PR teams need CRM, too

Over the past couple of decades, CRM software has revolutionized the workflows of your peers in other departments ranging from sales and customer support to marketing and hiring/talent acquisition.  These solutions have radically increased productivity and collaboration, becoming as fundamental to daily work as coffee and email (or Slack/your messaging app of choice).

Like most PR professionals, there’s a good chance you’ve been forced to use archaic software with terrible customer service. Traditional PR solutions waste your PR team’s time with inaccurate contact info, complicated interfaces, disjointed workflows (i.e. having to jump between multiple solutions for researching reporters, sending pitches, and tracking coverage), and subpar support. These legacy solutions don’t just waste your time and money—they keep you from building meaningful relationships.

If your sales team didn’t use CRM, they’d be laughed at by colleagues at other companies. The vast majority of PR teams, however, don’t use CRM to maintain relationships with journalists (unless you count spreadsheets which, according to the State of PR 2019, nearly 60% of PR pros rely on daily).

So why haven’t PR teams flocked to CRM solutions? Let’s explore that topic, but first, take a step back.

People have used numerous systems to manage relationships over the years — from rolodexes and spreadsheets to dedicated apps and software. In all of its forms, from simple digitized contact cards to the robust variety of solutions on the market today, CRMs enable companies to store information about a given audience centrally. For example, most sales teams use CRM to track current and prospective customers.

Over the past decade, businesses have also made great strides in their ability to unite customer data from their disparate systems into a “single view of the customer,” making it possible for marketing, sales, and support to work from common context to provide a seamless and unified customer experience.

In the same way that other departments use CRM software works, PR pros have a lot to gain by finding a similar solution.

Think about it: What do PR pros and their sales counterparts have in common?

Sound similar? Because it is.

If you think of reporters as contacts and accounts as media outlets, you could be describing a valuable solution for PR.

It seems like a simple question. If CRMs have been around for years, and there are hundreds of products on the market, why do only about 10% of PR pros use CRM daily? Why aren’t many PR pros just using solutions like Salesforce or Hubspot that so many sales and marketing teams?

Even outside of PR, data quality is a challenge for sales, marketing, and HR professionals alike. Maintaining accurate and actionable information is tough. Research from Marketing Sherpas found that B2B data decays at an average rate of 22.5%. Contact information changes constantly. People stop using email addresses or move home offices all the time. Keeping up with those changes is a mountainous task, even for the most sophisticated CRMs.

However, communications teams face even more significant data challenges, for what might be an obvious reason: The media environment is changing faster than just about any other. Journalists change roles or publications. New publications rise, and older ones fall. Amidst this change, it’s more complicated than ever before for PR pros to determine which journalists and outlets are relevant, credible, and likely to have an impact.

When it comes to PR, a CRM instance without up-to-date contacts in it and without the context of recently published articles and what’s happening on social media is useless—and likely a lot of extra work.

When evaluating CRM for PR, be sure to consider the following to ensure you choose a solution that increases productivity and not just future operational headaches.

As discussed, you’re going to run into significant data if you try to maintain your PR CRM up to date.

What’s more, with fewer journalists than ever before PR pros need to be even more careful to ensure they are finding the most relevant journalists and sending thoughtful but concise pitches. Otherwise, they will be tuned out (after all, according to our State of Journalism Survey, lack of personalization is the #1 reason why journalists reject otherwise relevant pitches).

Searching for journalists purely based on the beat they cover or title they have will no longer cut it in today’s climate. You should be able to find journalists and publications based on the articles they’ve written, what they’ve shared on social, where they’re located, what topics they’re interested in, and more.

Then, for each journalist you choose as a fit for your campaign, you should also be able to access accurate contact information and context such as pitching preferences, as well as the ability to read their past articles and what they post most about on social.

Timing is everything when it comes to finding new PR opportunities and identifying potential crises. Your media monitoring solution should enable you to track your company and competitors as news breaks and identify which journalists are already interested in topics related to your campaigns. Also crucially, the solution should notify you any time a journalist is looking for a source on a given topic or sharing relevant information on social media.

When paired with a media database, monitoring provides the context you need for meaningful and productive media relations.

CRM for PR must be built to help teams work better together.

Whenever you go to a journalist’s profile, you should be able to easily view any activity that your teammates have logged, giving you a full picture of your team’s interaction with them.

Ideally, there should also be an easy way to keep track of your colleagues’ media lists, notes, call logs, and pitches all in one place, helping prevent overlap and saving duplicative work. You should also be able to quickly see who on your team owns a particular contact to help further avoid any pitching missteps.

As a PR professional, reporting can be time-consuming and even intimidating. PR professionals need reports that are usable and easy to understand. While data is essential, PR pros aren’t data scientists.

Reporting should be simple. PR professionals don’t need the broadest swath of features, but instead, need simple tools to build impressive emails and reports they can send to C-suite executives that show the value of PR.

Your solution should make it easy to calculate the impact of placements and identify the specific journalists who are helping your story reach more people, faster.

While PR has never widely adopted CRM solutions built for other departments, there’s a vast opportunity for improvement. With pressure to justify performance and resources only on the upswing, brands and agencies alike must adopt solutions that facilitate their workflows. This means choosing a solution built to manage relationships.

Muck Rack makes it possible for PR pros to build meaningful relationships with journalists through its advanced database, while also increasing coverage and showing results that satisfy management and clients alike.

If you’re interested in seeing how Muck Rack can help you build better media relationships, we’d love to show you how it works.

Mike Schneider is the Head of Marketing for Muck Rack, where he helps to shape the company’s strategic development and growth of marketing, brand and revenue.

Source: Muckrack.com

Powered by NewsAPI.org

Keywords:

Public relations • Customer relationship management • Workflow • Departmentalization • Sales • Customer support • Marketing • Recruitment • Recruitment • Productivity • Collaboration • Employment • Coffee • Email • Instant messaging • Utility • Public relations • Product (business) • Software • Customer relationship management • Money • Customer relationship management • Sales • Customer relationship management • Company • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Public relations • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Customer relationship management • Spreadsheet • Mobile app • Software • Social network • Marketing • Information • Sales • Customer relationship management • Business • Customer • System • Marketing • Sales • Customer experience • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Public relations • Sales • Public relations • Product (business) • Marketing • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Salesforce.com • HubSpot • Sales management • Marketing • Public relations • Data quality • Sales management • Marketing • Human resources • Accuracy and precision • Information • Research • Marketing • Sherpa people • Business-to-business • Data • Information • Email • Communication • Social change • Customer relationship management • Social media • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Productivity • Data • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Journalism • Journalism • Social science • Journalism • Political campaign • Information • Context (language use) • Social science • Public relations • Media monitoring • Corporation • News • Marketing • Time • Journalism • Source (journalism) • Relevance • Information • Social media • Database • Surveillance • Context (language use) • Meaning of life • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Employment • Better Together (campaign) • Journalism • Public relations • Public relations • Public relations • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Performance management • Resource • Workflow • Customer relationship management • Public relations • Customer relationship management • Journalism • Database • Management • Mike Schneider (news anchor) • Company • Strategy • Economic development • Brand • Revenue •