Online tools, websites and internet extensions are the lifeblood of many data-driven campaigns. These online accessories have helped streamline many aspects of our day-to-day roles. The online PR and marketing community are great at finding these tools and sharing them far and wide on social media.
The best thing? Most of these tools are free to use.
Whether you’re looking for a simple keyword tool to help you write elevated performance content for SEO or you’re building out an internal bank of quick-win datasets, here is a list of useful tools, grouped into different categories:
- Creative
- Data visualisation
- Inspiration
- Notes / Project Management
- Outreach
- Research
- SEO
- Tools
Creative
A tool for collaborating on feedback, internally or with clients. You can keep different versions of creative assets on one dashboard to show progress as well as leaving real-time feedback on pinpointed areas of a design.
This tool is an online photo editor that is great for graphic design and making edits to visuals.
Forget Google images when you’re sourcing inspirational imagery for your client-facing decks or campaigns. Unsplash is an image search engine that is license free. You can sort images by landscape and portrait.
Data Visualisation
This is a great website to browse when you’re looking for examples of data viz formats.
This website has a filter option at the top that helps you pick which format would be best according to your objectives or view you’re trying to show.
A platform for bringing data sets to life through interactivity.
Inspiration
Digital PR Twitter
The online digital PR community is an entire resource in itself. From sharing recent coverage and campaigns, to providing helpful threads of wider landscape insights, it really is a plethora of data, opinions and research.
An example list of helpful people to follow in the digital PR circle: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1102568430316736512
This is a list of inspiring campaigns that the agency Neomam shared in late-2020. They’re examples of digital PR executed well and are worth a look to inspire your teams or adding them to your own campaign bank.
Root Digital’s Digital PR Campaign filter tool
When researching competitor content or digital PR content that has performed well in a certain industry, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. This online tool by Root Digital allows you to filter different campaigns by their topic, date and format for easy viewing.
Notes & Project Management
This is a great note-taking platform. It’s particularly useful for creating folders within your notes to group them together as well as accessing it on your phone and laptop for ultimate organization.
If you, or your team, are particularly visual, Asana is a great collaborative tool to plan and manage campaigns.
If you’re looking for a tool to help keep you more organized with your to-do lists, Trello is a platform for keeping your projects on track and your to-do list tidy.
Outreach
#JournoRequest & #PRRequest
When trying to source commentary, case studies or advice from journalists on Twitter, using these hashtags can be an effective way to reach them. Tip: Use additional tags such as #Travel #Lifestyle to help you reach a more defined audience with your Tweets
10yetisdigital Days of the Year Calendar
It’s well known that piggybacking off of Awareness days and other seasonal events can help boost your campaign's visibility and coverage numbers. 10 Yetis release a ‘social media days of the year calendar’ each year, which is worth a bookmark.
To see your client’s coverage that’s behind a paywall, this tool can help you see the content.
This tool by Alexa acts as a mini-search engine for similar sites. This is a great way to diversify your media lists or when you need to find niche media prospects.
For those working in the SEO field, it’s important to know if a website holds any SEO value or equity that will pass through to your client’s website. Use this tool to check any potential websites that you plan to pitch to.
Buzzstream is for collaborative outreach. It syncs with your email provider to track open rates, complete follow ups and conduct split testing across your campaigns.
Buzzstream Buzzmarker extension
This is a quick way to highlight coverage and keep it all in one place. The extension links up with the main outreach system..
There are plenty of media databases available to help you locate contacts and filter them by different metrics, such as keywords or location. Cision is a global database.
Use this tool to help with A/B split testing of subject lines.
Store all of your client’s coverage in one place. Coverage Book allows you to share this coverage as a PDF, as well as pulling other reporting factors such as overall average DA (Domain Authority) of coverage and average readership.
Use this for tracking brand mentions and any coverage. Set up alerts for your client’s name as well as any campaign names to help you capture everything. You can choose how often to receive these alerts into your inbox, too.
For sourcing journalist requests.
