Tracking media mentions is essential for understanding your brand’s visibility and reputation across all channels. Just like other core PR metrics, mentions need to be consistently and accurately monitored to measure the impact of your work.

This includes keeping tabs on both traditional media coverage and online conversations, where discussions about your brand may be occurring organically — and often without your involvement.

In this guide, we’ll explore what media mentions really mean, how to track them effectively, and how they fit into your daily PR workflow.

What is a media mention?

A media mention on the best days in PR feels like kicking a field goal. It's a major score! On the most challenging days, negative press mentions can throw a wrench into your best-laid plans and pivot your PR campaign into a new direction. 

The definition of “media mentions” can also depend on a PR campaign's goals. For a specific campaign or client, the definition may also include mentions on social media and in online discussion forums.

PR professionals track media mentions for the brands they represent and their competitors. They also track keywords related to the brand's industry to determine the most discussed topics at the moment.

Tracking media mentions is a frequent and regular task for PR. It is often done daily to keep track of what news is breaking online.

Why are media mentions important?

So why is so much time and energy invested in tracking media mentions?

Because media mentions increase brand awareness, a critical function of PR for a brand's sales funnel.

Here’s why they matter:

• Visibility
  Every mention expands your reach. Whether it’s a feature in a niche blog or a shout-out on social media, mentions put your brand in front of new audiences — often organically.
• Social proof
  Mentions act as third-party validation. When media outlets, influencers, or communities talk about your brand, it builds trust and credibility in ways ads can’t.
• SEO impact
  Online media coverage often includes backlinks — helping you climb search engine rankings and drive long-term organic traffic.
• Measurable PR results
  Tracking mentions over time helps you connect PR efforts to tangible outcomes like reach, sentiment shifts, share of voice, and sales conversions — essential for reporting and budget justification.
• Crisis monitoring
  Mentions help you spot emerging issues early. Real-time alerts mean you can act fast before a small problem blooms into a brand crisis.
• Stakeholder confidence
  Regular media visibility boosts your reputation with investors, partners, and internal teams. It shows your brand has momentum.

In monthly PR reports, media mentions are also highlighted and assessed for individual value. They are typically what a PR's client or supervisor views as “results” at the end of a PR campaign.

This is exactly why a PR professional wants to catch all media mentions and identify the particular value of each one.

How to track media mentions

Tracking media mentions is one of a PR professional's most important tasks. It's that one PR task that will never get skipped because it's so closely linked to measuring the value of your work.

PR professionals use one of three methods to track mentions:

• Media monitoring tools
• Google Alerts
• Manual searches

→ Media monitoring tools

Media monitoring tools and brand monitoring tools do all the heavy lifting for you, automatically tracking media mentions and sending you alerts based on your custom filters. They're reliable, provide data in a user-friendly manner, and can even generate your monthly PR reports.

Tracking media mentions using media monitoring tools help you:

• Track mentions across digital, print, broadcast, social, and podcasts
• Save hours by automating what would manually take days
• Analyze sentiment, reach, and trends and present it all on one dashboard
• Stay ahead of crises by catching negative press early

Some tools, like Prowly, let you monitor both digital and print & broadcast media. To ensure you don't miss anything important, make sure you're tracking mentions across all core media channels, including:

• Broadcast
• Print
• Online news and blogs
• Social media
• Discussions and communities
• Podcasts

Print media mentions

While less immediate, print mentions — such as those in newspapers and magazines — still carry prestige and long-term brand value. With print monitoring, you can get instant access to several global, national, regional, and local newspapers, trade publications, consumer magazines, and business journals.

Make sure your monitoring tool can track both and digital and print mentions.

Broadcast mentions

TV and radio still shape public perception, especially in regional or traditional markets.

Broadcast mentions are harder to track manually — this is where media monitoring tools shine.

Online news & blog mentions

Still the go-to source for industry updates and breaking news. Mentions in online publications or influential blogs often signal credibility and authority. 

Tip: Track branded keywords, executive names, and campaign mentions.

Social media

Mentions here spread fast — and wide. Social buzz can amplify a campaign or spiral into crisis.

Tip: Monitor platforms like X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram for brand mentions, hashtags, and sentiment.

Discussions & communities

Your brand might be discussed in forums like Reddit, Quora, or niche Slack groups — often with raw, honest feedback.

Tip: Use tools that pick up on mentions beyond the mainstream.

Podcasts

Podcasts are an increasingly influential space, especially in B2B and niche industries. Mentions here often come with more in-depth commentary.

Tip: Some advanced tools even transcribe and index podcast content.

For a more detailed guide on how to effectively conduct media monitoring, including setting up queries and analyzing your results, check out our article: How to Do Media Monitoring: Tips & Best Practices.

→ Google Alerts

The second method is using Google Alerts, which is often tempting because it’s a free service that’s simple to set up. However, we’ve already written about how limited its results can be.

Many mentions get missed, and the alerts aren’t always timely. Essentially, it’s not reliable enough to trust with this important task.

After trying both methods, most PR professionals decide to track brand mentions most easily, using media monitoring tools.

→ The manual search

This is when a PR professional searches for brand names and keywords in multiple search engines to find mentions. Yes, we’re talking about entering a list of keywords one by one into Google and looking through pages of results.

Since media mentions tracking is usually a daily task, you can quickly see how much time this can take away from a busy PR pro’s schedule! Even if this work is delegated to a junior team member, there is a substantial cost involved with the necessary labor hours.

How to never miss a media mention

With so much at stake, it’s no wonder PR professionals turn to automated PR software like Prowly to get solid media monitoring coverage and build impressive PR reports that “wow” their clients.

Here is what you need to do to stay informed: 

1. Set up comprehensive monitoring

In Prowly's media monitoring, you can simply set:

• Brand names
• Spokesperson mentions
• Keywords
• Backlinks
• Specific authors

The tool scans online news sites, blogs, and discussion platforms like Reddit to dig up relevant media mentions — even picking up backlinks to your website and campaign URLs.

Not only can Prowly's media monitoring tool find international mentions, but it can also find mentions before Google has even indexed them, so you can see them earlier than a manual Google search would provide. 

2. Set up filtering

Customize your monitoring to focus on what's most relevant: 

• Source types: Choose between digital, print, broadcast, or social media sources.
• Geographical filters: Narrow down mentions by country or region.
• Language preferences: Monitor mentions in specific languages.

In the Prowly Media Monitoring, you can set up email alerts tailored to your preferences — so when you start your workday, your latest media mentions are already waiting in your inbox. No more manual scanning.

3. Add context & insight

Prowly doesn’t stop at finding mentions — it adds context with detailed metrics like:

• Sentiment
• Domain authority
• Estimated reach

Your results are presented in a clean, easy-to-navigate dashboard, letting you analyze, strategize, and act faster.

You can also track advanced metrics like Share of Voice and AVE alternatives, giving you a fuller picture of your PR impact.

4. Create custom PR reports

PR automation software turns recurring tasks that feel like a chore into a valuable dashboard where campaign results can be analyzed and reported quickly. 

