The internet has smothered newspapers in popularity, but traditional media are still the most trusted news sources—and even growing stronger in the fake news era. While the number of newspapers is shrinking on a global scale, their authority and relevancy are growing. Can't miss out on print coverage if you want to build a high brand reputation and credibility.

The guide you're about to read shows how to use print media tracking to create well-informed and effective PR strategies in 2025.

What is print media monitoring in 2025?

For the sake of clarity, I'll state the obvious.

Print media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, your clients, or relevant industry topics in printed publications.

It used to be done only manually, but, since the PR world progressed, even paper has gone digital. Well, not literally.

There are still many opportunities to earn mentions in paper publications on a national and local level. Prowly's Media Database contains insights about 14,000 newspapers and magazines in the US alone.

Why is print monitoring important (still)?

Simple reason: your audiences are reading magazines and journals and they aren't going anywhere. To name a few:

• News readers want reliable sources of information.
• Businesspeople stay for non-clickbait opinions and thorough analyses of their industry.
• Heavy smartphone users are trying to take a break from their screens.

Some industries still treat print as their top media outlets

Among them:

• Fashion and lifestyle brands want to be featured in glossy magazines.
• B2B companies care about mentions in trade publications.
• NGOs and public affairs keep print opinion magazines in their tier 1 lists.

And you can help them get there. You just need a good PR strategy fueled by print monitoring insights.

How print media monitoring works in 2025

Vintage PR pros remember the time when physically flipping through pages and cutting out clippings was the only way to get proof of print media coverage. It was slow, meticulous work—yet it's still the only way some of us do it, even though there are print monitoring tools for that.

Print monitoring tools like Prowly provide an automatic print clipping service. You get a base of magazines and journals from which you can automatically collect mentions.

But... how?

How to do print monitoring

The licensed provider buys and digitizes print content for you. From then on, it's just like any other media monitoring software:

1. You create a query for any keyword or backlink.
2. You narrow it down with advanced criteria and filters to get just the results you're looking for.
3. You browse and save the mentions in digital form.

What's the benefit of using print monitoring (other than speed and efficiency)?

You can perform offline and online media analyses on a scale you would've struggled with before.

How to analyze print media coverage

Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty.

To fully utilize your print monitoring tool, you should aim to understand the media landscape, not just find relevant mentions. That's where dashboards come in handy, helping you track what's going on, find trends and correlations, extract useful insights, and create effective strategies.

Here are the key metrics that'll help you get a better understanding and make informed decisions:

Share of voice (SOV)

SOV reveals your relative visibility. You can compare your brand's presence in print outlets to your competitors, giving you an amazing bird's-eye view of your share and possible influence.

It's the go-to metric for showing your stakeholders a stunning before and after in the competitive landscape.

Volume of print coverage

It's the simplest metric, giving insight into your overall visibility. To assess the exact impact of your PR efforts, you can track coverage patterns and trends across a specific period of time.

Print mention sentiment

But what good does just counting mentions do? Analyze the tone and context of your print coverage.

You can do that manually by reading every mention and looking for specific language and phrases that indicate sentiment. Example: "Innovative breakthrough" vs. "Controversial approach."

Or, you can use media monitoring software that detects the sentiment for you. But make sure it's correct—algorithms can make mistakes in detecting human attitudes.

Estimated reach/readership/circulation

Estimated reach can be a great addition to your media coverage reports, as long as you understand it's not extremely accurate. That's the risk of doing estimates, unfortunately.

The metric is useful if there are significant differences in reach across weeks or months.

Luckily, you don't have to take these measurements yourself; creating a readership estimate comparison could take you a few afternoons. Just choose a print monitoring platform that will do it automatically.

Keywords

Keyword tracking is great for filtering out mentions you’re not interested in. Using key phrases adds a little context to your query, so you can report only the results that reflect your real PR impact.

This way, using one query, you can create a number of charts, all filtered by different phrases, and compare the data. 

Top 7 print media monitoring tools (with pricing)

#1 Prowly

💸 Pricing: Prowly starts at $369/mo, but Print Monitoring is available in custom plans only (Enterprise)

All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: Yes

What is Prowly?

Prowly is an all-in-one PR tool built to help you obtain data-driven insights by features created to foster real, long-lasting relationships with journalists.

There are dozens of tailor-made, PR features there, and one of them is meticulous print media monitoring that gives users instant access to global, national, regional, and local newspapers, along with trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals.

Additionally, in terms of print media monitoring capabilities, communications professionals are also able to track brands, competitors, or keyword press hits across domestic and international outlets (both print and those behind a pay wall), making it a powerful solution for businesses operating on a global scale.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online mentions, discussion forums, social media monitoring, and broadcast and print monitoring (in partnership with LexisNexis).

→ Learn more about Prowly's Print and Broadcast Monitoring here.

You can also set up custom mention alerts and digests in Prowly, including AI coverage summaries of your chosen queries.

Who is it best for?

• Busy, small to medium PR agencies with diverse, demanding clients
• Small to medium in-house teams and brands
• Data-driven freelancers who want to show concrete mentions

🔻 Cons

• Not the best for in-house corporate communications or marketing teams managing global communication campaigns and coordinating with local teams
• Not ideal for large agency teams (50+) that require enterprise-class software and advanced team management features

#2 Brandwatch

💸 Brandwatch pricing: Undisclosed, but third-party sources say starting at $750
All-in-one PR tool: No
Free trial: No

What is Brandwatch?

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence platform that helps professionals assess their audience engagement, helps do research, and provides metrics for stakeholders and clients.

It's also equipped with specialized features to help teams collaborate on tasks within the app itself.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Social media monitoring with secondary print media and broadcast tracking.

Who is it best for?

• Enterprise businesses
• Brands that focus on social media coverage
• Teams who engage in lots of influencer marketing campaigns

🔻 Cons 

• Not suitable if you want an all-in-one PR tool
• Might have little to offer if you're doing PR outside of socials
• Very little to no information about print monitoring quality

#3 Critical Mention (Onclusive)

💸 Critical mention pricing: According to third-party sources, around $4k to $10k per year
All-in-one PR tool: No
Free trial: No

What is Critical Mention?

Critical Mention is a media monitoring company that tracks mentions from online sources, social media, print publications, broadcasts, and podcasts.

It also offers a media database, reports, and other functionalities that help evaluate the value of earned media.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Digital, print media tracking, broadcast monitoring and mentions from print publications.

Who is it best for?

• Teams reporting on mentions only
• Wide range of media monitoring channels
• Great for large companies and established brands

🔻 Cons 

• According to reviews, its media database is lacking
• Not an all-in-one PR tool

#4 Meltwater

💸 Meltwater pricing: According to third-party sources, $12k per user per year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Meltwater?

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that offers a media database, media monitoring including newspaper monitoring, reporting, and tools to help professionals engage with their audience. It provides insights across various channels, making it a valuable solution for brands looking to track coverage across social media platforms and traditional media.

In addition to monitoring digital mentions, Meltwater also helps businesses track printed documents, such as press clippings and physical publications.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online media tracking, social media, print, broadcast and podcast monitoring.

Who is it best for?

• Works well for enterprises and large teams
• Teams in need of a good media database
• Those who want various tracking offers

🔻 Cons 

• User reviews say it's difficult to use
• Very expensive for small businesses

→ Read more about Meltwater's alternatives and how it compares to Cision and Prowl

#5 Cision

💸 Cision pricing: According to third-party sources, starts around $8k/year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Cision?

Cision is one of the oldest PR tools available, with a media database, media monitoring, press release distribution, and reporting available. As a media intelligence platform, it helps businesses track and analyze their media coverage across multiple channels, ensuring they stay informed about their brand presence and industry trends.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online media, social media, print, broadcast and podcast.

Who is it best for?

• Great for enterprises and large teams that need media monitoring on a global scale
• Good for companies that want to use newswires
• Solid choice for well established companies

🔻 Cons 

• Might not be suitable for small businesses
• Expensive
• No free trial

→ Read more about Cision's alternatives and how it compares to Muck Rack and Prowly.

#6 Agility PR

💸 Agility PR pricing: Undisclosed
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Agility PR?

