CRM for PR: 20+ PR tools to help manage your media relations

Looking out the window of your home office at all the flying cars and hoverboards and wondering if it's time to finally swap in that Rolodex for something a little less analog? Well, you've come to the right place.

Ask most public relations pros what, for instance, PR CRM 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.

In fact, a global survey we did 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.

It needn’t be that way.

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 build relationships with influencers and improve your media relations all round.

Below we break down the top PR tools into sections, so that you can find the right PR software for you, wherever you are in your PR journey.

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.

Cision 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.

The 7 Best Cision Competitors & Alternatives (in 2024)

A no-nonsense guide to help you shop around for the best deal on your PR software.

“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.

In either case – subscribe to HARO’s daily digest emails for your chance to weigh in on hot topics and increase your likelihood of securing coverage while helping a reporter out.

(Psst... check out our free guide to mining HARO for hidden media opportunities as well as the 8 best HARO alternatives for connecting with journalists!)

Cision vs Meltwater vs Prezly: Which One Is Better? [2024]

We put all three to the test, so you can see which has the right strengths to fit your needs.

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.

Media and contact databases are the quickest way to build a media list and discover new journalists and stakeholders. We all know that good media connections are one of the core principles of public relations. 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.

• The Ultimate Guide to Media Databases
• Three reasons you shouldn't buy Media Databases
• The problem with GDPR, Legitimate Interest and Public Relations

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 email address or a twitter handle and it will give you all social profiles associated with that email or X handle.

Psst. We use FullContact in our PR software to enrich your contacts’ by suggesting helpful details like social media profiles.

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. It's a bit more than a PR CRM and can feel a bit full-on, so we recommend you contact them for a demo to see if Nimble fits your needs.

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.

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention our own PR software. While Prezly has a dedicated PR CRM at its core, it's really an all-in-one tool for PR teams. With it, you can organize your contact lists as a team, publish stunning newsrooms, send campaigns and pitches, share multimedia, log coverage – you see why we say "all-in-one", right?

You can try it for yourself with a 14-day free trial, no credit card info required, no sudden charges. See what you think :)

As a starting point here is an articles on pitching the press.

Snapengage is a simple Live Chat tool that recently paired with TeamSupport to develop its offering. (Their homepage actually looks a bit different now, but there's a big banner on it at the moment that ruins any screenshot attempts, so please enjoy a picture of their vintage homepage below!)

Basically, it lets you get in touch with your site visitors in real time.

How does this apply to PR? Well, imagine if you enabled live chat in your newsroom. Journalists could ask for further info or assets right there and then, without having to wade through their inbox.

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 to becoming a better PR pro.

Through temper.io it’s really easy to set up 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.

Email isn't dead. According to Cision's State of the Media report, 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.

• The Best Email Pitch, Backed by Numbers
• Report: Generic Personalization Harms Your Email Pitching

Plausible is the internet's answer to privacy-first analytics in that it doesn't collect any personal data, doesn't store cookies or any other long-term identifiers, and doesn't do any cross-site or cross-device targeting.

What it does do is show you clear and actionable website metrics without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail, which also means it loads super fast. It's also fully compliant with the GDPR, CCPA, and PECR.

You can use Plausible to track traffic, events and goals, including conversion rates and referral sites. It's what we do.

For the full details, see Plausible’s data policy and about page.

The Plausible Analytics integration dashboard viewed within Prezly.

The mother of all analytics 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.

But watch out – if you want to do business in Europe, Google Analytics could get you in trouble by breaching the GDPR; that's why we use Plausible for Prezly's newsroom analytics.

Here are our top three privacy-friendly alternatives to Google Analytics →

Analytics like Google Analytics are about visits, pageviews and time on site. Mixpanel has a different approach.