With PR automation, you spend less time chasing mentions and more time responding strategically.
Plus, having faster access to results-driven data helps you pivot underperforming campaigns or double down on what’s working.

Getting started with media mention monitoring

PR pros approach media mention monitoring in three ways: manual research, Google Alerts, or media monitoring tools. 

All can provide data to analyze and report, but only one approach provides real-time, thorough data with details like sentiment, reach, and media outlet importance. 

If you’re ready to try a media monitoring tool (with added PR reporting!), we’re here to help you get started as soon as possible.

The post Media Mentions Guide: How to Track Media Mentions Effectively appeared first on Prowly.

Luckily, media monitoring costs are probably a lot less expensive than you’re thinking and will save you and your team hours of time, provide you with timely, reliable data, and arrange it into easy-to-digest reports where clear actions can be taken.

The value is just too tremendous to pass up. In today’s PR & marketing environment, this is exactly the way you need to view media monitoring services when you conduct a cost-benefit analysis of media monitoring costs.

Media monitoring has quickly become one of the foundations of digital PR & marketing. If the term is new to you, media monitoring means observing and collecting key customer data directly from mentions and discussions about your company (or your client’s company). These discussions take place in social media comments, product review websites, blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, and media websites.  

How much does media monitoring cost?

In general, media monitoring tools begin at $200 a month for the most basic monitoring and around $5000 per year for enterprise-level services.

Services are subscription-based, either monthly or annually, and most pricing isn’t available directly on websites. Apart from Prowly, which has transparent pricing plans starting from $258 per month, most media monitoring providers require getting in touch to get a custom quote.

However, based on customer discussions online, we can estimate the following costs: 

It's important to remember that for tools without transparent pricing, the figure can greatly differ based on the number of users, the specific features required, volume of mentions, and simply how well you negotiate.

What goes into media monitoring pricing?

Media monitoring services vary, which is good because every company has different needs.

As you begin to shop around, some considerations will be your notification requirements, the number of channels you want to monitor, the number of users who’ll be involved, the dashboard ease, any need for customization, and the types of reports you’ll want to collect.

Not sure which level of service your team needs? Fortunately, some of these services, like Prowly, offer media monitoring free trials, so you can test them out and make sure they include the specific features your team is looking for.

Here are the features and benefits you and your team should consider when pricing out your options:

• The number of clients and keywords you’ll need to monitor
• The total number of channels you’ll want to monitor. There are many to choose from! Do you need coverage for media outlets only, or also social media?
• The number of users. How many team members will need access to the service?
• Your agency reporting needs. Will the service’s standard ones work, or will you require the ability to build custom reports? Do you need these reports to be scheduled for automatic delivery?

If you compare media monitoring costs against running a focus group, either in-house or with an outside agency, you’ll quickly understand why many marketing and PR teams consider media monitoring costs an investment rather than an expense.

But, before you start signing up for media monitoring free trials and evaluating each service against its real cost, you should first understand the business value of media monitoring.

You can also learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

How media monitoring costs actually save businesses money

Yes, it’s true! Media monitoring is a business investment and provides real ROI when you make note of its major benefits. Here are the most significant ones:

It allows the company to “hear” what customers love

Your product or service may offer several benefits to the customer, but maybe only one or two of those benefits really get customers excited. Uncovering those special features will allow you to focus on them in your marketing, increasing the effectiveness of your ads and PR campaigns and helping you create more sales.

In many ways, media monitoring provides the invaluable benefits of hosting a focus group; you’re just sitting behind your computer screen instead of one-way glass.

Are your customers saying they wish your product had this or that? Are they pointing out what they like better about your competition? With the ear-to-the-ground benefits of media monitoring, you’ll find yourself taking notes not only for the marketing team, but for the product development team as well. 

It creates the opportunity to provide outstanding customer service

In a timely fashion, you can see customer complaints and respond to them quickly. Public responses from the company show a commitment to listening to customers and taking negative feedback seriously. This is your opportunity to turn unhappy customers into loyal customers who provide valuable word-of-mouth referrals. 

It serves as a collection point for customer testimonials

We all know that customer testimonials are PR & marketing gold. That’s why you don’t want to overlook your company’s most loyal, raving fans.

When you’re committed to media monitoring, you can spot them, reward them, and keep them spreading the word. The social proof and personal recommendations that your best customers provide are worth the cost of media monitoring alone.

In some cases, you may even spot industry influencers praising your product (in fact, many influencers call out their favorite brands specifically to catch their attention). Your brand would benefit from reaching out to these influencers and arranging future marketing collaborations.

It alerts a company early to a potential crisis

From time to time, a company inadvertently releases a marketing campaign, announcement, or product launch that isn’t accepted well by its customers, or even the general public. In these instances, an immediate corporate response is vital, so catching customer sentiment early on is a tremendous advantage. 

These early flags are invaluable to anyone managing a brand’s reputation. Since a brand’s reputation is one of its greatest assets, this makes media monitoring a type of protection, or insurance, tool.

And, if you've had enough of writing coverage summaries by hand to report to your stakeholders, tools like Prowly do that for you. Not only can you create customized alerts filtered by specific keywords, but you can also send automated, AI-summarized digests to external recipients.

It highlights what your competition is doing better, and worse, than you

Media monitoring of your competition will put a spotlight on how your customers and potential customers see them. What advantages and drawbacks do they see from each of you? Where is the competition-winning over potential customers and how are they doing it? What is the public sentiment like around each company? The customers are having these conversations online every day, and you need to be listening closely. 

It finds those media mentions for you

This is definitely music to any PR professional’s ears. Spend your time pitching and landing stories, then leave your media monitoring service to alert you when the articles are published. Once you have the alert, jump on promoting the new article. Share it on the company’s social media platforms, add it to the company website, and send the editor a big thank-you.

It’s an excellent measurement tool for your PR campaigns

You’ve launched what you believe to be an incredible PR campaign around your company’s or client’s product. Besides tracking media mentions, you’ll want to look further down the line to customer reactions from the media mentions. Media monitoring allows you to learn whether the coverage has resulted in an increase in online discussion, shares, and comments.

There's one more thing to remember when choosing a media monitoring service: social media listening.

Not every tool monitors social media channels, where many key conversations happen. Make sure to check which digital spaces are included in the plan you're opting for. And in case you're looking for a social listening tool, check out this list and get to know the difference between media monitoring and social media listening.

It helps you plan future PR & marketing content

Sometimes customers are using your product or service in ways you hadn’t even imagined, or maybe your product is solving a particular problem for them that you overlooked. Media monitoring is excellent at pointing out trends, so pay close attention to the trending topics in your customer discussions and create more content around them on your website, blog, and social media channels.

It delivers significant in-house labor savings

There are some things only we can do, and some things we have to admit a software program can manage better. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback across multiple platforms and websites is a lot of work. A media monitoring service can do the work in minutes and leave your team to the more valuable step of acting on the customer feedback.