Agility PR is a media monitoring and analysis software that helps PR pros with their daily workflow.

What monitoring features does it offer?

The company offers the tracking of online media, social media, broadcast and print mentions, although some are subject to licensing fees.

Who is it best for?

• New users who need an easy to use toll who are not familiar with PR tools
• Teams needing a wide range of features

🔻 Cons 

• No transparent pricing
• Some print content is subject to licensing fees

#7 Muck Rack

💸 Muck Rack pricing: According to third-party sources, $10k/year
All-in-one PR tool: Yes
Free trial: No

What is Muck Rack?

Muck Rack is a software database for journalists most known for having a good contact database. Along with that feature, it also has others, such as media monitoring and reporting.

What monitoring features does it offer?

Online monitoring, social media listening, TV, radio and print monitoring.

Who is it best for?

• Large in-house teams and agencies
• Professionals who need an all-in-one

🔻 Cons 

• Can get quite expensive
• There's no free trial

💡 If you need even more details, check out this article featuring examples of Prowly alternatives, or simply ask us anything you'd like to know!

Media analysis with print media intelligence

Here are some use cases of print mention analysis. Most PR professionals have been in similar situations before.

PR crisis

A yoghurt brand issued a product recall. Your job is to monitor national and local titles to track the spread of the story, gauge public sentiment, and identify emerging issues in real time. This enables you to tailor your response and mitigate damage effectively.

All news sources are game in this situation. Social media platforms, online news, broadcast, and, you guessed it, newspapers. You can't miss out on what the most trustworthy news articles are saying.

Reputation management

Let's say a CEO of your company gives a controversial interview. The press is all over him; even trade publications cover his comments, and it's not good publicity.

You need to monitor print coverage to see how the story is being framed in various circles. This way, you can identify negative narratives and develop a plan to address them.

Read these articles to learn more about:

• PR crisis management
• Reputation management
• 16 PR Crisis Management Examples You Need to See

Investor relations

A publicly traded company has sent out a special announcement to trade publications. As a communication professional, you should monitor financial publications and business sections of newspapers to track how the news is being reported.

In this instance, media monitoring helps the brand manage investor perceptions and maintain positive relationships with the financial community.

Challenges in print monitoring

Is print tracking software the right choice for you? Let's break it down.

Comprehensive media analysis

It all depends on the scale of your operations.

If there's only a small handful of publications you'll be tracking (up to three), then you're fine with buying and browsing them yourself. But doing the same for five publications costs about $900 per year.

If your brand appears or is planning to appear in newspapers more often than that, then flipping all the pages by hand is a waste of time and resources. Buying separate subscriptions to specialized journals can cost $300-1,200 each.

Add keeping track of the competition to the mix, and analyzing paper media becomes a headache. Unless, of course, you're leveraging the right technology, such as mention alerts and AI-powered coverage summaries.

Paywalled content monitoring

Although we're witnessing a comeback to paper media, traditional magazines want to be accessible online. That's why print is evolving, adapting to consumers, and going digital.

The problem is that more and more major news outlets are closing behind paid subscriptions. Over 75% of top US newspapers and magazines have paywalls. If you want to be cost-effective about it, some tools offer access to paywalled content as part of a print monitoring service.

Overcoming the divide between offline and digital sources

Tallying up online and offline metrics is a must if you want a full overview of your brand's news coverage. Easier said than done—unless you use a reporting platform that gathers all your monitoring insights in one place.

Over to you

Keeping track of your industry on a daily basis is one of the most important PR tasks. It's also extremely time-consuming, especially when you're trying to report your work's impact.

Remember: print monitoring is not just for big corporate budgets. You can get a tool that is tailored for your needs, not for Fortune 500 clients.

The digital age complicates many things, but print media monitoring isn't one of them. Try a dedicated software yourself and see how much easier your life can be!

The post How to Use Print Media Monitoring in Your PR Strategy appeared first on Prowly.

When building advanced queries, Boolean can be cumbersome, ineffective, and prone to human error. One small mistake and your results can drastically change. But it’s still the most reliable search system. Is it?

There’s a simpler way to create effective queries. Here’s Prowly’s new take on how to quickly create monitoring searches that work.

Digital and social media, print and broadcast—track them all in one place, within a single query, dashboard, or project. Schedule a demo to see Prowly’s media monitoring in action.

How to create queries that collect relevant media mentions

The short answer is: check and refine.

There’s no going around it; your first monitoring searches will probably be pretty inaccurate. Instead of getting an initial spam tsunami, get a tool with a results preview built into the query creator.

And, if you’ve already created a query and your news scans are collecting too many irrelevant results, it’s time to revise the search. Exclude some terms to narrow it down or add more possible keywords to expand.

A self-serve tool like Prowly lets you edit queries yourself without erasing previous results or valuable historical data.

Get the Enterprise plan to unlock unlimited query-building sessions with a dedicated expert.

But what’s the secret to building effective queries in Prowly? It’s just four steps.

Step 1. Choose your search type

There are five types of search queries in Prowly:

The first four operate in pretty much the same way: you enter one or more key phrases, include or exclude some terms, and voila. The labels Brand, Competitor, Person, or Keyword make it easier to differentiate between all your queries.

The Backlink query is a separate type, used only to track a single URL. This is useful if you’re focused on whether a particular link appears in the media.

If you'd like to add backlink tracking to your standard queries, this will be explained in Step 3: Filters.

Step 2. Operators and how to use them

Prowly’s query builder is based on three types of criteria:

• ALL (AND operator)

Used to find only the mentions that match all given keywords. This is a great way to hyper-focus your search on irreplaceable phrases.

• ANY (OR operator)

Finds all results with at least one of the keywords given. Use ANY if you want to expand your query or fill in the missing context.

• NONE (NOT operator)

Excludes all mentions containing any of your listed keywords. NONE helps filter out unwanted terms from your search.

The main criteria

They are the focus of your search. Here you can use either ALL or ANY. If you want to add more than one key phrase, you can type them in separately or paste all at once, separated by commas, and press Enter.

NOTE: If you’ve got keywords from old Boolean strings lying around, you can paste up to 15 phrases in one box (500 characters in total). Remember to replace all AND or OR operators with commas.

You modify the primary search by using…

Optional criteria

They are the additional modifiers for your query. 

If your main criterion is ALL, then your optional criteria can be ANY and/or NONE.

If your main criterion is ANY, then your optional criteria can be ALL, ANY, and/or NONE.

What does that mean in practice?

Example 1. You’re monitoring the Prowly brand, but it’s often misspelled as Prowley. You want the results to contain mentions of AI. Your main and optional criteria will look something like this:

Example 2. You’re monitoring Prowly in the context of their top feature, AI Assistant. You want none of your results to mention ChatGPT or Gemini. This is what the search looks like:

Easy, isn’t it?

There are just two more elements you need to consider at this point. They’re your keyword options:

1. Exact match—check this option if you don’t want to find any keyword variations. For example, a non-exact match is “Apples” or “Apple’s” instead of just “Apple”.
2. Case sensitive—tick this box if you want your results to match the exact capitalization you used in your search. Example: the noun “apple” when you’re searching for the brand “Apple”.

Looks like we’ve got this step covered! What’s next?

Step 3. Filters

At this stage, you can select the countries, languages, and date ranges for the media you’re about to monitor. Depending on your chosen source, you can track up to one year of historical data.

The Main filters section is also where you can add a URL to track. What’s the difference between the Track backlinks filter and creating a Backlink query? 

A Backlink query finds only mentions that include your chosen URL.

The Track backlinks filter means your results may or may not contain your given URL. To find the ones that do, you can filter them out in the mention browser or dashboard widget.

Step 4. Selecting your source

The last stage is to choose your media channel. At Prowly, you can monitor all sources in one place:

Once you’ve selected your sources, you can check the results preview. It shows you up to 15 random mentions so you can see if your query needs more finessing. Broadcast mentions cannot be previewed.

Now that you know the theory, how about some real-life scenarios?

How to build effective queries: use cases

1. Your search term is often misspelled

Typos happen, even to the best of journalists.