It can show you a newsfeed of what a specific user is doing (or did) on your site: opened your e-mail, seen your press release, clicked on a link, downloaded attachment x, seen image y, …

Similar to Plausible, Matomo is an open-source web analytics tool that provides complex open-source web analytics while prioritizing data privacy. Where the two differ is accessibility – while Plausible is plug-and-play, Matomo offers a more complex product that you can set up to work exactly how you want, provided you’re willing to learn its ins and outs. It is far closer to Google Analytics in that regard.

Matomo:

• Offers 100% ownership over your own data
• Offers complex web analytics that you can set up any way you like
• Uses cookies and collects personal data by default, but you can toggle this off or ask for viewer consent
• Can be set up to be fully GDPR compliant

For full details, visit Matomo’s Google Analytics comparison page.

Screenshot from matomo.org

Cloudflare Web Analytics, as you might expect, belongs to the Cloudflare cohort of web tools and as such is well established online. It is a free, privacy-first GA alternative. It is compliant with all major data protection regulations, and differentiates itself by offering a free subscription to all but enterprise clients.

While Cloudflare is a strong contender, it does has some downsides – namely that its data retention is limited to six months (at time of writing, August 2022). That means you can’t compare your latest figures with those from a year ago.

In addition, Cloudflare uses a sample of 1–10% of your real data to generate your analytics results, so accuracy can vary greatly depending on sample size, and isn’t great at filtering out bots from your traffic, which can result in skewed data.

Cloudflare Web Analytics:

• Is available for free
• Does not use cookies or collect personal information
• Is fully compliant with the GDPR, CCPA and PECR

For full details, visit the Cloudflare Web Analytics product page.

Screenshot from cloudflare.com

“Track the success rate of your emails.” Originally created for sales professionals, it can give PR pros insight into their email efforts by integrating with your email client (see the Gmail example below).

You can create templates for easy outreach automation. You can see the open and click rates of each template – this way you know which template is the most successful and which ones you can omit.

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.

• Staying on Trend: The Importance of Monitoring Trending Topics Online
• Media Monitoring & Tracking: The Benefits & Tools

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 get a real picture of what is going on.

The top PR metrics to measure in your 2024 KPIs

Or, what numbers to track so that the CEO doesn't fire you

We love Google Alerts because a) it works, b) it's simple, and c) it's free (🎉 ). It's easy to set up a Google Alerts to ping you an email anytime e.g. you, your industry, your competitors, or your sworn enemies are mentioned.

Get industry info in a digestible overview by putting all of your favorite blogs into searchable categories. You can view all categories at once, go through them individually and save articles to read later.

There are tons of news aggregators out there. Most of them allow you to drill down to topics like food, fashion, tech, etc, which can come in handy for learning what’s hot in the sectors your clients are active in.

The news aggregator you use is down to your niche, so have a click around, or try Reddit (learn how to use Reddit for PR), Quartz, and Techmeme for starters.

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

• Staying on Trend: The Importance of Monitoring Trending Topics Online

Media monitoring: 6+ tools, benefits & more

Someone has to do some press monitoring, it might as well be you.

In a time when AI is being needlessly crammed into every software nook you can think of, DeepL brings you a service that is actually super useful: automatic translation, done by AI.

Although of course it's not foolproof, DeepL's auto-translation can save you heaps of time on, say, localizing your press release. Instead of sending it off to an external party to translate or spending time painstakingly copy-pasting content to and from Google Translate, you can simply click a button and have DeepL spit out the first draft for you. Even PDFs 😱

DeepL also comes integrated in Prezly's PR software, letting you translate your stories in about 5 seconds without ever leaving the app. That makes it far easier and faster to create and publish your newsroom in multiple languages.

A service to tie online services together. While Zapier can be a little hit and miss, it's definitely worth trying for any mundane tasks that regularly trickle through your day. With it, you can set up integrations between other tools so that one action in one tool – for example, sharing a social media post – triggers a corresponding action in another.

Check out Zapier's existing list of integrations here.

The future of public relations: 10+ best AI tools

How to work with the robots, not against them.