Take it for a spin: Media monitoring free trials

Since some of the best media monitoring tools offer free trials, it’s worth taking one or two promising ones for a spin. As an agency owner or in-house team leader, you may not feel like you have the time to lead the search, but time invested upfront in finding and setting one up will save you and your team time in the future. 

Plus, it will provide your team with another important tool for showing the value of your PR and marketing efforts. You may even find a team member who would love the opportunity to give these services a try and report back on their findings. Since they are often closest to the daily tasks of the campaigns, they’re most likely to assess the true time savings and the extra service value-add. 

Ready to start testing media monitoring tools? Try Prowly.

It's an all-in-one workflow automation solution for PR professionals, where companies of all sizes can manage media relations more effectively by saving time on routine tasks, including media monitoring.

And if you're interested in a customized plan that aligns with your specific goals, or you just want to add print and broadcast monitoring to your toolkit, simply provide your contact information, and we'll handle the rest.

Cover photo by Ibrahim Boran

The post How Much Does Media Monitoring Cost (2025 Pricing Guide) appeared first on Prowly.

But what is Share of Voice exactly and why does it even matter?

Share of Voice, also known as SOV, is the percentage of mentions your brand has out of all brand mentions in your market.

This article explores the definition of share of voice and discusses its importance to both PR and your marketing strategy. We'll then answer the big question of how to track share of voice for your brand.

What is Share of Voice (SOV)?

Share of voice has different definitions depending on the platform you're measuring it on. Here are some of the most common SOV instances:

Share of voice in PR

Share of voice for PR refers to your unpaid, organic searches and number of online mentions of your brand on media websites, blogs, and discussion forums. It essentially tracks your brand visibility and awareness with your target audience.

PPC share of voice

Share of voice in paid advertising is a measure of market share percentage, known by marketing metrics such as PPC share of voice and others, which you may find in your Google Ads account. 

In it, you focus on paid ads and PPC, or pay-per-click. Calculating this marketing measurement mainly involves data found in Google Ads to help establish your total market share through paid advertising.

SEO share of voice

SEO share of voice measurement shows you how much real estate you occupy in search engine results compared to your competitors for a specific set of keywords. You can measure SEO SOV with the following formula:

(Estimated traffic your site gets from target keywords ÷ Total estimated traffic from those keywords for all competitors) × 100

This gives you a percentage that reflects your presence and authority through organic search.

However, most businesses and SEO professionals use tools such as Semrush that are more accurate in measuring this metric.

Social media share of voice

Social media share of voice describes the percentage of the total social media presence you hold in your industry and in front of your target audience, as compared to your competitors and their social media accounts.

Social media SOV tracks social media mentions of your brand across platforms (like Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok), as compared to the total mentions of your competitors or your entire industry. This often includes hashtags, tags, direct mentions, or keyword usage.

Market share vs. share of voice

Market share and share of voice are related, but they focus on different performance dimensions.

Market share is your portion of total sales volume in your industry. It reflects how much revenue your business makes compared to competitors. For example, if your company earns $10M in a $100M market, your market share is 10%.

Share of Voice (SoV) measures how visible your brand is across marketing channels, such as SEO, social media, or ads, compared to others. It’s about brand presence, not sales. If your brand has 20% of all mentions or impressions in your niche, that’s a 20% share of voice.

In short:

• Market share = financial performance
• Share of voice = brand visibility

While market share shows how much of the market you own, share of voice shows how much of the conversation you’re part of. A strong SoV often leads to increased market share over time.

Why you should measure Share of Voice

With so many different metrics for measuring your sales, PR, and marketing efforts, it seems like a chore to add SOV to your long list of things to report.

However, SOV can give you some extremely valuable insights.

1. PR professionals measure share of voice online to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. Spotting increases in share of voice before and after a dedicated campaign helps point out successes and areas for improvement.
2. They also use it to assess their general ranking in the competitive landscape.
3. Comparing a brand's share of voice against other market players determines which brand is leading. It reveals what aspirational competitors to follow and which industry topics get the most engagement from your demographic. 
4. Finally, it indicates which brand is gaining on you and stands a chance of taking over your narrative.

This share of voice calculation in competitive analysis essentially points out which brands are leading the pack, those setting their footprints on results pages or SERPs. This prompts your team to look into their latest marketing campaigns and decide whether the leading trends filling the hashtags are territory your brand should pursue.

How to calculate share of voice? Standard SOV formula

To appropriately calculate the share of voice, you'll first need to find two key details:

1. The total online mentions for your brand name during a given period
2. The total mentions of all brands in your market during the same time period

With this data, you can apply the most widely used share of voice formula:

(the total number of your brand's online mentions ÷ the total number of brand mentions in your market)

This allows you to understand the percentage of share of voice your brand has achieved in the chosen period, similar to calculations for impression share columns.

While the formula is simple, getting your hands on the calculation factors can be tricky. They involve searching and tallying mentions for your brand and all competing brands across multiple search engines and major social media networks.

Doing this manually is a huge effort, and ultimately, you'll be working with estimates. The output you create will be nothing short of an educated guess.

The best way to calculate share of voice, then, is to use a dedicated social listening tool such as Prowly that captures relevant keywords as they are mentioned in real time, all across the web and social media.

However, if you're committed to calculating your share of voice, you may want to ignore total market SOV altogether.

Instead, you may want to do a simple competitive analysis and focus on how many mentions you see against your closest competitor. You can use their total monthly mentions as a benchmark for your own brand mentions.

Don't forget sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis means discovering how people feel when they talk about you online. Customer sentiment is a handy metric, especially if you can measure it with AI-based tools instead of doing it manually.

Along with reach and engagement, sentiment rounds out your brand's full online presence and gives you a complete picture of the discussion around your brand. 

For example, an emerging PR crisis can be marked by a sharp increase in share of voice on LinkedIn or other platforms but with a purely negative sentiment. You'll want to know about this change as soon as possible.

The problem is that most companies won't notice if they suddenly get hundreds of negative mentions from LinkedIn or a similar platform. And by the time they notice, the crisis is in full swing, affecting everything from your brand reputation to your website traffic.

The key to solving this issue is using a PR platform such as Prowly that captures new mentions as they happen and uses AI to assign sentiment to each one. If Prowly spots a sudden spike in negative mentions, it alerts you to the possible crisis that may be brewing.

💡Read our guide about how to do media monitoring effectively and learn best practices and tips.

How do you know if your share of voice is good or not?

You may be wondering: What is a good share of voice percentage?

The problem is that we can't tell you because it depends on various factors. Your industry, the competitive landscape, your ongoing marketing and PR efforts, and so much more.

To determine whether your SOV is good, you need to measure it for a prolonged period of time. This means doing competitor research and seeing how your SOV comparea against others over time.

P.S. Here’s an article that might come in handy if you’re looking for a tool to measure the impact of your communication efforts.

The major benefit of Share of Voice tools 

While share of voice is incredibly useful to capture, it also requires a lot of time and manual labor. In small businesses, agencies, marketing and PR teams, measuring SOV across various marketing channels manually just might not be possible.