When you’re trying to find a journalists’ email.
Also for when you’re trying to locate a journalists’ email
An email alert platform to put you in touch with journalists who are looking for story ideas or additions to their stories. Often case study requests.
This is another media database, especially good for UK contacts.
Similar Sites Chrome extension
When you’re building out a media list, this Chrome extension allows you to quickly see other recommended websites to potentially add.
(Or any other email tracking software) to notify you whenever someone has opened your email.
This is a great way to organize your Twitter feed and create dashboard views for certain keywords across your clients.
Another great media database for global outreach.
Research
This is an easy-to-use platform that shows you the questions and trends that people are asking in Google. This is a great tactic for the brainstorm phase of campaign creation - ensuring that your idea will be topical.
This is another tool where you can use a keyword to see what searches are happening in your space.
If you’re using hashtags to help show any data, this website allows you to see related hashtags and the top 10 best-matched to yours.
Use Buzzsumo to research content topics as well as adding in any competitor URLs into the backlinks section to see the coverage they received.
Surveys are a great PR tactic to share third-party opinions and support a wider campaign.
Discover new, or trending, topics on this website.
Advertised as a “not-yet-trending” report, Pinterest shares what trends they predict will appear over the next year.
See popular pin data to use within your campaigns.
For all your data scraping/crawling needs. This is particularly useful when dealing with lots of data.
Use this tool to discover the latest trends on the platform, what topics are working well and audience insights.
This tool helps you to see top influencer data and statistics.
SparkToro allows you to see insights by audience. You can search by what your audience talks about, where they search online and their social media activity.
A credible source of data to cite within your campaign's methodologies.
An internet archive.
Build out your audience by country, age and interest to see various insights about their likes and activity.
A rabbit hole of inspiration and brainstorming starting points. You can also share ideas for your campaigns here to receive feedback from the community.
Inspiration/research on different data visualisation formats and topics.
Ask questions or answer questions on various topics. This is another great way to see what topics are trending and what people are talking about.
SEO
Quickly see the DR (Domain Rating) for any website in your toolbar.
Hubspot Google Search Statistics
There are some really solid Google Search stats here.
To help you see if trends have ‘peaked’ or if you still have time to jump on them for newsjacking. You can also cross reference between two trends to see if they correlate for interesting storytelling.
This is a tool for determining domain relevancy using Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow measurables. These are a score out of 1,000 categories to outline what Google thinks your website offers from a product or services standpoint.
Use the KWfinder tool to discover insights on a keyword by country, in various languages. You can see the volume of search interest, other related keywords, keyword difficulty and SERP overview to see the websites currently ranking for your keyword.
Much like the DR toolbar from Ahrefs, the DA toolbar is another score out of 100 to determine how trustworthy your website is. The higher the score is, the better. Backlinks from high DA websites can help boost your own website’s authority.
Quickly check if a link on any webpage is a follow or nofollow link.
Download the extension to help you quickly see any broken links on your client’s website and analyze any on-page issues.
Tools
Use this website to draw a rough example of any iconography you require for decks.
This is an easy-to-use tool to help you convert file types.
When dealing with clients and teams in other timezones, it can be difficult to know when is best to set calls and meetings. This tool makes that simple.
This is useful when you don’t have a client’s brand book or TOV guidelines. This extension acts as a color picker and matches any color from a webpage.
Ensure all of your press releases, client-facing documents and emails are spell checked.
This is an interactive way to conduct ideation sessions using a sticky-note method.
JBH agency’s Percentage Calculator
This is an easy way to reinterpret fractions and percentages from your data and turn them into more digestible statistics for headlines and subject lines.
This is particularly useful for UK folk who need to grammar check any copy for US clients.
This is a recording software to share virtual meetings or any instance where you need to share your screen.
When using images in decks or other media assets, this is a great way to quickly remove the background color to leave it transparent.
If you need to edit any copy to hit exact character counts - across websites such as Twitter and Instagram - this website does exactly that.