24 Best Public Relations Tools and Software for PR Professionals in 2022

If you ever want to make your job as a PR professional easier, you need the right PR tools and software.

Without these tools and software, you’ll find that you’d be spending way more time writing/editing press releases, hunting down email addresses of journalists, and tracking the performance of your PR campaign.

You could also be losing out on earned media opportunities.

To help you, we’ve curated a list of the best PR tools and software you need.

We based this list on the activities of a public relations professional. So whether you’re looking for a tool to help with writing, tracking brand mentions, nurturing media relations, or performing PR outreach, you’ll find it here. Let’s begin.

Media Monitoring Tools and Software

1. BrandWatch
   BrandWatch is a social media listening or monitoring tool that allows you to discover mentions about your brand online. Besides helping you track your brand mentions, BrandWatch also enables you to spy on competitors — which is great for finding ways to improve your service and plan a better content strategy. BrandWatch is excellent for PR professionals who work with small businesses, as well as enterprise companies.
2. Brand24
   Brand24 is another media monitoring tool that allows you to track brand mentions and understand the conversations going on about your business (or a client’s business). One great thing about this tool is that it has a sentiment score that helps you know whether people are saying negative or positive things about your brand.
3. Prowly
   Monitoring media mentions is not the only thing you do as a PR pro. Your job also involves managing press releases. And that’s where Prowly comes in. Prowly is a PR software that allows you to manage and organize your press releases. With Prowly, you can easily find earned media opportunities, collect and store your media contacts, and analyse the stats to see how well your PR campaign performs.
4. Cision Communication Cloud
   Cision communication cloud is an all-in-one PR platform for professionals. You can use the platform to monitor brand mentions and also share your press releases. But there’s more. With Cision, it’s super easy to find niche influencers and famous journalists who can help you lead your PR campaign and gain mentions in authoritative third-party websites.
5. Prezly
   If you’re looking for software that allows you to create, share and manage press releases in one place, then look no further than Prezly. Prezly is easy and straightforward to use. Once you create an account, you’ll have access to a media center or newsroom where you can share stories under your brand name. You can also import the contact details of journalists you want to reach and share your press release with them without leaving the platform.
6. Meltwater
   Meltwater, like BrandWatch, is a PR tool that’s great for social media monitoring. With Meltwater, you can track mentions about your brand (or client brands) on social media. You can also follow trends and track the activities or mentions of your competitors.
7. Mention
   Mention offers a social media scheduling feature alongside the ability to track remarks about your company. This makes it easy to find what people are saying about you and reply to comments without leaving the Mention app. You can use Mention from your browser or download the mobile app. You can also monitor your competitors with Mention and get notifications whenever someone online mentions them.
8. BuzzSumo
   BuzzSumo is one of the most popular tools in the marketing world. With BuzzSumo, you can quickly find topics or content that are performing well in your industry. You can then use the information you find to create your content so that it performs well too. BuzzSumo also helps you identify key influencers and bloggers in your industry to help you with your PR efforts.
9. TweetDeck
   TweetDeck is one of the most underutilized PR tools any business can have. The reason being that many people don’t know about it in the first place. With TweetDeck, you can effectively manage your Twitter account. You can create different feeds for the same account, allowing you to track mentions, follows, and monitor trends all in one place. TweetDeck is also great for tracking down other users or competitors, thanks to its advanced search features.
10. Awario
    If you have a small team but still want to make PR’s best use to grow your business, then Awario is for you. This media monitoring tool is less expensive than others on this list and still comes with all the essential features you need. Want to track your brand mention? Awario has you covered. What if you want to spy on competitors? Awario is there for you.