But automated analytics tools, such as Prowly, can do the heavy lifting for you. Set up your keywords and campaign channels and you can monitor any particular brand that comes to mind - yours or your competitors.

Media monitoring tools can measure share of voice and conduct share of voice analysis, including sentiment analysis. Essentially becoming that SOV calculator you've been dreaming of.

Tip: check the scope of monitoring tools

Using tools for share of voice measurement saves time and provides real-time insights. Some of these tools can also perform sentiment analysis and track mentions across various media types.

Most of them track digital mentions and competitor metrics only: social media, review websites, blogs, online magazines, etc.

Although most of our information comes from online sources, print, TV, and radio remain crucial media platforms. They are often seen as more "prestigious" since earning mentions in these outlets is generally more challenging and securing press coverage in them boosts visibility and credibility.

Tools like Prowly give you the best of both worlds. They monitor digital and traditional media, including print monitoringand broadcasts, so you can:

• Easily analyze your results using customizable dashboards, complete with new filters that simplify evaluating the impact of your campaigns
• Ensure comprehensive coverage from diverse sources and evaluate print media investments and campaign ROI with advanced filters

Monitoring share of voice is best left to media monitoring tools. Among the tools used to measure share of voice is Prowly's PR automation software, which has handy SOV widgets.

💡 Tip: When choosing a media monitoring service, make sure it’s tailored to local media — for example, the UK market.

How do you calculate your share of voice with an automated PR tool like Prowly?

You don't have to calculate anything, because the tool does everything for you automatically.

Prowly's media monitoring tool simplifies share of voice calculation by:

• Tracking online mentions of your brand and your competitors.
• Using custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages.
• Tracking mentions in blogs, forums, print, and broadcast media.
• Providing various reporting graphs to visualize change over time.

Prowly tracks your share of voice across online media for you. More specifically, delivering the ability to:

• Focus on your competitors' brands and the keywords relevant to your company.
• Choose custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages.
• Track mentions in blog posts and in discussion groups like Reddit and Quora.
• Select your preferred type of reporting graph, like bar or donut, and even put insights on a timeline to visualize changes by the day.
• Track your brand experts and their current positioning, such as the number of times your CEO is mentioned alongside your brand.

Essentially, Prowly's media monitoring tool delivers the valuable SOV analysis you've been looking for.

It can easily calculate the number of times mentions occur for your brand and all competing brands.

Take a look at an example of Prowly's share of voice calculation to see how the data is organized:

The best tools to measure share of voice for your brand

At this point, you hopefully know that tracking SOV across different marketing channels manually is nearly impossible. These are some of the best products to help you measure share of voice, online and offline.

1. Prowly (best overall for measuring SoV)

Pricing: Starts at $258/month with a free trial available.

Prowly is an all-in-one PR software solution that makes it easy to track media mentions, analyze coverage, and measure your brand’s share of voice in the press. It’s ideal for PR teams and marketers who want clear, actionable insights into how their brand is performing across editorial media.

Top features:

• Share of voice analytics that compare your brand to competitors in real time
• Media monitoring across online news outlets, blogs, and podcasts
• AI-powered coverage filtering to identify valuable mentions
• Automated reports that visualize trends, sentiment and SoV share
• Media database with access to over 1 million journalists and outlets

2. Brand24

Pricing: Starts at $99/month with a 14-day free trial.

Brand24 is a social listening and media monitoring tool that helps you understand what people are saying about your brand online. It’s especially useful for tracking your social media share of voice, sentiment, and engagement over time.

Top features:

• Mentions tracking across social media, forums, news, and blogs
• Sentiment analysis to monitor brand perception
• Competitive comparison to benchmark your SoV against others
• Alerts and notifications for spikes in mentions or negative feedback
• Exportable reports for teams and clients

3. Semrush (best for measuring SEO SoV)

Pricing: Starts at $129.95/month with a 7-day free trial available.

Semrush is a leading SEO and digital marketing platform and one of the best tools for tracking SEO share of voice. It allows you to see how your visibility in search compares to your competitors' across custom keyword sets.

Top features:

• Position tracking for specific keywords and domains
• SEO share of voice reports based on estimated traffic and rankings
• Competitive analysis to uncover keyword gaps and traffic share
• Organic research for visibility trends
• Custom dashboards to monitor changes over time

How to increase your share of voice in PR

So, you've either decided to manually calculate share of voice for your brand or you are using an automated tool to gather the data.

What comes next?

With these share of voice metrics in hand, you can now begin to strategize how to increase your share of voice measurement against the competition.

💡The time-tested tactics we recommend trying:

• Utilize your social media platforms and keep them up-to-date with frequent content that both provides value to your customers and nails your brand messaging home.
• Consistently add new SEO-rich blog posts to your website that focus on topics of importance for your current and potential customers.
• Engage regularly with customer comments, either on social media or in discussion forums, and engage with both positive and negative comments to build trust and loyalty.
• Reach out to the media consistently with exciting story pitches about topics getting attention in your market. Use an automated PR software tool to manage and deliver consistent media outreach.
• Run paid ad campaigns to supplement your earned media efforts and share of voice data. Keep brand messaging consistent.
• Share the expertise of your brand spokespeople, offering the media your brand leaders as experts in current trending topics.
• Get customers more involved with your brand. For example, conduct online polls where customers can help influence small company decisions like voting on the style of dress to manufacture for a new season.

When developing these strategies, note what messaging and content work best for your competitors. You may be able to create your own brand stories around these topics.

Looking for a way to measure your PR performance? Read our guide on PR Reporting: How to Measure Media Coverage.

Wrapping up

Share of voice is one of those brand metrics you can't ignore. It lets you not only compare yourself against the competition, but also against your previous performance. Unfortunately, measuring it is not for the weak of heart... If you do it manually.

With Prowly as your partner, we'll take care of the hard work so you can get SOV metrics with one click of a button. And that's just one of the many great PR features in Prowly.

Frequently asked questions

How to calculate share of voice in PR?

To calculate share of voice in PR, divide your brand’s earned media coverage by the total media coverage for all competitors in your industry, then multiply by 100.

Formula:
SOV (%) = (Your brand coverage / Total market coverage) × 100
This helps you understand how visible your brand is compared to others in your space.

What is a good tool for measuring share of voice?

Several tools can measure share of voice across media and digital channels. Popular platforms include Prowly, Brand24and SEMrush (for SEO share of voice). These tools track media mentions, sentiment, and visibility across news outlets, blogs, and social media.

What is an example of SOV analysis?

Typical SOV analysis might compare the media mentions of five brands in the same sector. For example, if your brand received 500 mentions in a month and your four competitors received 300, 100, 50, and 50 mentions respectively, your total market coverage is 1,000.
Your SOV = (500 / 1,000) × 100 = 50%
This means your brand had half of the media visibility in that space for that time period.

The post Share of Voice Guide: Calculation, Tools, and Best Practices appeared first on Prowly.

The good news is that there are many media monitoring services available. The bad news is that there are many media monitoring services available. No doubt: with so many choices, it can be overwhelming to decide which one is best. 