"PR software" is an awkward umbrella term that swallows everything from newswires to campaign builders, which can make meaningful comparisons hard. For the purposes of this list, we'll be looking at the main comprehensive PR software solutions available on the market – i.e. those that promise to cater to pretty much your entire workflow minus the Starbucks integration (one day 🤞).

Instead of going through the tools one by one, I'm going to give you the facts up top with this very aesthetic feature comparison table, and then go through the key differences between the tools. Ready? Let's go :)

👉 Scroll sideways to see more 👉

Here's how I would go about it:

1. Outline what you want from your PR software
2. Divide and conquer (get one or two people to test tools and get back to you)
3. Take advantage of free trials, demos, and reviews
4. Choose Prezly (I'm KIDDING)

But first, let's get an idea of what makes these PR tools different.

Here are a few key things you should ask yourself.

(And if it feels like Prezly is coming up an inordinate amount, it's only because we do this thing where we speak with our clients, find out what they want and then build those things into our software. Wild, I know.)

How do you and your team currently manage your contact lists? What's your process for keeping them updated? Is it easy to share updates across your team?

If you're still using pen and paper to manage your contacts – or worse, Excel – then it's likely you can save literally hours each week by switching to a CRM (that's Contact Relationship Manager for any non-nerds). And I'm not even saying a good CRM – literally any CRM will be a marked improvement.

It turns out that most PRs can save 2 hours a week just by switching to a CRM.

It's true! I have the science to prove it. In our 2019 Global PR Survey, which interviewed more than 400 PR and comms people worldwide, we found out that PR pros who use a spreadsheet to manage their contacts lose 2 hours every week vs those who use a CRM 😱

Moving onto a CRM is an immediate step you can take to make your work more effective and your life that little bit easier.

And if all you're in the market for is a CRM, you can take a look at our separate roundup of market options, though I'd strongly encourage you to try one of the all-in-one PR software tools and pr agency softwares listed in this article – it will do wonders for your organization (and your migraines) to centralize all your comms in a single cohesive tool.

There are basically endless benefits to storing your press releases in an online newsroom, whether you make it live to the world or not.

A public newsroom that lets you take advantage of SEO makes it possible for new people stumble upon your stories, increasing your exposure – that's free lunch for consumer brands.

A private newsroom lets you share stories and assets with your contacts on a need-to-know basis, and gives you the opportunity to prepare crisis newsrooms, online press kits or internal newsrooms (quickly becoming indispensable for enterprise businesses).

Four of the five tools listed in our table above offer newsroom functionality, with a few nuanced differences. Pay attention to:

• The number of newsrooms included in the subscription price. Do you want only one, or do you work with multiple clients that would be interested in having a newsroom each? Have an idea of this upfront as adding more newsrooms once you're committed can jack up your subscription price
• Who will build your newsroom. This can create a barrier to entry for those of us without developers at our beck and call. Some solutions comes with professionally designed themes that are ready to use straight out of the box (yes, like Prezly), while others will build your newsroom for you for a one-off fee. Have an idea of your budget, resources and timeline before you buy in
• The analytics on offer. Most newsroom software will let you plug in Google Analytics, while others have reporting built in (Prezly has both!), giving you an idea
• Whether they include SEO capabilities. If you want your stories to appear in online search results, you'll need a tool that lets you define things like meta title and canonical URL

Press release distribution: The what, where & who of press releases

Hey, we're not here for grammar.

Some all-in-one PR software gives you the option to purchase media contacts within the app itself – which can be helpful if it fits in with your comms strategy, but also has some downsides, as we'll see below. Others refuse to offer this feature because it comes with legal, technical and moral implications, like GDPR-compliance, increased SPAM penalties and the ability to sleep soundly at night.

Even if your PR tool doesn't come with its own media contacts, you can always use an external tool to buy the occasional list and import it into your CRM for polishing.

But is it a deal breaker? That's up to you.

Here's a little context.

Buying a media list is exactly what it sounds like – you get a static list of contact details for a few hundred journalists and some company profits over selling you this personal data. (Is that GDPR-compliant? Jury's still out.)