Make sure the keyword you’re looking for isn’t commonly misspelled. If it is, use the ANY criterion so each version of the word pops up in your search.

PRO TIP: Broadcast crawlers search for key phrases in transcripts, which often contain incorrect spellings. Make your query more precise by adding a few variants of your brand’s name or common misspellings of your keyword.

2. Your brand goes by many names

You no longer need to set up separate queries to gather all your brand mentions. Use ANY to find each variation of your brand’s name.

3. Putting keywords in context

Don’t want your query to exist in a vacuum? Use the main and additional criteria to narrow down your search to particular topics.

For example, if you’re looking for media narratives about your product launch, type in your brand name and product name in the ALL criterion.

Or, if your tech brand is often conflated with a common fruit, use NONE to rule out all food-related associations.

4. A competitor’s name is an acronym and a common word

This situation is similar to use case 2, except that, next to the ANY criterion, you need to add the Case sensitive filter, too. It’ll make sure your brand name isn’t taken for a common noun.

But remember: Case sensitive doesn’t work for broadcast mentions, since transcripts often don’t offer proper capitalization.

If you’re searching for acronyms in broadcast, add spaces between the letters, e.g., “I C E” instead of “ICE”. This will help pick up the right mentions instead of results containing the noun ice.

5. Monitoring a brand and its spokespeople

Has your brand launched a thought leadership campaign? Type your brand name(s) in the main criteria and add ANY as your additional criteria.

The query must find your brand’s name alongside at least one of these names.

6. Various alphabets

Are you looking for your CEO’s name in more than one alphabet? Use ANY to make sure the query finds all possible spellings in the media outlets you’re interested in.

Bonus tip: how to do news scans

If you don't have the right workflow, they can take hours from your day. News scans are daily, weekly, or monthly updates about your media monitoring results.

What a news scan should contain

What do your stakeholders and clients look for in a news scan? The gist. The story. The message behind your coverage.

Rarely does anybody have the time to browse through dozens of mentions every day. A nice, succinct summary of the sentiment and overall narrative is what they're looking for.

How to automate news scans

Writing those summaries by hand takes way too much time.

In Prowly, you can schedule recurring monitoring digests with AI summarizing one or more of your queries. Just create a search query, go to Email notifications and create a custom monitoring digest.

Prowly's AI generates an overall summary and key takeaways from the mention scan.

See how simple media monitoring can be

Now that you’re all caught up, you can start creating new media monitoring searches. Building queries doesn’t have to be as complicated and exhausting as Boolean. 

The post How to Create Effective Media Monitoring Queries (with Real-Life Examples) appeared first on Prowly.

Clients and stakeholders can't be impressed with that. So, chances are, you’ve already started embellishing your weekly media briefings with short coverage summaries. But doing this manually can take an hour or more.

Read this article to find out:

• How to get the gist from your monitoring results in 5 minutes
• How to refine daily and weekly newsletters with little effort
• How to make briefings more attractive for your boss or client (with examples!)

What should a media briefing email contain?

For quickly communicating your PR outcomes to the team, clients, or higher-ups, all you need is a coverage summary.

Automated monitoring digests with AI coverage summaries

Monitoring digests are notifications that collect all new media mentions from a given period in a single email to help you quickly browse through the updates.

In Prowly, though, this doesn’t mean just a newsletter listing random mentions one by one; Prowly’s digests include AI coverage summaries.

What is an AI coverage summary? It’s an automatically generated, succinct recap of key messages, overarching sentiment, and trending topics in your chosen monitoring searches.

You can add AI coverage summaries to your existing email notifications or create brand-new ones.

How to create monitoring digests

Prowly’s media monitoring covers online, social, print, and broadcast media.

All you have to do to set up your first-ever monitoring digest in Prowly is complete these two steps:

1. Set up media monitoring queries

The intuitive query builder lets you track brands, competitors, keywords, people, and backlinks. Narrowing down results in Prowly is simpler than composing incoherent Boolean strings—just use the ALL/ANY/NONE criteria.

Want to know more? Here's how to build advanced queries in Prowly.

Each of the queries you create can be used to set up a monitoring digest in Prowly.

2. Create a notification with tailored details

Just go step by step:

1. Select one or more of your queries for the digest to track
2. Create an internal email name for the team
3. Add the subject line that your recipients will see
4. Include AI coverage summaries
5. Pick recipients; they can be internal and/or external
6. Choose your notification frequency; it can be daily, weekly, monthly, or custom

Each step is an opportunity to tailor the email to your recipients’ needs. But to make sure they’re only receiving the meat and potatoes, you’ll want to add the right filters.

How to customize monitoring digests (+ examples)

At the bottom of the notification builder, the last step is to add your chosen filters to narrow down the mentions your digest will be analyzing.

Here are some examples of how to create digests tailored to specific PR situations you might’ve experienced before:

1. Other teams at your company need competitive insights

You monitor your competitors closely, but your colleagues from business departments (like Marketing, Sales, or Product) don’t have access to your PR tool. Monitoring the media narratives surrounding your competitors is especially valuable for them.

How can you keep these teams updated?

Create a daily, weekly, or monthly monitoring digest to external recipients.

1. Use the queries that track your competitors. You can add more than one query to a single digest.
2. Apply the Article keywords filter if you want to reduce your results to a particular product (for example, “yoga pants”)
3. To further narrow down the area of interest, you can add other filters, such as location, language, or domain category.

By being able to check competitive insights every morning, business departments will experience the amazing value that media monitoring brings.

Regardless of the language you’re monitoring, all AI summaries in Prowly are automatically written in English, so your team and clients can understand. No more wasting time on translation. 

2. The CEO wants to track a thought leadership campaign

You’ve pitched your CEO’s expert comments to various publications in the industry. You’re monitoring your boss’s name and quote keywords in all industry media, but the CEO is interested only in the most prominent online news sources.

How do you calibrate your digest to accommodate this requirement?

Add two filters:

1. Set Source to “News”
2. Set Domain authority to “more than 70” or “more than 80” (depending on what “prominent news sources” mean to you or your boss)

Your CEO is busy and doesn’t want weekly updates or notifications when there’s no new data available. Go to Delivery settings and set the notification frequency to any time you want. You can keep the bottom box “Send a digest even if there is no new data available” unchecked.

3. Product managers want to track recent launches

Your athleticwear brand has just launched a new collection of yoga pants. Product managers need to measure the success of this release.

All you need to do here is schedule a digest for your brand query with the right filter(s). In this case, you can:

1. Use queries tracking the product, or type the product name in the Article keywords filter (general, like “yoga pants” or particular, like “Eva pants”).
2. If the product manager wants to observe product reviews, set the Source filter to Instagram or other social media and add the keyword “review.”
3. Track top media (Source: News, Domain authority: 80+) to get insights about the general narrative.

To get real-time alerts anytime someone mentions your brand in the product context, set up monitoring alerts using the same filters.

4. Your clients need to monitor the industry

Your client is an automotive company. They'd appreciate a weekly intel digest summarizing top news about competitors, customers, and other industry-related info.

With Prowly monitoring digests, you can set up an industry newsletter in a few minutes:

1. Add all relevant queries connected to the industry (for example, “Automotive news”, or “Car manufacturing”).
2. Use the Article keywords filter to track particular trends or topics (such as “Automotive market”).
3. Add external recipients (your clients' email addresses)

PRO TIP: Want to test the digests before you send them out to clients or executives? Try the filters out in your mention browser and make sure Prowly is picking up the right mentions. You can also send yourself a few test digests.

So, how can monitoring digests help you?

Custom, AI-powered monitoring digests change the game when it comes to frequent PR updates. What are the benefits?

Time. 

Once you’ve set up well-calibrated digests, your work is done. The system creates summaries and sends emails for you; your team saves tens of hours monthly.

Want to save time on personalizing pitches? Read this pitch personalization playbook

Improving efficiency helps score points with execs at your company.

Crisis prevention. 

Automatic notifications with mention overview help detect early crisis signals so you can develop emergency strategies on time.

If you’re always the first to know about everything reputation-related, your role in the organization becomes strategic.

Proof of progress. 

Instead of manually writing summaries of what you’ve achieved, your boss can be on the same page just by looking at the AI coverage summaries.