To make it easier to choose the best media tracking tool for your needs, we've reviewed the top platforms. You’ll find the pros and cons of each solution below, as well as what to consider when narrowing down your options.

What are media monitoring tools?

Media monitoring tools are software platforms that scan a wide range of media sources—from traditional news to social media—for mentions of specific keywords, brands, or topics.

From tracking mentions of your brand to crisis detection and measuring the ROI of your campaigns, these tools are a must-have for every PR professional.

It should be made clear that the term “media monitoring” is an overarching umbrella that includes a few sub-categories:

• Media monitoring tools track general industry news that’s important to you and your clients.
• Brand monitoring tools track the specific mentions of your brand.
• Social media monitoring tools track conversations about your brand on social media platforms.

The majority of PR monitoring software available on the market will cover all of these types of monitoring in one comprehensive service. 

Top 13 media monitoring services compared

Most media tracking platforms offer similar core functionalities, with key differences in specific details, features, and channels. When comparing these services, consider the following:

Ultimately, your choice may depend on additional considerations such as other tools provided as part of an all-in-one PR platform, overall integration capabilities, user interface design, ease of use, and personal preference.

We've reviewed the top 13 media monitoring tools below, along with their pricing and key features so that you can find the best solution for your needs.

Media Monitoring Software Overview

Prowly

Prowly is an all-in-one public relations management platform designed to help teams build media relationships and earn coverage​. It offers a media contacts database, press release creator, email pitching tools, and analytics to track engagement​.

PR pros can use Prowly to manage journalist outreach, host an online newsroom, and monitor press results all in one place.

Prowly includes integrated media monitoring across digital, social, and traditional channels. Even on its basic plan, users can track online news mentions in real time; upgrading unlocks social listening on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, with enterprise plans adding broadcast and print monitoring​, including NLA-licensed outlets and paywalled publications.
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The platform lets you set up keyword-based “mentions” alerts and provides dashboards for analyzing coverage sentiment (positive/neutral/negative) and reach across web, social, print, and TV/radio sources.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time alerts for brand mentions
• Multi-channel monitoring (online, social, broadcast, print)
• Competitor coverage tracking

Cision

Cision is one of the most established PR software suites, known for its extensive media database and media monitoring capabilities. It’s a comprehensive platform that helps PR professionals target journalists, distribute press releases, monitor media coverage across channels, and measure impact​.

Cision offers media monitoring across all major channels – online news, print publications, broadcasts, and social media – integrated into what it calls the Cision Communications Cloud.
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Users can set up complex boolean queries and get real-time alerts when their company is mentioned in articles or on TV/radio​.​

Cision’s monitoring is paired with analytics: you can track sentiment, share of voice, reach, and even tie coverage to business outcomes using their attribution tools.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Comprehensive global media coverage (online, print, broadcast, social)
• Advanced real-time alerts and searches
• Built-in analytics for measuring media impact

💡 Want to make the most of your print coverage? Discover how to turn print media monitoring into a powerful part of your PR strategy.

Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a popular PR software platform that combines a media database of journalists with news monitoring and PR reporting tools. It’s known for being more modern and social-media-integrated than legacy databases. For PR pros, Muck Rack offers the ability to find and target journalists, send them pitches (either via the platform or your email), and track coverage and engagement.

Muck Rack has strong media monitoring capabilities, especially for online news. The platform checks millions of online sources continuously​. The moment a story mentioning your company or keywords goes live, it often appears in your Muck Rack feed.

You can set up custom alerts for your brand, competitors, industry terms, etc., and get notified in real time when new articles hit. Muck Rack’s monitoring isn’t limited to news websites; it also tracks blogs and can pull in tweets from journalists.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Instant online news alerts
• Journalist-linked monitoring for easier follow-ups
• AI-powered insights on media impact

Meltwater

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that helps PR and communications professionals monitor and analyze media coverage and social media in real time​.

Known for its powerful media monitoring, it continuously crawls over 300,000 news sources, millions of blogs, and social media platforms to capture mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you specify.

Users can build complex searches with boolean logic and filters (by location, language, source type, etc.), automatically tagging mentions as positive, neutral, or negative – and can detect spikes in volume that might indicate a brewing issue​.

Meltwater’s dashboards allow you to visualize media trends (share of voice, sentiment over time, geographic spread of mentions) and it can even integrate with third-party data to correlate media coverage to business outcomes (like web traffic or sales).

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Extensive global media source tracking
• Real-time alerts and trend detection
• Combined news and social media monitoring

Agility PR

Agility PR is an integrated PR platform designed to streamline media outreach, monitoring, and reporting workflows. Positioned as a versatile tool for PR professionals, it combines an extensive media database with comprehensive monitoring features, enabling users to efficiently identify relevant journalists, distribute press releases, track coverage, and measure results in one centralized location.

Agility PR provides extensive media monitoring capabilities across multiple media types, including online news, print, broadcast (TV and radio), and social media.

The tool supports real-time tracking, meaning users can quickly identify emerging stories or brand mentions, enabling timely responses. Users can set up keyword-based alerts and receive automatic updates on relevant coverage.

The monitoring dashboard provides intuitive visualization, including metrics like reach, sentiment analysis, share of voice, and coverage comparisons against competitors. Coverage reports can be easily generated and customized, providing PR professionals with insights to evaluate the success and impact of their campaigns.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Multi-channel media monitoring including podcasts
• Daily coverage reports and real-time alerts
• Sentiment analysis and impact scoring

Determ (formerly Mediatoolkit)

Determ (formerly known as Mediatoolkit) is an AI-powered online media monitoring platform that provides real-time insights into what’s being said about your brand, competitors, or industry​. 

It’s essentially a specialized tool for tracking online media and social conversations. Determ allows you to monitor keywords across over 100 million online sources in any language, aggregating all your mentions into a single feed for analysis​. 

With its AI assistant “Synthia” and smart alerts, Determ aims to help PR and marketing teams make faster, data-driven decisions based on media trends.

Overview of channels monitored

Key features:

• Immediate alerts for online and social mentions
• AI-assisted trend summaries
• Multilingual media monitoring

Propel

Propel is a newer PR software platform that focuses on PR workflow and relationship management (often termed a “PRM”). It combines a media database, outreach tools, and tracking in one system. In practice, Propel is like a PR-specific CRM: you can find journalists (Propel offers a database of over 1 million contacts​), pitch them directly from your email, and then monitor the results of those pitches.

Alongside its pitching tools, Propel includes a built-in media monitoring module so you can see the outcome of your PR efforts. It monitors over 100 million online sources (news sites, blogs, forums) every day for your chosen keywords​. 

It also offers social listening across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (tracking 1 billion+ social accounts) so you can catch social media mentions of your brand or campaign​. Propel is notable for covering some emerging channels as well – for instance, it touts podcast monitoring, scanning 25,000+ podcasts for mentions of your keywords​. 

