3 Ways to Automate Your PR Efforts

Public relations used to be a very complicated process that was exclusive to high-level PR agencies.

14:24 23 March 2020

There are lots of businesses that still wait on doing PR because they think that it’s super expensive and out of their reach. In this post, we show you the top 3 tips to make PR a reality for your business. These tips, that no PR agency in London will share with you, will help you set up outreach campaigns and be successful in your PR efforts.

Let’s dive in.

1. Use a database tool

PR used to be solely based on the connections that you had but this has changed dramatically in the last few years. There are now tools that contain huge databases of journalists and can help you to connect with the right people through cold email outreach. For example, you can use a tool called PressHunt which has over 580,000 journalists in it.

What’s really great about PressHunt is that you can create outreach campaigns using these emails on the same tool without having to get another tool.

2. Cold Email Outreach

Our next tip is cold email outreach! It’s one of the most effective channel to make connections. You can use a tool like Mailshake or Lemlist to reach out to a list of journalists. Send 5-6 emails to each person 3-7 days apart, depending on the industry that you are working in.

Here’s a sample email drip campaign that you could use:


Email 1 - Intro and offer value

Email 2 - Send an article that was published about you

Email 3 - Ask if they would like to feature you (in a non-salesy kind of way)

Email 4 - Send a reminder email

Email 5 - Do a closing email

You can find loads of good cold email templates online. Take a few of them and make it your own.

The key to being successful in cold email outreach is…

3. Personalization and customization

Personalization means using the person’s first name and making sure that it’s correct on every single email. Look up your leads and make sure that you have everything spelled correctly. Customization, on the other hand, is adding something specific about each lead into the email that you send them.

This could be a sentence or two about one of their published works and sharing your thoughts on it. We’re not talking about a cheesy compliment. Make it something meaningful and not salesy. And most importantly, be yourself.

Recap

If you follow our 3 tips to automate your PR which are using a database tool, creating cold email outreach campaigns, and personalizing and customizing them, you will surely see some incredible successes in connecting with journalists.

Now, remember, don’t rely on just email to reach out to these contacts. Use other channels like various social media platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn - to say hi to your leads. Also, participate with their online communities by leaving thoughtful valuable comments on their posts.

That’s it folks, go out there and get some publicity!