Customization of monitoring digests in Prowly is super-easy, so each person within your company or any client can get just the information they need.

Cyclical summaries of your achievements help prove to non-PR folk that your work bears fruit. And, it’s easier to justify the media monitoring spending if the CEO, CFO, or Director of Marketing can see the value directly.

Added value. 

Your clients expect results, and receiving systematic, professional-looking updates will definitely give them reasons to trust your methods.

It shows you’re proactive—nothing can escape your attention if you’re always one step ahead. Once your clients bite into the updates, they can get involved in catching trends and useful insights themselves.

The cooperation becomes a well-oiled machine, and you get to be the strategic advisor.

Don’t forget: your clients have bosses they want to impress, too. Receiving monitoring digests with key media narratives and competitive intelligence helps them provide value within their company. That’s a bonus they’ll appreciate.

Less noise. 

Prowly gives you multiple ways to narrow down the results appearing in the digests. Filter out the mentions that don’t matter so your frequent updates don’t populate people’s inboxes with junk.

Even better, you can create notifications for multiple queries at once, so fewer notifications are needed.

Try media monitoring digests

Prowly monitoring digests will make your life easier. AI-generated coverage summaries save dozens of hours each month. Personalization options make your media briefings more targeted and impressive to your clients and stakeholders.

Go beyond inefficient tactics–automate mundane media briefings so you can spend time researching, pitching, and fostering strong media relationships.

The post A New Way to Make Media Briefings More Engaging (w/ Examples) appeared first on Prowly.

In B2B PR, you want to impact the decision-makers: executives, managers, C-suite… There’s no better feeling than proving to your stakeholders that your media placements shortened the sales cycle.

But breaking through is getting more and more difficult in the over-saturated market. To strategize better, learn the dos and don’ts of the quintessential trade media workflow:

• Task #1: Finding trade media contacts
• Task #2: Writing pitches to trade media
• Task #3: Maintaining the relationships

See how Prowly’s features live up to the challenge of hyper-targeting trade media.

Task #1: Finding trade media contacts

Sending generic pitches to segmented groups no longer cuts it. To actually get replies and build relationships, you need to hyper-target your Tier 1 journalists.

This means tracking down the perfect contacts for your story, researching them, and crafting individual pitches. But you can’t do that with hundreds or even dozens of recipients per campaign.

Do: Develop a screening system.

Narrow down your media lists. Here are the four steps to do this:

1. Take a broader look at the media landscape and your competitors. 

Use Media Monitoring to create queries and set up alerts for competitor mentions, industry keywords, or thought leaders. Observe their activities in various media channels.

Who are the leading voices in your niche? Which channels best reach your target audience? Prowly enables you to monitor print, social media, broadcast, and online outlets.

Get instant access to print-only publications and licensed sources hidden behind paywalls. Alongside general news and business publications, Prowly's monitoring scans thousands of trade, industry, and specialist sources. Track any subject, from healthcare to engineering to politics to sports.

To find expert comments and thought leadership opportunities, create a query for #journorequest or #bloggerrequest. Narrow it down with your industry keyword to get more laser-focused results.

Wondering if you’ve missed some outlets? Monitoring your competitors helps track down journalists, freelancers, and contributors who might’ve skipped your attention. Create queries and set up alerts to see what industry people say, benchmark your narrative against competitors, and develop a unique perspective.

💡 Learn how to create effective media monitoring queries using Prowly from this article based on real-life examples.

2. Filter the database to show only trade media outlets.

The old classics like searching by topic, region, or media type are not enough to trim your results to trade media only. That’s why we introduced the trade media filter in the Media Database.

Combined with detailed traffic data from Semrush, you can instantly zoom in on just the right outlets for your story.

3. Scour the database with your target audience in mind.

Finding the right contacts will be much easier once you understand who you’re trying to impact. 

For example, in Prowly, you can filter your results by the audience’s exact interests, income distribution, occupation, or even household size. This way you’re narrowing down the search using your target demographics.

This feature is especially useful for targeting B2B bloggers, whose traffic and audience data are usually shrouded in mystery.

4. Expand your search using keywords suggested by AI.

The phrase “Mental health” might not instantly identify journalists writing about stress management. However, in the “Keywords search” tab in Prowly’s Media Database, the AI Assistant generates custom keywords for you to search by, polish your results, and find new lanes to expand your research.

Don’t: Guess who to pitch.

Adding contacts to your list based on a gut feeling can cost you great coverage opportunities. There isn’t enough time to hyper-personalize pitches to mismatched Tier 1 journalists.

PRO TIP: To make your lists more precise, you can group journalists and outlets by industry sector, technology, market, or region.

Data-based PR is the new reality. Trade journalists are seen as trusted sources of industry news. To ‘wow’ them, you need in-depth info, such as their recent publications, main beats, and audience profiles. 

Use data to craft a story that’ll help their readers make better business decisions. Trade journalists can tell when you aren’t up-to-date with the latest market trends and numbers.

Task #2: Writing pitches to trade media

Trade media cycles are longer than for consumer outlets, so you should have the time to prepare hyper-targeted pitches. But do you have the right strategies and tools?

Do: Keep it simple and valuable.

B2B PR is all about building brand awareness and authority in the right trade publications.

Prowly’s Emails module offers a smart writing feature to help you immediately connect with trade journalists. These reporters appreciate comments from established experts and data from unbiased studies. In just a few seconds, the PR-trained AI drafts pitches such as:

• Expert comment suggestion
• Interview opportunity
• Sharing survey or research results
• Summary of your press release

A successful trade media pitch helps the journalist understand the bigger industry picture and your brand’s place in it. Use your product or service as an example of a trend or a solution to a problem.

PRO TIP: A great way to bring attention to your product is to get a review from a trade blogger or opinion leader. But make sure their audiences align with yours!

In other words, your pitch has to be useful. Unique POV doesn’t mean convoluted.

Don’t: Be simplistic and robotic.

Buzzwords, jargon, sales talk, data overload, and copy-pasted company descriptions are the fastest ways to kill your pitch. Trade reporters might be fact-oriented, but they’re still human.

1. When offering an expert for a comment or interview, show how one-of-a-kind they are. Describe their interesting business case and the value they can bring to the readers.
2. In a boilerplate, talk about the company’s unique business approach and give tangible proof. None of that “industry disruptor” fluff.

Being bold, contrarian, and funny is always better than being boring and stiff as a board. Novelty and surprise get the audience in their seats.

PRO TIP: You can brainstorm story angles with Prowly’s AI for press release creation. Just type in your key messages and watch the ideas unfold.

Task #3: Maintaining the relationships

Not all your messages to trade journalists have to be pitches. Reporters appreciate selfless help from time to time.

Once you become their trusted source, they might approach you for comments on various industry topics.

Do: Offer extra ideas and be proactive.

How can you be more helpful to a trade journalist?

If they’ve accepted your pitch, share additional content for publication like videos, graphs, and data visualization. If they’ve rejected it or haven’t replied, offer something else than your pitch. Maybe some expert insights on another topic?

PRO TIP: Prowly offers in-depth email analytics to track journalists’ engagement with each part of your pitch, including the attachments. Just use the Prowly inbox for your send-outs.

Remember that trade media is more deliberate than consumer outlets. Trade editors usually plan special issues and topics even a year in advance. To be more useful to them and stay timely and relevant, ask for their editorial calendar.

And, as a proactive PR professional, you can’t miss out on developing a LinkedIn presence. Networking skills always go a long way in B2B.

Don’t: Plug your brand all the time.

All reporters want their stories to be unbiased, but trade journalists care about it to a bigger extent. They want to establish themselves as experts in their niche.

Salesy pitches annoy both journalists and decision-makers and for a good reason. Stop tooting your own horn and start solving your target audience’s problems. For example:

• If you’re representing a SaaS company, offer an expert explaining a complex solution popular or new to the industry. 
• Working for green energy? Create a purpose-driven campaign aiming to impact public policies.
• Doing PR for finance services? Offer a recent study with trend forecasts.