Broadcast monitoring is included too, with the ability to track TV and radio mentions and even play the clip within minutes of airing.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Unified PR pitching and coverage tracking
• Covers online, social, broadcast, and podcasts
• Easy-to-use dashboards with AI insights

Vuelio

Vuelio is a PR and communications software suite popular in the UK and Europe. It offers an extensive media database, press release distribution, media monitoring, and even public affairs tools in one platform.

Vuelio includes a built-in media monitoring service that tracks a broad range of media for mentions of your brand or keywords. This covers online news, print publications, and broadcast in the UK and beyond. Users have noted that Vuelio’s monitoring “misses nothing” in their market – it’s very thorough at capturing coverage, even from smaller regional outlets​. 

The platform provides daily email alerts with coverage summaries, which is handy for staying on top of news without logging in​. 

Vuelio’s monitoring dashboard will show you the volume of mentions, top sources, and allows you to drill into each piece of coverage. It may not have the real-time social media firehose of a dedicated listening tool, but for traditional press and online news, it’s robust. The service can also integrate licensed content (like print scans and broadcast clips) – often as an add-on – so you can see everything in one feed.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Thorough UK media monitoring (online, print, broadcast)
• Automated daily coverage emails
• Integrated print and broadcast clips

Prezly

Prezly is a PR software platform that is particularly known for its storytelling and newsroom capabilities. It functions as a PR CRM and publishing tool – allowing teams to manage their media contacts, create and distribute beautiful press releases or stories, and keep track of engagement.

Prezly introduced a built-in media monitoring solution in recent years to round out its offering​. This feature allows Prezly users to track online news coverage of their brand and log those mentions under “Coverage” in the platform​.

In practice, you set up keywords (like your brand name or campaign keywords) in Prezly’s monitoring settings, and the system will fetch relevant news articles from a database of 200k+ online news sources across 150+ countries​. 

Prezly’s monitoring is more basic compared to dedicated tools: it's primarily focused on online news mentions. It does not natively include social media listening or advanced analytics on coverage (aside from listing the outlet, date, and providing a link/clip). The philosophy is to give PR users a simple way to track and report on earned media outcomes without needing a separate monitoring subscription.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Simple global online news tracking
• Easy integration with PR campaigns
• Quick sharing of coverage results

Critical Mention

Critical Mention is an advanced, real-time media monitoring platform specifically built for PR professionals who need comprehensive tracking across multiple media channels. 

It integrates coverage from television, radio, online news, podcasts, print, and social media into a single, easy-to-use platform. Critical Mention helps PR teams stay informed about their brand's presence, respond quickly to coverage, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

It provides instant keyword-based alerts, advanced sentiment analysis, and customizable analytics dashboards that allow PR professionals to track media coverage, understand audience reactions, and swiftly respond to emerging trends or crises.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time TV and radio monitoring
• Combined coverage (online, social, broadcast)
• Easy sharing of broadcast clips

Mention

Mention is a user-friendly media monitoring tool designed for real-time tracking of brand mentions across social media, websites, news outlets, blogs, and forums. It helps businesses of all sizes keep track of their digital footprint, analyze sentiment around their brands, and manage their reputation online efficiently.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time online and social alerts
• Influencer identification from mentions
• Simple, team-friendly monitoring dashboard

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a leading consumer intelligence and media monitoring platform focused on analyzing large-scale social media and web conversations. It helps PR professionals uncover valuable insights about brand perception, consumer sentiment, competitive positioning, and market trends.

Brandwatch provides sophisticated monitoring across social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and reviews, enabling detailed consumer sentiment analysis and influence tracking.

Its advanced analytics offer real-time sentiment detection, deep topic analysis, demographic insights, and customizable dashboards. Brandwatch also supports historical data analysis, allowing teams to measure performance over time and inform strategic decision-making.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• In-depth social and online monitoring
• Advanced sentiment and trend analysis
• AI-driven crisis and trend alerts

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a powerful media monitoring and social listening platform designed to help PR professionals manage brand reputation and gain strategic insights. It tracks real-time conversations across social media, online news, print, broadcast, blogs, and forums, providing advanced analytics to assess the effectiveness and impact of PR activities.

Talkwalker offers robust, real-time monitoring across online, social media, print, broadcast (TV & radio), and even image and video analysis. It excels in sentiment analysis, trend detection, and predictive analytics.

Talkwalker’s dashboards provide visualized data on reach, engagement, share of voice, and brand sentiment. It uniquely offers AI-powered visual insights like logo recognition, helping brands track their presence beyond traditional text-based mentions.

Overview of channels monitored

Top features:

• Real-time multi-channel global monitoring
• Visual monitoring (logo/image/video detection)
• Predictive alerts for emerging trends or crises

What to consider when choosing a media monitoring service

Navigating the vast landscape of media tracking solutions can be daunting. 

With so many options offering similar functionality, it's easy to get lost. To help you make the right choice, we recommend considering the following:

All-in-one PR tools vs media monitoring tools

Most media monitoring software is not limited to just tracking media coverage and offer a complete suite of tools for PR professionals. These all-in-one PR platforms offer other features such as a media database, PR reporting, press release creation and distribution, and more.

If you’re not solely looking for a tool that offers media monitoring, it’s worth having a look at what other features are available as part of the whole tool and how they compare to other platforms.

Key points:

• Clarifying your needs: Do you require a comprehensive PR suite, or is a dedicated media monitoring tool sufficient?
• Cost-benefit analysis: All-in-one platforms typically cost more upfront but might be more economical than subscribing to multiple specialized tools.
• Feature overlap: evaluate whether additional features genuinely enhance your workflow or create unnecessary complexity and cost.

Available channels

Media monitoring tools typically track:

• Online: News sites, blogs, forums, and reviews.
• Social Media: Platforms such as Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and niche platforms.
• Print: Newspapers, magazines.
• Broadcast: Television and radio.

Most tools will track mentions from similar sources and include online and social mentions.

More advanced software can cover niche social media platforms, or traditional channels such as print, TV, and radio.

Additionally, the quality of these mentions may differ from tool to tool. If a particular channel is important for you, check with the provider to understand if there any limitations.

Free trial

Some media monitoring tools offer the chance to try out the software first-hand with a trial. The free version will likely be limited, but it’s still a great way to try out the service, check the quality of the mentions, and see if it fits your needs before you commit to a paid subscription.

Enrichment data

If you’re tracking online mentions, it’s worth checking the quality of the enrichment data. This will allow you to track metrics such as estimated reach, domain authority, and reach, to assess the importance of your mentions.

For example, Prowly uses Semrush data, a leading data provider to accurately estimate the reach of online mentions.

Customization and query flexibility

Effective monitoring depends significantly on precise search queries. Broad or inaccurate queries can lead to irrelevant results or missed critical mentions. Ensure the tool provides adequate customization options, including:

• Advanced search logic: Utilize Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and parentheses to fine-tune queries.
• Keyword inclusion/exclusion: Easily add relevant keywords and exclude irrelevant terms.
• Real-time query adjustments: Quickly adapt queries to evolving campaign requirements or trends.

