From writing press releases to communicating with the media, the job of public relations professionals isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Having to constantly promote clients and improve their public image, organize events, prepare presentations, do different analyses, find influencers, and effectively use social media platforms all takes time and effort.
Fortunately, in today’s technological age, there’s a lot of tasks that PR professionals can automate through PR automation, which can make their jobs a lot easier. PR professionals can automate their more technical tasks without negatively affecting any of their existing relationships they’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing. With automation, they’ll save a lot of time, which can then be invested in segments of the job which can’t be automated.
Scheduled posts
Implementing social media into a company’s general PR and digital marketing strategies is essential these days because most consumers tend to interact with brands through social media platforms. That’s why PR professionals have to promote clear and concise messages to consumers on social media and use those platforms wisely. There’s a fine balance that needs to be struck between curating a brand’s voice, building a brand’s presence, and creating a powerful and positive brand image while not causing any sort of public backlash.
Some of the strongest brand-consumer relationships are built on social media, which is why companies have to be sharing content regularly. If not, companies end up not growing their following, which results in poor brand awareness. Fortunately, this is one of the tasks that can be automated in PR, by scheduling and distributing posts on social media platforms. There are plenty of tools that can help PR professionals schedule and post content on social media platforms; tools that help them save time and focus on other, more important tasks, such as creating the content in the first place.
Emailing and press releases
Another automation tool that can help PR professionals are features that help in creating press releases. Those automation tools help analyze how people will react to content, find media contacts for a story, develop long-term relationships with journalists, pitch a story, personalize emails, and manage contact lists. With those types of automation tools, it’s quite easy to create press releases that are interesting to both journalists and readers.
Then there are tools that help PR professionals automate searching for emails of journalists. Instead of having to spend hours or even days searching for the emails of the right journalists, and sometimes, not even finding the right email, these automation tools can search and discover publicly available addresses in just a few seconds.
Media monitoring
Finally, there are several automation tools that help monitor public opinion, which helps PR professionals manage a client’s reputation and prevent PR crises. Practically all online mentions of clients can be monitored across the internet, which helps in anticipating backlash to comments or statements, and in planning early responses in case the situation develops further. Many of those automation tools also come with real-time notifications, which means public relations professionals can immediately get a notification when there’s a new mention of a tracked keyword.
