
23. Buzzstream
Your outreach process shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. You’ll have to carefully plan and monitor it to ensure that it’s working.
Luckily, Buzzstream lets you know precisely how well your outreach strategy is faring.
How does it work?
You can use Buzzstream’s outreach reports to identify which team members are outperforming and see the PR gaps that need work.
You can even manage your influencer relationships to identify what stage they’re in, to help yourself prepare for conversion at the right moment.
You can even build your network through Buzzstream by reaching out and connecting with tons of prominent influencers in your niche. You can create targeted templates and personalized emails with their email tool to send powerful pitches to prospects. The tool will also help you nail this process with their tips on ideal subject lines and email structures.
Type Of Tool: PR Analytics Tool
Pricing: Starts at $29/month
24. Upbeat PR
If you don’t have enough resources for your PR strategy – you can always outsource it.
Partner up with Upbeat to develop a media strategy, launch outreach campaigns, build journalist relationships, get media coverage and more. You’ll get all the expertise you need to craft a successful PR strategy that’ll get you the coverage you deserve.
You get to work with dedicated virtual public relations professionals who are experts at what they do. Upbeat PR will also give you tons of PR tools to help you manage your campaign.
You can even create ‘Press Pages’ on your website for any visiting journalists. The tool can automatically update these pages with your latest coverage to give the journalist an idea of what’s going on. With Upbeat’s extensive journalist network, you’ll have no trouble getting the exposure you want with your press pages.
Pricing: Starts at $2000/month
25. PRGloo
Sometimes you can’t decide which PR tool to use.
Do you need an analytics tool? What about a journalist outreach tool?
Instead of selecting one, why not use all of them in one package?
PRGloo is a complete media relations platform that combines tons of powerful, user-friendly tools. You can build influencer lists, manage contacts and engage with journalists – all in one unified platform.
PRGloo also lets you create and publish media-rich stories with its powerful publication and distribution tools. You can even engage audiences with a customized newsroom that highlights your most recent press coverage.
You’ll also get detailed one-click reporting to monitor what’s been working and how your PR campaign is doing. With the ‘Response Desk’, you can keep track of in-team and external conversations – to keep everyone on the same page.
Type Of Tool: PR Campaign Tool
Pricing: Starts at $2000/year
Over To You
Doing your own PR is not difficult. Use these pro tools to get the press coverage that you deserve.
Which ones of these 25 awesome public relations tools would you use for your PR outreach? Let me know in the comments below.