PRO TIP: If you want to keep up with news and trends in your B2B niche, use Prowly’s Media Monitoring. Stay updated about your industry with daily, weekly, and monthly mention digests.

Closing thoughts

As a B2B PR pro, your audience isn’t the general crowd. Your job is to find journalists and outlets whose readers could be your potential buyers.

Your brand has to appeal to key decision-makers, and they know the industry. Building authority is more complicated than generating coverage and audience engagement.

But there are ways to create pitches that resonate with your target audience. Focus on solving their problems and your thought leadership might just shorten your brand’s sales cycle. If not, simply growing your Share of Voice among people with budgets is great enough!

The post How to Pitch Trade Media: The 3 Dos and Don’ts appeared first on Prowly.

In 2024, Prowly listened to your feedback and industry talk to diagnose three main problems PR pros will be facing in 2025:

• Problem #1: Pitch engagement is lower than ever before
• Problem #2: There isn’t enough real data to base your PR strategies on
• Problem #3: Scoring quality coverage takes too much time and effort

To help you overcome them, Prowly added a set of groundbreaking features that might change the way you look at targeting journalists, hyper-personalization, AI adoption, and more.

Prowly never stops improving. Keep on reading and get a sneak peek of our future updates!

PR Problem #1: Pitch engagement is lower than ever before

Getting journalists to respond to pitches is starting to feel like pushing a boulder uphill. 

In the PR Trends 2025 report, 32% of respondents say that hyper-personalization will be their priority from this point forward. The emphasis is on deeply researching Tier 1 journalists, crafting individual pitches, and focusing on building lasting relationships.

Here’s how Prowly will help you understand journalists and their audiences like no other tool on the market. 

Precise data for better targeting

We’ve expanded your research capabilities adding new journalist and outlet insights to our Media Database. Use a single tool to quickly scan journalists’ online activities, publishing frequency, X (Twitter) following, timezone, domain traffic, and in-depth audience profiles (more on that later).

Crafting engaging stories

Get acquainted with the first AI Assistant for PR, a groundbreaking feature designed to brainstorm captivating ideas and examine the journalist’s perspective. Go through a Q&A that mirrors an interview with a journalist and discover smart angles for your story.

If you’re struggling with crafting compelling emails, write them using the new dynamic AI prompts for:

• expert comment suggestions,
• interview opportunities, or
• sharing survey or research results.

Expanding your media lists

Writing an email or a press release? Get automatic contact recommendations based on what you write! Spot relevant journalists and outlets you hadn’t found on your own.

Pitch personalization & follow-ups

In Prowly’s new personalization flow, you get quick access to all your notes, recent journalist's publications, audience insights, and your communication history, so you don’t miss any important element of your pitch.

And, to make personalization even more convenient, connected inboxes can now automate follow-ups based on whether or not the recipient has opened, replied, or clicked on your message. Read on to see more about Prowly’s advanced email analytics.

PR Problem #2: There isn’t enough real data to base your PR strategies on

How do you build a data-driven campaign when the information is scarce and hard to get?

37% of participants of the PR Trends 2025 survey believe that data-based strategies will yield more measurable outcomes in 2025. Prowly has made insights much easier to find, track, and analyze so you can revolutionize your PR tactics.

In-depth audience profiles

Age and country metrics aren’t enough to hyper-target the media. By integrating data from Semrush, Prowly enables you to dive into detailed audience information such as interests, occupation, income distribution, education level, or even household size. 

All audience and traffic insights come from Semrush, a reliable global leader in visibility management trusted by over 10 million marketing professionals. 

Easy access to reliable data

Prowly aims to make your search experience as easy as possible. That’s why you can now filter results by specific audience insights, traffic data, exact regions, and media categories. Thousands of contacts can be quickly narrowed down to just the most promising ones.

New Media Monitoring channels

Some of the most requested Prowly features were new monitoring sources. First we've added TikTok and YouTube, then partnered with industry leaders, LexisNexis and TVEyes, for print and broadcast monitoring. Monitoring dashboards now have new metrics and widgets for a more comprehensive overview.

Strategic dashboards and precise alerts

We’ve simplified data analysis. Now you can filter metrics by keywords to build strategic dashboards and narrow down your data into actionable chunks. To stay updated at all times, use keyword filtering to set up laser-focused alerts. You’ll be able to spot brand crises from miles away.

Tracking email analytics

We improved the precision of inbox data and engagement tracking. Prowly’s mailing tool now adjusts open and click rates to filter out bot activity. And, if you’re a Pro user with a connected inbox, you can see journalists’ email viewing times and detailed, time-stamped breakdowns of their every interaction with your messages.

PR Problem #3: Scoring quality coverage takes too much time and effort

How do you justify spending long hours on research when there’s still monitoring, writing, and strategizing to do?

Do everything in one tool. Keeping your media lists, email campaigns, communication history, dashboards, and notes in one place saves days of work each month. And of course, AI-powered tools are crucial, according to 74% of respondents in the PR Trends 2025 report.

Here’s how the new Prowly features speed up the PR workflow.

Content on high gear

We all know how rigid and awkward AI writing can be; Prowly’s AI for PR is trained to draft professional press releases and pitches that sound authentic. The Pitching Tool also helps boost your email deliverability and engagement by detecting potential spam triggers and empty fallback for personalization tokens. 

And, to further alleviate your stress, the Press Release Creator reviews your draft’s Content Score and suggests improvements, such as:

• headline, messaging, and formatting clarity,
• potential angles and promotional perspectives,
• checking more sources or adding supporting quotes.

Easier query building and polishing

Prowly has added query editing so you never have to start from scratch to tweak some details ever again. The search builder also has a new “OR” operator, so you can diversify your exploration and catch all relevant mentions.

Better sender’s reputation

Using the Prowly inbox, you don’t have to worry about sender reputation technicalities. The writing tool warns you about spam words in text and adds the “Unsubscribe” button, as mandated by Google’s and Yahoo’s policies for quality senders. Email analytics show you problems with deliverability so you can react and prevent send-out hiccups.

Over to you

2024 was a busy year for Prowly, but it must have been even more chaotic for you, a PR pro.

The media reality is shifting, as more and more journalists expect hyper-personalization and spot-on pitches. The lack of quality data leads to weak PR strategies, which in turn causes low journalist engagement.

But remember: engagement rates, data-based pitches, efficient workflows–they’re all just a means to an end. The point is to get your story out there. Let Prowly help you carry your narrative into 2026!

The post Top 3 PR Problems and New Ways to Fix Them: Future-Proof Your Tactics in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

There’s rarely time to create a flawless pitch. Speeding up usually means compromising on quality. But how can your story be engaging without good research and credible data sources? 

PR pros need realistic, evidence-based strategies to be able to pitch with confidence. 

This December, Prowly has introduced new features to help you organize and enhance your PR workflow, from research to follow-ups.

Read on and learn:

• How to find more information about online media outlets
• New ways to expand your topical search
• How we made following up more convenient

Update 1. Enhanced online outlet data (powered by Semrush)

As far as online media outlets, until now you could only browse information about the general domain. With this update, Prowly's Media Database gives you instant access to some of the most hard-to-find data: traffic and audience details for subdomains and subfolders.

Thanks to Semrush, a leading provider of credible traffic and audience data, you can now check the real numbers behind every branch and subpage of your chosen domain.

For example, instead of just researching CNN.com, you can analyze the traffic and audience insights of the station’s subdomain (e.g. money.CNN.com), or one of their subfolders
(e.g. CNN.com/world).

And, to make your search even more precise, domain traffic and audience info are also available as search filters in all search tabs. So, for example, when you go to the Media Outlets tab, you can quickly filter out the most-visited news sites with female viewers aged 35+ from Montreal, Canada.

Knowing the exact audience and traffic stats helps you personalize your pitches better. Not sure how to best personalize your messages? Read our step-by-step playbook.

3 tasks this feature will make easier for you

1. Targeting. Finding the perfect journalists for your story is easier when you know their exact audience and traffic stats.
2. Identifying relevant Tier 1 media. Allocate time where it matters. Perfect the pitches for your Top 10 or Top 20 outlets, establish connections, and show stakeholders the true value of your PR efforts.
3. Creating precise pitches. Knowing the outlet’s or journalist’s traffic and audience insights helps you find the right story angle and personalize your message.

