The tech stack: What tech does a PR team need today?

By Nathan Makalena

At Roaring Mouse, we’ve built a purposeful PR tech stack, informed by client needs, and focused at helping us produce our best work for them.

Here, we’ll share our picks for tech that tackles the key tasks of PR.

Content – Keeping your copy sharp and your graphics smart

A host of plug-ins and websites claim to have made it easier than ever to produce high-quality written, visual and video content.

But tools like automated proofreaders don’t all make your writing better. We use readable.com, a powerful way of simplifying your writing. And we invest in Otter.AI which transcribes recordings – so we spend no time transcribing, giving us more time to sharpen what we write. It massively speeds up the process of turning client briefings into coherent copy.

Also in this category let’s shout out Canva, an outstanding, free, and easy-to-use graphic design platform that caters for all social-media channels.

Distribution – Getting your message out

Once you’ve got the best press release you and your plug-ins can provide, you need to get it in front of the right eyes.

We love the media database offered by AgilityPR, which allows us to build targeted lists of journalists and to share content fast through the Newsroom service.

Nothing beats developing the right relationships with journalists. But with Agility we can focus more time on that and less on building email lists.

If you’re often looking to go big, loud, ultra-fast and untargeted, newswire services by the likes of CISION might be a better fit.

Reporting – Software for selling your success, internally and externally

Here, we turn again to AgilityPR which offers insights on who opened your releases, downloaded attached images and clicked through on hyperlinks.

Google Analytics is a free, comprehensive service that everyone should know the basics of. And CoverageBook offers a handy way of collecting offline and online press clippings, tracking their total audience engagement and sharing the story with clients via a custom PDF.

Apps that help you plan and deliver outstanding campaigns

Campaign delivery. Here we find apps on media monitoring, social listening and internal collaboration which help your campaigns stay on track from start to finish.

Social media listening is a great way to understand the public sentiment and social mentions for your clients, as well as the key influencers in their space. We like Awario, as it’s easy to interact with mentions in-app, by liking, commenting and following.

For collaboration, our money’s on Monday.com for its unlimited number of project boards and additional budgeting, invoicing and time-tracking features.