Now, in the old days when people were chained to one desk for their entire career and the internet didn't exist, this worked pretty well. Today? Not so much.

Because in an age where even plain old me gets pitched stories daily, imagine how much inbox garbage the average journo has to wade through. And that would be fine if said stories were relevant, but in reality, it turns relationship management into a numbers game: spammers and lazy marketers (sorry, marketeers) download your details in one bold stroke and blast out their email to everyone on it without nary a hoot given to whether or not you may be interested (or indeed, who you actually are). Why? Because it's easy.

kate bystrova

@ekatemari

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People Who Think I'm Called Katelyn: A Thread "I loved your article on CSR. Would you mind linking it to my post on The History of Shoes?"

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Does buying a media list mean you're one of these awful people obsessed with shoe history? No, but it does put you in their company, and it means that your well-thought-out, nuanced email appears midway through a stack of inbox stuffers.

After all, if you have these people's emails, it stands to reason that several hundred other stressed out PRs (and salespeople) have them too.

It's little surprise that blasting emails out to randos you bought from the internet equivalent of a man in a trench coat doesn't herald sterling results.

On top of that, journalists simply move around too much to make buying media lists a viable option, since so many of the contact details are out of date by the time you actually send your campaign.

But this makes for a very biased overview. There are benefits to buying media lists too – of course there are. If people can put a moral spin on Twitter, we can do anything. For example, maybe…

• You buy media lists to merge with your existing database so you can see any conflicting or outdated emails, or
• You buy media lists to distribute only certain types of generic story, and keep the big news for your closest contacts

There are ways that the purchase of media lists makes sense, but that's down to you and your PR strategy. When it comes to choosing PR software, you need to decide what makes sense for you.

Some PR tools will offer media lists as part of their package, others won't – usually for the reasons stated above. If you want a little of both, you can also consider using a separate media contacts database to occasionally top up your main PR CRM, which can be a good way to go if that CRM will help you see which of your shiny new contacts have broken email addresses.

PR tools are normally priced along three parameters:

• Number of user seats
• Usage
• Features

The most common use-cases tend to come pre-bundled in subscription tiers, and it's worth remembering that the lowest tiers may not be the most cost-effective option for you.

To use Prezly as an example, a lower subscription tier that gives two users the option to publish four newsrooms costs more than a Premium Plan that includes up to five newsrooms as well as extra features, like user permissions, coverage logging and a portfolio hub room.

That's why it pays to use any online price calculators available or speak with the team about your particular requirements when evaluating the best PR management software for you.

Use price calculators to compare pricing across subscription tiers

It's also worth exploring whether the software you're eyeing offers specialized pricing for your particular use-case – many tools offer discounts for NGOs, while some have an agency pricing plan.

Whatever your current position, think about what you want from the software now and whether that's likely to change in the next year or two. Are you planning to grow your team? Or maybe you'll want to set up an extra newsroom or two down the line, or a PR portfolio?

You don't need to have all the answers, but having an idea of how your software needs might evolve in the near term will help you get a feel for how much it's likely to cost you over the next few years.

When working out your budget, you'll probably already be taking into account any existing software subscriptions that this new tool could save you. But you should also be mindful of the softer gains an all-in-one PR tool can bring, such as the time saved collaborating with your coworkers, switching between multiple tools, or waiting to hear back from IT or marketing about publishing your latest newsroom updates.

Still need help making up your mind? Let's see if we can simplify things.

Several of these tools offer free trials, which I personally find the best way to establish whether or not a piece of new software is right for me. Demos are helpful too, but it's usually difficult to get a good idea of how a tool impacts on your day-to-day until you're, well, actually using it.

Of course, a trial will only give you as much as you're willing to invest in it.

Here are a few guidelines to make sure you don't waste your free days with your shiny new plaything.

Before you begin, outline what it is that you actually do every day – i.e. your workflow. That should include any frustrations and tasks that take up a disproportionate amount of your time, as well as a wishlist of things you would like to try in the near future. (This wishlist may well be the reason you're looking at new PR software in the first place!)