Update 2. Smarter search for journalists by topics

Expand your search without getting a bunch of irrelevant results. Try Prowly’s new topic branching.

Before the update, when typing “technology” into your topic browser, you’d get only exact match topic categories to choose from, like Technology or Computers & Technology. Now, Prowly's Media Database will also show you related topic recommendations, like Cloud Computing or Artificial Intelligence.

Using this feature, you might find some unexpected but useful results.

2 ways this feature will make your life easier

1. Faster research. Tracking down relevant journalists goes smoother with precise and related topic suggestions.
2. Wider reach. Uncover new connection opportunities and tap into niches you might have otherwise missed. 

Update 3. Advanced follow-ups (feature for Pro Plan users)

To boost your pitching efficiency, try to improve your email open and reply rates. Sending systematic follow-ups increases your chances for coverage.

In Prowly's mailing tool, connected inboxes can now automate follow-ups based on whether or not the recipient has replied to your message. As soon as you get a reply, the mailing list for pre-planned follow-ups will update itself so that only non-responders get them. No more manual removals. And, you get to craft 1:1 follow-ups based on the content of the reply.

It works for all emails sent after Tuesday, Nov 19.

This functionality is yet another reason to connect your inbox with Prowly. You don’t have to remember to keep track of your silent recipients—and you’ll never miss important replies! Automation helps you avoid the risk of being pushy, annoying, or non-responsive.

Your reply rates will also be included in the email campaign overview and will act as filters in your CRM.

3 perks you’ll get from this feature

1. Higher reply rates. Journalists’ inboxes are always full. You have a better chance of not being skipped if you stay top-of-mind. Well-timed, relevant follow-ups are crucial for increasing your pitching success.
2. Fewer things to remember. Automation is your workflow’s friend. You only set up the follow-ups once a campaign and don’t have to worry about them again.
3. No more missed chances. Suppose you could have landed coverage, but you forgot or didn’t have time to follow up. Never again!

Try them yourself

Timeliness and relevancy: this is what journalists want in a PR pitch. Features like automation and research support come in handy, helping to find up-to-date story angles and do thorough research.

Don’t underestimate how stressful guesswork in PR can be. Being confident that your story will resonate with the journalist’s audience can take a huge load off your shoulders.

We’re constantly improving the Prowly app to give you the best PR-building experiences. The Basic Plan covers essential PR research and outreach tools, while the Pro Plan unlocks all Prowly functionalities (you can upgrade now!). 

If you’re a Pro Plan user, here’s a quick guide to integrating your inbox with Prowly.

Ready to engage journalists with your next-level pitches?

Give Prowly a try for 7 days free!

The post Low Reply Rates? Transform the Way You Pitch with Prowly’s New Features appeared first on Prowly.

Background

Surviving as a media outlet in today’s fast-paced, fragmented media world filled with newsertainment is easier said than done. Receiving irrelevant PR stories makes journalists’ lives even harder.

The expectations towards pitches are growing while traditional PR software is always a few steps behind. Good research is the key to a journalist’s heart, yet few PR pros have the time or proper tools to do it. 

The tactics from the olden days (“spray and pray”, press releases) are on their way out, while data-based, targeted pitches are taking over.

But, as new niche journalists and outlets pop up every day, finding the right recipients for pitches has become an uphill battle. Here’s how Sandra Torres has dealt with this problem.

Problem

Meet Sandra Torres, the Head of On Air, a bilingual (English and Spanish) broadcast group under the communications firm, Avoq. Over the years, she has seen a tremendous shift and blend of broadcast and digital media. On Air is a project that evolves alongside this new cultural reality. Sandra’s clients want to reach very specific audiences across traditional and new media.

As a pro with 15 years of experience, Sandra knows that hyper-targeting local and niche outlets is way more effective than:

• mass send-outs, because they annoy journalists and damage relations,
• pitching major but irrelevant news outlets, because it’s a waste of time, and
• badly-researched pitches, because they have low engagement rates.

But hyper-targeting and deeply researching niche outlets takes a lot of time and not many PR tools are of any help.

“We had been using other platforms to get contacts and figure out who we wanted to reach, but they were very general. A lot of [journalists] were not there anymore, and a lot of the outlets weren't even on air anymore,” says Sandra.

She wanted to find a new, effective way to create insightful, well-researched, and timely pitches. Her goal was to reach hyper-local and niche audiences for her clients.

Solution

The answer: an evolved media targeting workflow inside a single, advanced PR platform. Just follow Prowly’s simple 3-step process for better targeting accuracy:

“Just in the couple of months that we've been using Prowly, we've had huge success,” says Sandra.

Step 1. AI keyword research

Sandra and her team find a lot of their contacts through the keyword search functionality in Prowly’s Media Database. They type in any word or phrase in the browser and only get results containing these keywords.

What's the best way to use this feature? Here's Sandra’s tip for beginners in keyword search:

“Playing around with it is number one (...). Once I discovered it I spent probably two days just playing around. Start small, use one or two filters, and see how the results change.”

The team’s research flow got even more in-depth with AI keyword suggestions. As they type in generic keywords, Prowly’s AI generates related phrases, niches, or areas of the industry. The engine scans articles, tweets, and posts and automatically suggests keywords that are similar or connected to the topic in any way to make the search more thorough.

This way, Sandra and her team broaden their scope with new story angles, ideas, and niches.

“The AI keyword feature has definitely been the most helpful just to figure out what people are talking about and if they're talking about your story or the specific topic where your story would be relevant,” she says.

Sandra gets to discover new lanes without losing time on dead ends. She can sort and scan through all her results using the filters below the browser bar.

Step 2. Browse the latest publications

When she picks a journalist or an outlet she’s interested in, Sandra can check their latest articles and tweets. To make things easier, recent online activity, location, and main topics are shown right there, in every search result.

“It has been a game changer for us. We're able to target journalists who have recently talked about the topic. We follow up and usually get a response whether they need something extra or not,” says Sandra. 

Sandra doesn’t have to click away from Prowly to get an understanding of what the journalist or outlet is all about. At this stage of research, it’s a major time-saver.

“We've gotten so many ideas just by using Prowly’s research and data. We're blending in broadcast with digital and the tool has helped us a lot to widen our view of what media is and where we can go with it.”

Having seen or read a few pieces by a particular outlet or journalist, you can conduct an in-depth audience-focus analysis. Here’s the recipe:

• Pay close attention to storytelling patterns.
• Look at how they cover your competitors or your industry.
• Detect what format they use–is it features? Roundups? Editorials?
• Understand what angles they take to get the audience’s attention.

Step 3. Check audience stats

To find journalists or outlets that might be a match, Sandra asks: “Who are we trying to reach and why?” She prioritizes outlets whose audience profiles align with her client’s target demographics.

In Prowly, she can get this information instantly in two ways:

1. By clicking on “Details” under any search result and browsing through outlet details and audience insights. It’s where she can see a comprehensive overview of the outlet profile.
2. By searching in the “People” or “Media outlet” tab and using the “Audience insights” filter. This way all her results will be on point right away.

“Before [Prowly,] we were just pulling all broadcast local newsrooms and the top producers, but we couldn’t figure out who their audiences were. Now we can really zone into what our client wants and strategically reach out to the right audiences.”

Thanks to Prowly’s partnership with Semrush, the leading audience and traffic data provider, all insights are reliable and up-to-date.

This feature provides Sandra and her team with sought-after information such as:

• audience location, interests, age & gender, income, occupation, education level, and household size,
• domain visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, and time spent on the site.

These metrics help construct a data-backed PR strategy. But most of all, they are the key to knowing who you’re addressing.

“Understand your audience. This is what [Prowly] helps us do. Be very intentional about who you're reaching out to. That's how relationships grow and that's how your stories are credible.”

Each journalist and media hub has a specific mission and audience. Your success story only matters if it resonates with the viewers, their problems, and their interests.

Bonus Step: Organize everything in the CRM

Once you pick a journalist or outlet, you can add them to one or more media lists right away. Prowly’s CRM allows you to create numerous media lists per topic, angle, location, or any other category. 