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

Managing and prioritizing results

If you're tracking a popular brand or keyword then the number of your results could be a lot.Efficient workflow management capabilities help prevent information overload. Consider features like:

• Tier assignment: Prioritize important mentions.
• Favorites and tagging: Organize mentions quickly for future reference.

Insights and customizable dashboards

Quick access to insightful data is crucial for real-time decision-making and client communications. Look for:

• Interactive dashboards: Customizable dashboards for campaigns, competitors, or specific trends.
• Advanced visualization: Graphs, timelines, and widgets (e.g., share of voice with filter options) to enhance data presentation and demonstrate the value of your work effectively.

Automated stakeholder communication

Regular updates to stakeholders are essential. Evaluate tools that provide:

• Customized mention digests: Daily, weekly, or monthly emails tailored to stakeholders’ specific interests, avoiding information overload.
• AI-generated coverage summaries: Automatically create concise summaries to save analysis time.

Custom and shareable reports

The ability to generate professional, shareable reports is invaluable. Ensure the platform supports:

• Report customization: Create reports per campaign, topic, or timeframe, with flexible formatting (XLS, PPT, etc.).
• Ease of sharing: Easily share reports via links with customized visuals and data representation.

Pricing and subscription length

Your budget will be one of the key factors in choosing the right software. Media monitoring tools can range from $500/yr to over $10,000/yr. This will depend on the channels available and included features.

The more sophisticated the software, the more you’ll have to pay, so it’s important to figure out your requirements beforehand—if you need a basic monitoring tool or a powerful all-in-one PR platform.

This is also true across different plans for the same software. All tools offer multiple plans, which can greatly differ in price and features.

Some questions worth asking yourself include:

• The number of clients and keywords you’ll need to monitor
• The total number of channels you’ll want to monitor - do you need coverage for only media outlets, or also social media?
• The number of users

Unfortunately, many tools do not publicly disclose their pricing, requiring that you sign up for a demo to get a quote. It’s possible to find estimates online of how much each tool costs, although this may greatly differ based on your requirements.

Last but not least, while most tools require yearly plans, some provide monthly subscriptions as well. These will be more expensive, with the benefit of not having to commit to an entire year.

User experience and navigation

Evaluate the platform’s usability thoroughly:

• Intuitive design: Simple navigation accelerates user adoption and ensures ongoing team engagement.
• Performance: The platform should perform swiftly and reliably, ensuring maximum productivity and utilization.

Customer support responsiveness

Strong customer support is critical, especially during initial setup and ongoing usage:

• Initial query setup assistance: Access to dedicated support simplifies complex query building.
• Responsive ongoing support: Prompt assistance in case of missed coverage or technical issues ensures uninterrupted monitoring and maximum tool effectiveness.

By carefully weighing these criteria, you'll select a media monitoring tool best suited to your

Partnerships and data providers

Many media monitoring tools do not gather all of the mentions by themselves but rely on partnerships or data providers to fill in the gaps for certain channels.

If a particular channel is of importance to you, find out where the mentions are sourced from.

As an example, most media monitoring tools have TV mentions through the same provider, TVEyes.

Paywalls

An increasing number of online news outlets contain paywalls, requiring a subscription to read articles. These can cause online mentions to be missed or displayed incorrectly.

Some media monitoring tools are able to bypass these paywalls.

This information may not always be provided on the website and is worth inquiring about during a demo call.

Time to pick the right software

The right tool can help you stay ahead of the conversation, measure the impact of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions. Whether you’re managing a Public Relations of a global brand or a growing business, finding a tool that fits your specific needs and budget is key.

If you're looking for a solution that offers powerful media monitoring combined with intuitive PR tools, consider exploring Prowly's PR software. With features designed to streamline your workflow and maximize your media efforts, it’s a great choice for professionals who want to stay ahead in the competitive PR landscape.

Try Prowly today and discover how it can transform your media monitoring and PR efforts.

The post The Best 13 Media Monitoring Services for PR (2025 Buyer's Guide) appeared first on Prowly.

A book launch press release follows similar rules to other press releases, with a few caveats. Let us walk you through exactly how to write a good book press release.

Looking to create a book press release?

Use Prowly's AI press release generator or templates that you can use for free to easily create your own in a format that journalists expect to receive.

Prowly also lets you find relevant journalists and send out your press release to them directly from the platform.

Why write a book press release?

Book promotion is an ongoing process, so PR for books is relevant whenever a book is launched, even if it's a new edition of a timeless classic. The key to excellent press releases, though, is to provide much more than a summary of a book. Instead, you'll want to entice potential readers with the benefits of reading the whole piece.

Like most great press release writing, it's all about excellent storytelling.

And if you're looking for insights and book press release examples, you've landed in the right spot. Just keep reading.

What are the 3 main goals of a book press release?

As you write your press release, keep these main goals in mind:

1. Show the journalist why their readers will find the book exciting.
2. Provide the main points of the book while leaving the reader wanting more.
3. Include specific details like the release date and book signing dates.

When to write a book press release?

You can write a book launch announcement whenever a book is newly-published and will be available for purchase within a few weeks. You may even wait until the book is officially available online or in stores, as long as the date of the release is very recent.

Protip: Write a new book press release several weeks before the book launch date, ideally when a pre-order sales channel is set up.

How to write a press release for a book launch?

The best book press releases are concise but exciting. They provide a taste of what the reader can expect without giving away any spoilers.

To hit the sweet spot, try combining storytelling with providing only pertinent information.

Book press release format

When writing a book launch press release, remember that there's a standard expected format for press releases.

While you might get creative when it comes to the content, the structure you use to present it should follow some basic rules to be properly formatted.

Craft your press release with crystal clear clarity about your target audience and speak directly to them. Tailor your press releases for consumers, bloggers, journalists, and even the Google search algorithm.

To get to know the details of each element, read How to Write a Press Release (With Tips From PR Pros). You will find more than just generic press release tips there.

As a refresher, the common elements of a standard press release are:

• A great headline
• Subheader / Lead
• Dateline
• Body
• Quote
• Company info
• Logo
• Media contact info

Don't forget the importance of including contact details in a press release! They play a vital role in fostering effective communication and making it easier for media inquiries to reach out and follow up.

And if you're looking for more inspiration for product launch press releases, check out 6 more examples in the "Writing a New Product Press Release" article.

The Prowly press release creator can guide you through this process and assist you in covering all the key information on one page.

Other things to include

Find an interesting news angle

Identify your hook and connect the book to current events, viral topics, Google Trends, and popular topics on social media. That way you can grab major media outlets', audiences', and journalists' attention with your news story.

Book title

Include the book title right away. Don’t bury it in your great press pitch!

Book release date

Provide details on when and where the book will be made available for purchase. Give links to pre-order channels if they’re available.

Summary of the book

Provide a brief introduction to the book that focuses on high-level points like genre and themes. Then include the benefits to the reader, whether it’s learning something new or being taken on an escapist reading voyage.

Quote

You have two choices: you can either include a quote from the book or use an endorsement quote. Additionally, this is a great spot to showcase book reviews.