Your outline might look something like this:

• Check email for replies from media contacts, update any details in Excel
  • Frustration: can't see if someone else of the team has made changes to spreadsheet; sometimes contact details are changed and I don't know if it's by accident or on purpose
• See who has not responded to the last campaign and plan follow-up
  • Frustration: working with Mandy on this one, so have to coordinate with her to see who's replied, but she's off for the rest of the week for her cat's birthday 😩
• Email [xyz] journalists with photos and video assets for [brand]
• Find a way to get the latest press release draft off Mandy's computer 😑 if can't, tidy up last version we have
• Send Word draft of new press release to [client] for sign-off
• Set alarm for 2:30am to hit send on campaign for the Life–Work Balance Institute
• Wishlist:
  • Find a better way to store and share media assets
  • Get a view of which journalists are good bets to follow up with
  • Find a better way to share working drafts between self and Mandy/Mandy's cat

Ok, now the reason you put yourself through that exercise isn't to make yourself completely jaded about your career.

This list gives you a great starting point from which to approach your PR software search.

From the list above, we can see that Mandy's coworker would benefit from being able to share things like contacts and press release drafts within their team, and even with clients. We also know that they're currently using Excel to store contact data, and Microsoft Word for drafting press releases, which means there's a huge opportunity to free up their time with something like a CRM (contact relationship manager) or an online newsroom tool. It also sounds like they need to be able to share media assets with select contacts, meaning that the option to publish a press kit or at least store those assets online could go a long way.

Now, compare that with our PR software comparison table above.

The tools that meet the criteria for a PR CRM, online newsrooms, and press kits are Prezly, Presspage and Prowly. Of those, Prezly and Prowly offer a free trial, so I would start by dedicating a few days to trying both, and likely book a demo for the third option.

Of course, signing up for a trial is the easy bit. Once you get access to the software, you need to commit to using it for the next few days and really get a feel for what it offers.

Click around, try setting up a newsroom, importing some contacts, sending a campaign to yourself and your team. Take a look through any onboarding resources available to get an idea of what features might be squirreled away for you to find; a company's changelog can give you a good idea of what features are available, as well as what they are prioritizing building and how frequently they update.

Skimping on this part of the journey pretty much invalidates the research you've done so far, so pencil in a good week or two for testing.

Very few of us work in a silo, so why would we test out software by ourselves? If you work in a team, you need to be sure that the PR software you choose works for everyone's workflow, not just yours.

At the same time, you don't want to wind up in the position of having too many cooks; or, as a well-known African proverb says: 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. Have one or two people look into the possible solutions, own this process, and report back their findings to the rest.

Btw – our 14-day free trial (did I mention we had a trial?) includes three seats, so do get your team involved in helping you make that decision.

It's pretty standard practice for companies to roll out the red carpet for prospective leads and promise them the world, only for things to start falling apart once you're locked into a contract.

Switching PR software isn't something you want to do very often, so it's best to do a bit of due diligence now and save yourself a headache down the line. Here's what I would do.

• Consider speaking with people who already use the software you're evaluating (the support team for any tool would likely be happy to put you in touch), or at the very least, check out independent reviews on sites like Capterra; bear in mind to look at the total number of reviews for each tool as well as the overall sentiment
• Ask about the pricing plans that are available for your particular use case and any discounts on offer – for example, you will often save around 20% on the monthly price by subscribing to a full year upfront, while Prezly offers a discounted rate for NGOs as well as a specialized subscription plan for PR agencies
• Find out whether you should expect pricing to increase with the number of user seats, newsrooms, contacts stored in your CRM or number of campaigns sent

So there you have it – the top PR software options to help you conquer the media world! Remember, whether you're a one-person show or a team in the double-digits, there's a solution out there that can help you get the job done.

So what are you waiting for? Make like a corduroy pillow and create some headlines :)

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