For example, since On Air is a bilingual agency, the team can create media lists based on outlet location and language used. The list name can also reflect their current campaign or pitch focus.

“[Prowly] has helped us categorize every single story and every single sector and every audience that we're trying to reach.”

Targeted media lists help organize your campaigns. You can also easily sort contacts by existing media lists, contact information, location, email engagement, social media profiles, or even the time of being added to your directory.

To remember all the journalist information gathered during research, Prowly has a special feature called the Journalist Card. It’s a place to add notes and reminders, write contact descriptions, and log emails, calls, and meetings. What for?

• Tags let you differentiate Tier 1 contacts, label journalists, categorize outlets & more.
• Tags and notes can be used to filter through media lists faster. 
• Notes and reminders keep all your information in one place so you never leave important info out of your pitch.

All notes are available not only in the CRM but also while writing personalized emails in Prowly’s email writing module.

Pitch personalization is crucial for every successful campaign.

“We like to customize pitches based on reporter niche. For instance, if we're pitching a big report that covers health, a consumer, or politics, we would write up different targeted pitches for each of those journalists that match the type of content they typically cover,” says Sandra.

The post PR Playbook: How to Hyper-Target the Media and Get More Replies to Your Pitches appeared first on Prowly.

1. By how often you were too late to jump on an opportunity for coverage. 
2. By how many times you had to act on a PR crisis after it had already gained traction. 
3. By how often your boss or stakeholders are unconvinced by your PR results and share of voice metrics.

Scoring high for all three? Don’t feel bad. Building precise queries, detecting crises, and applying PR metrics to business decisions might be some of the trickiest PR tasks. 

Unless you know the smart ways to use media monitoring to its fullest potential. All you need are a few convenient media monitoring features.

Read on and find out:

• How to winnow down monitoring results using keyword filtering
• How to extract strategic insights from raw monitoring data
• How to refine queries to get just the right mentions

The challenge: Information overflow in media monitoring

Everything is happening too fast. 

Especially in the media, a new important headline comes up every second of every day. And, as a PR pro, your job is to track all mentions that matter to your brand and boil them down to crucial insights, like trending topics, customer sentiment, and competitive intelligence.

No wonder you might feel overwhelmed. Collecting mentions usually means receiving loads of spam, and filtering through all that to get to the gist leads to information overload. It can take precious hours away from you–hours that could be spent building great public relations.

And in monitoring the media, timing is essential. You need those strategic insights ASAP to create timely pitches, plan relevant and targeted campaigns, track your progress, and report successes to stakeholders.

How can you arrive at actionable data faster? How do you turn chaos into clarity?

The solution: Smart media monitoring features

Prowly’s query builder has long had the function to search for any keyword or backlink. You can narrow down or expand your results by adding more criteria, like location and filters.

That’s all great, but what if there are still too many matches to analyze?

Prowly now allows you to create keyword-focused dashboards, alerts, digests, and notifications. And if your original query is too broad, you can edit it and refine your search.

To understand how all this works, we've prepared the four step-by-step instructions below. Here's how you introduce more precision into your monitoring workflow and get an accurate media overview.

4 ways to get more strategic with media monitoring

Read the theoretical scenarios below and learn how to conduct coverage analysis, build strategic dashboards, create focused mention alerts, and refine queries.

Scenario 1. Keyword-specific coverage analysis

Say, you want to conduct a social media sentiment analysis for your new product launch.

Your brand is an athleticwear company called lululemon and you’ve launched sustainable clothing packaging. You want to know how the launch is being perceived in social media and find ways to tie it in with the current online trends. 

You’ve created a basic brand query, “lululemon”.

Who should you monitor? 

In this particular case, you might want to focus on:

• News and journalists: how does mainstream media talk about your brand?
• Content creators: how are they presenting your product?
• The online community: how do the customers engage with the launch?

Which keywords should you filter mentions by? 

Think of social media trends and forms of content, like the following:

• News and journalists: "drop", "launch", "new leggings", "limited edition", "mystery box"
• Content creators: "review", "trying on", "haul", "unboxing", "ASMR", "rating", "honest", "thoughts"
• The online community: "duet", "stitch", "trend", "challenge", "viral", "FYP", "community"

How do you filter mentions by keywords in Prowly?

Prowly’s Media Monitoring gives you the option to create a query focused on a keyword or backlink.

Each query you create has a separate page called Mention Browser, where you can see all results and filter through them by sentiment, location, post engagement, and more.

One of the most precise filters is Keywords. Here’s how you’d use this filter in your Lululemon project:

1. Go to the “Lululemon” query Mention Browser in Media Monitoring.
2. Among the filters on the left, choose “Source”.
3. Select X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (available for Pro plan users only).
4. Next, choose the filter “Keywords”, type in the keyword, and press enter.
5. Your mention browser now only shows the mentions for this keyword.

What’s the strategic benefit?

Using keywords in the mention browser helps quickly evaluate the social media sentiment for your product launch. 

You could potentially find new ways and channels for promoting the brand, like the most engaging unboxing format, micro-influencers who organically mention lululemon’s sustainability, or a new customer community emerging on Instagram, who call themselves “the lulu crew”.

Equipped with these insights, you get a detailed understanding of how the launch has been going and what to do next.

Scenario 2. Building strategic dashboards

You and your stakeholders want to understand the media narrative about the activewear category and how lululemon's competitors are positioned in this narrative. You need visual help, so you’re building a strategic dashboard.

A Prowly dashboard consists of widgets with your chosen metrics. You decide whether you want them in the form of bar charts, columns, donut graphs, etc.

You can add as many widgets as you want to see the full picture.

How do you create a strategic dashboard in Prowly?

When considering your brand presence against competitors, you might be asking yourself the following questions:

• What are the top online media outlets covering this product category?
• Which messages and keywords are gaining traction?
• Where are the gaps in my competitors' storytelling? Which audiences are they failing to own? 

To analyze all this, it's best to create a query that monitors your product category and build a strategic dashboard. Here's how you do that:

1. Create a query for the name of your product category, “activewear”.
2. Name the dashboard for this query: “Mentions about activewear in US media”.
3. Add widgets with quality insights, like a "Top mentions" list sorted by authority score.
4. In the "Top mentions" widget, under “Filter results”, click “Article keywords”.
5. Type in the competitor's name, press enter, and save.

Your dashboard now shows a top mentions list for this competitor.

Here's what an example of a strategic dashboard looks like:

Which keywords should you filter widgets by?

Create as many widgets as you want, with any keywords that will help you understand your brand presence and the competitive landscape:

• What type of content is created about the product? Use “product review”, “recommend”, or “tried”
• How does product perception differ between countries? Pay attention to linguistic differences, e.g. "shorts" (US) or "briefs" (UK)
• Do people like the product varieties? For example, you can use product lines, like “yoga", "workout", or "hiking"

What’s the strategic benefit?

Visual aids are especially helpful in grasping elusive metrics like brand presence. 

Building dashboards with keyword-specific charts and graphs helps you find the current media narratives about your product category. You may also track down the media outlets and journalists who cover it, and start brainstorming story angles for them.

Found any specific customer frustrations or pain points? Address them in your press release or pitch. Found interesting insights about the activewear market? Share them with marketing or the business team. 

Strategic media monitoring dashboards are a great way to gain actionable insights for the entire brand. By showing actual metrics, you prove your work’s value for the company.

Scenario 3. Creating precise alerts

Let’s say you’re launching a new Nestle product. Your goal is to set up alerts for crisis prevention.

Which aspects should you consider?

For a commercial food company, potential brand safety issues include:

• Product safety signals
• Packaging/quality issues
• Cultural sensitivity
• Distribution problems
• Customer service

Which keywords should you filter alerts by?

Consider which keywords would be the most telling:

• Product safety signals: “allergy”, “sick”, “ingredients”, “contains”, “expired”
• Packaging/quality issues: “damaged”, “crushed”, “mold”, “sealed”, “half full”
• Cultural sensitivity: “offensive”, “inappropriate”, “not okay”, “yikes”, “problematic”
• Distribution problems: “shipping”, “overpriced”, “scalping”, “sold out”, “delayed”
• Customer service: “no response”, “ghosted”, “ignored”, “dm’d”, “refund”, “problem”

How do you filter alerts by keywords in Prowly?