PR Outreach Tools and Software

1. BuzzStream
   BuzzStream is a PR tool designed to make it easier for you to reach out to influencers and journalists. With BuzzStream, you can find influencers and their email addresses, send pitches, and send follow up messages in one place. If you’re handling PR outreach for the first time, Buzzstream has outreach templates to help you. This PR tool also allows you to track your conversations and campaign success.
2. Anewstip
   Influencer outreach is an integral part of PR. And with Anewstip, you can get access to a ton of influencers to help you with your campaign. Along with the access to influencers and journalists, Anewstip also has a PR pitch feature that recommends journalists and influencers who would be an excellent fit for your campaign. The Anewstip software also comes with a feature that allows you to track the PR pitches’ open rate that you send.
3. JustReachOut
   JustReachOut as the name implies, is a PR software that allows you to reach a targeted list of influencers and journalists. But JustReachOut is more than another software. JustReachOut has a team that can help you develop an effective PR strategy if you don’t already have one. This way, you do not mess up your PR efforts.
4. Ninja Outreach
   Ninja Outreach is another fantastic PR outreach tool that can help you access over 25 million bloggers and journalists. To find these bloggers and journalists, all you have to do is input keywords that describe your industry or the type of journalists you need. Ninja Outreach then provides you with contact details of leads that fit your keyword. You can also create lists and manage conversations with Ninja Outreach.
5. Muck Rack
   Muck Rack is one of the most popular press release software among PR professionals. One of the reasons why Muck Rack is popular is that it serves both journalists and companies who want to send out pitches. Journalists who sign up on Muck Rack can use the tool as an online portfolio. And because Muck Rack automatically updates a journalist’s profile with recent bylines, companies can quickly identify who should receive their pitches.
6. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
   HARO is a PR tool that allows you or your clients to earn media opportunities by answering journalists’ and reporters’ queries. Besides earning media opportunities, HARO also helps you gain backlinks and build your authority as a thought leader.

PR Tools for Audience Research

1. Answer the Public
   In general, PR professionals and marketers find AnswerThePublic to be an essential tool in discovering what an audience is asking questions about. The amount of content ideas you can generate from AnswerThePublic is enormous, and you can use these content ideas to guide the direction of your PR campaigns.
2. SparkToro
   Created by Rand Fishkin (Formerly at Moz), Sparktoro is an audience research tool that helps PR professionals understand their audience. With Sparktoro, you can quickly identify what kind of content your audience loves based on the blogs they visit, podcasts they listen to, and the social media accounts they follow. The insights SparkToro offers would help you create an effective PR strategy.

PR Writing & Editing Tools

1. Grammarly
   Grammarly is one of any marketer’s favorite tools. Although PR pros cannot use Grammarly to perform outreach, monitor brand mentions, or understand their audience, the tool is still useful in making sure that press releases are free from writing errors. Nobody wants to read an outreach message or press release full of writing mistakes. Grammarly can also help you set your message’s tone and check for plagiarism besides correcting writing errors. Another cool thing about Grammarly is that you can integrate it with your browser, which allows it to work anywhere you’re writing online.
2. Hemingway App
   Hemingway App is another writing tool for PR professionals who want to pass a message across clearly. The tool helps you dial down on excessive use of passive voice, adjectives, and hard-to-read sentences. Hemingway App also identifies your message’s reading level, suggesting how to make it even simpler.
3. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
   Most people skip past articles that have poor headlines. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps marketers craft headlines that instantly gain attention. If you want people to click on your press release, then you need to test how strong your headline is with this tool.

Email Tools for PR Pros

1. Hunter
   Finding a journalist’s or blogger’s correct email address can be tiring. But with Hunter, you can easily find these email addresses and send your outreach messages in no time. Hunter helps you find the correct email addresses and enables you to track the open rates for the emails you send.
2. MailTrack
   MailTrack is a simple tool for Gmail that tracks the open rates of your emails. The tool is excellent for you if you have only a handful of people to reach. And if you don’t want the robustness that comes with other email management tools. With MailTrack’s tracking in place, you can tell when to follow up on emails and test different email subject lines to get the one with the best open rates.

Conclusion

There you have it — 24 tools and software to help you improve your public relations efforts.

While it can be tempting to want to use all these tools at once, it’s important to note that these PR tools and software only work when you have a strong PR strategy in place.