By Clare McDermott published May 17, 2012

5 Tools to Help PR Professionals with Content Marketing

Chief Content Officer magazine asked a few of its contributors what their opinions were on the best PR tools available.  Here are their answers.  

 
 

HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Sign up with HARO to receive queries in your inbox from reporters seeking comment on a developing story in your field. With a premium subscription, you can even get advance notice, giving you more time to craft your response to a particular query.

 

Muckrack.com

Use Muckrack to (a.) identify journalists who are talking about the issues you care about most, (b.) engage them in conversation and (c.) pitch them more effectively. You can also get an early notification of breaking stories about your company or industry among journalists, letting you join the conversation in the critical early days.

 

 

Jon Gelberg
@JonBFM
CCO, Blue Fountain Media

PR Newswire

The press release should be considered essential for digital content marketing. Why? Because press releases are structured content that are easily optimized, distributed and consumed across the Web.  And distribution such as that offered by PR Newswire not only reaches thousands of websites, search engines, social networks and the like, offering unparalleled scale and reach, but also includes manual editorial review to help ensure the authenticity of the content and to make sure it is targeted to the relevant media partners only.  What’s more, PR Newswire’s ARC platform integrates text, video, multimedia, infographics and other content assets into a single platform that is distributed across the PR Newswire network, offering even broader storytelling capabilities across many more channels (each asset has a relevant distribution channel).

*PR Newswire is a sponsor of The Content Marketing Institute.

GroupHigh

Want to court the blogosphere more effectively? GroupHigh lets you search more than 1 million blogs in North America and the United Kingdom, identify the niche blogs you want to engage with and capture contact information for influential bloggers (including Twitter feeds and other social media contacts). The site also helps you manage your relationships with bloggers over time to help sustain the relationship and keep your name top-of-mind.

Clare McDermott
@soloportfolio
Editor, CCO Magazine
Constant Contact

Use Constant Contact to distribute press releases and send out announcements on events. The service makes it easy to create email lists, incorporate pictures, and monitor opens. You can also seamlessly distribute through social media.

 

Christine Dunn
@SavoirMedia
President, Savoir Media LLC

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

Author: Clare McDermott

Clare McDermott founded SoloPortfolio in 2007 on the premise that professional service firms need support from marketers with financial and operational work experience. Clare holds an MBA in Marketing and Finance from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College and an MA in American Literature from Washington University. She is passionate about writing, design, cycling, and virtual entrepreneurship. You can find her blogging about content marketing for professional service firms at Studious or follow her @soloportfolio.

Other posts by Clare McDermott

  • http://propertyagents.co/real-estate-lead-generation-course Muhammad Ayaz

    Really Interesting article I am doing social media marketing for my content marketing but didn’t consider press releases and after reading this post I got to think little bit about it.

    I got to ask one question here do you really think doing press releases can be great booster for the business compare to doing only marketing on social media?

    Thanks by the way sharing for the post!

  • http://twitter.com/skarjune David Skarjune

    Constant Contact is not a good choice for professional email service. Although they’ve added survey, event & social media support—their presentation mode favors newsletter layouts, their targeting abilities are subpar, and their integration to other systems is limited, which is critical.

    MailChimp is a better example of a high-end, professional, extensible email framework. It offers designers sophisticated control of templates, has precision targeting tools, and most important it can integrate with other CRM tools like Salesforce, Highrise, BatchBook, etc.

    Choosing the right tools for Real-time Web/Social/Mobile campaigns is key, and silo’d platforms like Constant Contact are not the right choice.

  • http://twitter.com/soloportfolio Clare McDermott

    Muhammad, I’ve had very good results using press releases for my clients. It’s a great tool to use in combination with social media, particularly if you’ve optimized for key words.

    David, thanks for weighing in re: Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp. Very helpful! Anyone else have success with other email content platforms? Exact Target? Others?

/Chief Content Officer Magazine