1. Go to Media Monitoring projects in the app.
2. Go to “Email notifications,” click "Create email notification," and choose "Alert".
3. Choose the alert type and select one or more queries for the alert.
4. Set the internal and external notification name and make sure the AI analysis is on.
5. Add internal and/or external recipients and use the "Add filters" option to add keywords, sources, etc.

What’s the strategic benefit?

There are so many early warning signals you can catch onto before a small issue becomes a full-blown crisis. No more waiting around until negative press goes viral.

With ad hoc alerts and recurring digests for specific keywords, you can track and address your food brand’s issues like unclear allergen labeling, unauthorized sellers, a socially unacceptable design element, distribution problems, or quality control issues at a specific retail location. All ahead of time.

Scenario 4. Editing existing queries

Prowly’s query builder is the perfect tool for scrutinizing your media mentions. But anyone who’s ever created a monitoring query knows it needs revisions and refinements over time.

With the new edit function, you can now redo your existing queries and create a more focused search each time.

How do you edit media monitoring queries in Prowly?

Based on the example of your lululemon product launch:

1. Go to the “nestle” query in Media Monitoring projects.
2. Click on "Settings" and “Edit query” to make changes to your query.
3. Preview the new matches to make sure your edits are helpful.
4. If you’re sure, save the changes.

Important notice: you have to be absolutely certain your refinements are necessary. Editing your query means getting new results, and new results lower your monitoring limits, just like a new query would.

Best practices for query maintenance

To make sure editing your query is a good idea, check the preview in the query builder. If your matches are more precise than before, you’ve done a good job and you can save the new query. 

What do more precise matches mean? In the case of your lululemon search, this means results that only show news, posts, and reviews about the brand and its products, and not e.g. special promotions or reselling deals.

Remember to pay attention to your mention limits.

You can make changes to any part of the query, including type, filters, keywords, and sources. Keep in mind there are time limitations for the new results:

• Basic plan: 30 days
• Pro plan: 90 days for online mentions, 30 days for social media
• Enterprise plan: 1 year for online and print, 90 days for broadcast, 30 days for social media

What’s the strategic benefit?

Plain and simple–you get to change the monitoring search scope without losing your progress.

A lot can happen between setting up your first query and finishing up a campaign. Query editing gives you an option to revise your strategy.

Your Media Monitoring Health Check

So, what should your perfect media monitoring workflow look like? 

Here’s a handy 3-step action plan to examine and cure all your media monitoring problems:

The Media Monitoring Health Check will help you detect gaps and inefficiencies in your query-building, filtering, and alert-setting process. Use this workflow to build a structured, streamlined network of insights and avoid slowdowns in your next projects.

Closing thoughts

Monitoring the media doesn't have to be a painful, messy chore. The devil is in the workflow.

Smart queries and strategic dashboards transform media monitoring from a passive reporting tool into an active driver of business intelligence. There’s a universe of interesting metrics and insights in every search.

Information you find in media monitoring can help sales and product teams succeed. Tracking your brand trust, competitors, and market trends elevates your role from a PR pro to a strategic advisor.

The post No More Data Overload: 4 Ways to Gain Strategic Insights from Media Monitoring appeared first on Prowly.

This is a step-by-step guide with expert tips from Dawn Jones, Founder of Pressed Fresh Collective, on how to streamline and improve your email personalization process.

Background

The world of traditional media is shrinking but PR needs are growing. Journalists’ inboxes are flooded with press releases and story ideas. There’s no room for weak pitches.

What can catch a journalist’s eye? Proving that you’ve done your research. You know their audience and you know their beats. What’s NOT going to boost your reply rates? Generic, mass-sent emails.

But there isn’t always time to research and personalize well. Here’s how Dawn Jones dealt with this issue.

Problem

Dawn Jones is the Founder of Pressed Fresh Collective, a PR and brand-building agency working to help independent artists succeed. 

Before using Prowly’s personalization, their strategy was to remove the most valuable contacts from the mass send-out and email them separately.

“[Using the private inbox for personalization] added time to the workflow because there were certain editors or writers that we wanted to talk to specifically, but they couldn’t be part of the mass outreach,” says Dawn.

Figuring out the campaign while jumping between all the tools and tabs consumed time and effort that could have been spent on research.

As a result, there wasn’t enough time to be accurate and deliberate. Major coverage opportunities could be passing Dawn by. She wanted to find a way to build relationships better.

Solution

The answer: email personalization using an all-in-one PR platform. Dawn adopted an effective pitching workflow covered entirely by Prowly software:

1. Find, research, and create notes on the most relevant journalists for my topic
2. Create the default, cold email pitch and personalize only a few key sentences
3. Analyze campaign data, find the most engaged recipients, and follow up

“You could say Prowly cuts the personalization time in half,” says Dawn.

Step 1. Research and preparation

Dawn’s first step to any good outreach campaign is browsing all the systematically gathered info about potential recipients. In Prowly’s Media Database, she can find: 

• Journalist’s recent articles and online activity
• Exact topics covered
• Outlet’s demographic and audience data

Dawn adds notes and tags to each contact card so she always has the information she needs at hand. Since she works with musicians, her tagging system is based on musical genres.

Her other trick is using Prowly’s CRM to check whether she has already connected with the chosen journalists in the past. This might be worth mentioning in a personalized message.

Using the gathered info, she can sort and filter her existing contact base to create precise media lists, one per story angle, sector, or genre.

“When we're looking for publications or writers to add to a list for a client,” says Dawn, “it's really easy because we can just go in and click the genre tag and then scroll through those specific writers, figure out who would be the best fit.”

Step 2. Best practices for writing

Dawn begins by writing a default draft that’s structured as a cold email, relevant to all journalists in the contact list. 

Her team always makes sure their emails maintain a distinct personality. But, when writer's block hits, they can overcome it using AI–either for email content, subject lines, or preview text.

Polishing the draft can take time, but Prowly’s AI can help you change some parts quickly–make sentences shorter or longer and switch the tone.

When the default email is finished, Dawn can choose her recipients list and start personalizing single emails.

“Sometimes we personalize the majority, sometimes just a few emails,” she says. “It really depends on the list and who we're pitching.”

To refresh their memory, in the “Personalize” step, Dawn and her team can review notes, contact details, history, and recent articles of each chosen journalist.

This makes it easy to personalize her Tier 1 emails fast. The personalization step used to be the most time-consuming; thanks to using an all-in-one platform, not anymore.

In Dawn’s opinion, pitching is a bit like small talk–you’re supposed to weave in timely and relevant topics that spark a conversation.

“Referring to any kind of previous content or just things that are happening in the world and in society is always super helpful. It's all about bringing humanity into it in whatever way you can.”

In some messages, she mentions the journalist’s recent social media activities; in others, she references the journalist’s article and adds a link.

It can be also helpful to infuse each personalization with insights about the outlet’s audience, showing that this particular story would be a real treat for them. 

After all, journalists’ main focus is always on their readers.

“Using Prowly’s personalization not only sped up our workflow but helped us be a lot more intentional with our outreach.”

Step 3. Drawing conclusions

After each sendout, Dawn and her team check the campaign stats. They pay special attention to:

• Delivery rates, to make sure spam and other risk factors weren’t triggered
• Open rates, CTR, and viewing time, to see if the pitch has sparked an interest
• Most and least engaged recipients, to know who to re-engage

Dawn has found analytics extremely helpful in adjusting her strategy:

1. She noticed some contacts never show interest–so she should start searching for alternates.
2. Her press release got a lot of clicks, which means the pitch is on the right track.
3. Longer emails result in lower response rates, so her agency’s pitches should only be 5 to 10 sentences long.
4. One journalist clicked 240 times, which means they might be very interested and may need a follow-up with additional information.

“The data is giving us a bird's eye view of everything going on in our emails to understand what's landing and what's not.” 

The post PR Playbook: How to Personalize Emails Successfully at 2x Speed appeared first on Prowly.