As a PR pro, you’re well aware that much of your time is spent carrying out the same mundane tasks over and over again, only varying (slightly) based on the client you’re serving.
However, repeating these tasks day after day, week after week, is only holding you back, both as an individual and as a company or business. The trick to success is to automate your processes. This saves you so much time when it comes to carrying out these tasks, allowing you to focus on the more important jobs.
Not sure where to start? Here are seven tasks that are holding you back right now.
Sourcing email addresses and account details
Hand in hand with the consideration above, you may have a list of all your influencers, but do you have the data you need to stay in contact with them?
This is a process known as enriching your influencer list, and when you’re done, you will have all knowable contact details linked to a name or email address, making these individuals incredibly easy to get hold of when you need them.
For this, you can employ easy-to-use tools like Hunter that can help you find anybody’s business email address if it’s online in a matter of seconds, saving you so much time when it comes to asking around for an email or scouring the internet.
Optimizing your social media
“One of the most important things you need to do to save yourself some time is to start automating your social media posts,” says Cristal Ford, a PR manager at Grade on Fire. “You can do this using a huge variety of tools and software solutions such as Buffer or HootSuite which allows you to create posts as you go and schedule them for certain times in the day.”
Some solutions will also give information on your post statistics and will have tools for keyword and hashtag research.
Building a list of influencers
If you’re spending your days searching the internet while trying to find contact details for influencers, journalists of other important people—especially if you’ve contacted these people before—you’re wasting so much time.
Instead, you can automate this process using tools like Buzzsumo and Klear to bookmark and save somebody’s contact information, whether it’s the information from the contact page on their website or otherwise.
Export this data into a spreadsheet, and you’ve got yourself an incredibly efficient address book with potentially hundreds of thousands of key contacts.
Managing your press releases professionally
As you know, managing a press release is hard work and requires the utmost attention and focus to pull it off successfully. With so much to think about and remember, it’s worth considering that there are many ways you can streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency.
One of the most common ways to do this is by combining and personalizing your multimedia distribution channels so you can automatically generate and create emails when you need them. This may sound like a challenge, but it’s been made easy using tools like Resumention and Assignment Help.
Tracking your emails
In the PR industry, the chances are that you send out a lot of emails every single day. However, it’s important that you track how many of these are actually opened so you can know if your target recipients are opening them or ignoring them.
There are a ton of plugins and tools out there that can help you to track this data—just search your email provider plus ‘email tracking’ to see what’s available.
Maintaining contact with influencers
When you’re in the PR industry, it’s important to stay in touch with your influencers, even when you don’t have news or projects to share with them. This helps you to maintain your relationships with these individuals and can be as easy as sending them an email or sharing an article with them that they might find interesting.
This also helps you to build up your rapport with them, as well as boosting your own and your company’s credibility. But as you know, this is another time-consuming process, and once you get busy, it can be easily forgotten about and overlooked.
However, there’s an easy way around it so you can maintain your relationships while staying focused on the tasks at hand. Using tools like Contactually and Write my paper you can easily create, write, format, edit and proofread these contextual emails so you can maintain the best business partnerships.
Creating relevant email replies
You might be dealing with a dozen clients every single day, each one different in their reasoning, format, language and purpose for contact.
With this in mind, every time you reply to an email or message, you want to make sure that your emails are relevant and connect with that client on a personal level—another time-consuming task, to say the least.
However, using tools like Academadvisor and Revieweal, you can create lists on data and social information, pulled from a user’s social media accounts and past conversation so you can be absolutely sure you know exactly what tone of voice and format you should be communicating in.
As you can see, there is a tonne of ways you can streamline your everyday processes, so you can achieve more in the most accurate and professional way possible. Start using these techniques today and realise how much time you can save!