Author bio

There is no need for a separate author press release. Instead, a brief bio is expected in your book release announcement. Give a little background on the author, including their expertise on the topic, especially if it’s a self-help title. 

Publisher

Place the name of the publishing house prominently.

Awards or accolades

If available, list the awards and accolades the author or the book have received (if it’s a new edition release).

Call To Action

What do you want to happen after someone reads your press release? Purchase or pre-order it, of course! Don’t forget to include the preorder and order information.

Protip: Include a visual for the journalist to use in their article. Provide a high-quality photo of the author or the book cover.

How to write a press release for a book signing tour?

Your book signing press release should include all the event details, like the dates and locations, plus any pre-signing readings or interviews. Name all special guests.

Writing press releases for a book tour separately is recommended because each event is a potential local news story and can be pitched to a new list of local journalists. In this article, you can find more about connecting with local media that might help you promote your new book.

Questions to answer in a book press release

Sometimes it’s best to write your press release with some guiding questions. Here are a few to consider:

How is the author qualified to discuss this topic?

This is especially important if the book provides advice. Readers need to know why they should trust the source rather than relying solely on the emotional angle.

What benefits does the book provide to the reader?

Explain what the reader has to gain from the book. Is it laughter, education, or a new outlook on life? This point is where potential readers make their decision to buy the book.

What problems does the book solve?

Again, think from the reader’s perspective, and make it clear how this book will improve their life, whether through knowledge or entertainment.

Protip: If the book is a guide, focus on describing the current problem readers might have or their aspirations. Then explain how the book addresses them.

Create a book press release with AI

AI-powered tools for PR can help you create high-quality press release drafts, provide advanced editing suggestions, and even recommend who to send your press release to.

While it's worth knowing how to create an effective press release from scratch, using tools can help speed up the process and ensure you've ticked all the boxes regarding the format and content that journalists expect to receive.

Read more: Mastering AI Press Releases: Comprehensive Guide to Writing and Sending + Practical Examples

Here’s how to create (and send) a book press release using a tool like Prowly’s AI-powered Press Release Generator.

Step 1: Enter basic details about your press release

1. Start the process by entering the type of your press release.
2. Once you select the type, Prowly's AI will ask you to pick your target audience. There are predefined options, such as industry players, customers, or local communities, but you can also add your own.
3. Choose the language of your press release draft.

Step 2: Enter key messages of your book press release

Here, you'll want to be as specific as possible and ensure that whatever you choose is the most relevant information about your new book announcement.

You can use the list of questions provided in the "How to write" section of this guide to help you get started.

Here are three examples of key messages that you can provide for your new book press release:

• Unique Selling Point: Clearly articulate what makes your book stand out from others, such as a compelling storyline, unique perspective, expert insights, or timely topic.
• Author's Credibility: Highlight the author's qualifications, experience, or relevant expertise that lend authority to the book.
• Target Audience and Appeal: Identify the intended audience and explain why the book will resonate with them, based on genre, themes, or relevance to current events.

Step 3: Answer the follow-up questions

Once you’ve entered the basic information about your book press release, Prowly’s AI will ask you more in-depth questions designed to mirror a natural conversation with the journalists you’re targeting.

You’ll receive ten questions tailored specifically to the content you shared earlier. This will complete your press release draft and reduce the need to answer many follow-up questions from the person you're pitching to.

Step 4: Customize and edit the press release draft

Whether you've generated a press release draft or written it yourself, you can adjust header font styles, fine-tune the content just like you would in a regular text editor, adjust your press release length, and cater it into a format you're happy with.

An AI Assistant trained in PR writing best practices reviews the draft and suggests improvements based on 11 key criteria, indicating exactly where to edit.

Step 5: Get contact recommendations for your press release

Prowly’s AI will start suggesting journalists you can pitch to based on the keywords found in your press release.

As long as you have contact information for the people you want to pitch to, you can always do deeper work and find out about what kind of books they've covered before, or what they're writing about at the moment.

Book press release example

Now that you understand the key elements, let’s take a look at a new book press release example from Simon & Schuster.

There are a number of things we really like about this book launch press release example:

• The storytelling! It begins right in the first paragraph and immediately captures the reader's attention.
• The book is described in a way that goes beyond a plot summary, with short, engaging paragraphs that build up the reader's interest.
• The developed sense of intrigue by explaining the process for writing the book.
• How it ends with a thought-provoking question that leaves readers curious and wanting more.
• Its clear structure, with the author's bio included in a separate paragraph below.

If you want to see more examples of press releases, we've discussed over twenty of them in this article.

Book press release template

Prefer to start with a press release template for book launches?

Prowly's press release creator is exactly what you need. Its templates are tailored to cover various press release types, such as product announcements, new hires, and event announcements, making it convenient for the media outlet to utilize your release.

The best part? The press release creator is only one piece of Prowly’s complete PR software solution. It will take you through the next steps too!

Start your free 7-day trial to access Prowly’s press release templates.

Distributing your book press release

Now, where to send press releases for books? Let’s look at the 3 options that you’re probably considering.

Pitching your press release with a high-quality media database

This is the ideal scenario with the highest likelihood of capturing media coverage. 

Using a PR software tool like Prowly gets you access to over 1 million media contacts that can easily be sorted by beat and location. By meticulously filtering your database contacts, you can distribute press releases to promote your book yourself. This way, you can ensure it reaches the right audience and target niche audiences more effectively, increasing the likelihood of book sales.

In the case of a book release, Prowly's media database currently boasts 1,819 journalist contacts and 1,295 contacts to media and news outlets that cover U.S. book releases. That's a lot of potential news coverage.

Protip To effectively reach your target audience, share the press release of your book with local businesses or nonprofit organizations that align with its mission statement. This will help create meaningful partnerships and expand your reach.

💡If you're seeking more exposure for your press release, explore these 10 ideas on how to effectively promote a press release.

Buying a media contact list

You may be tempted to buy a media list from a company that focuses on creating them for a wide array of topics, but we don't recommend it for one main reason. These one-off media outlets lists are notorious for being outdated, leading to nothing but frustration when half of your emails bounce back.

Using a wire service

You could use a wire service to distribute your press release, but the fact is that this is too broad of a pitch. You're much more likely to get results by curating your media list to the best media outlets fits for your story, then reaching out to them individually with a pitch tailored just to them.

Protip: When using a PR software tool, don’t forget to add new press releases to your online newsroom.

Recap

Writing a good press release yourself is a solid start to getting the word out about your client's latest work. With a book announcement needing a highly-targeted media audience, it's also a great opportunity to test out an automated PR software solution like Prowly.

You'll benefit from press release templates, targeted media databases, and media pitching tools that track your open rates and allow for team pitching. Did we mention it includes media monitoring and custom reporting too?

The post How to Write a Book Press Release (Example and Template) appeared first on Prowly.

There are plenty of dedicated PR reporting and PR Analytics tools that may help. However, picking the right software for crafting clean and beautiful reports may be tricky. You must consider budget expenses, layout preferences, coverage and outreach metrics, and supported formats.

With this guide, you'll learn everything you need to know to choose the right PR reporting tool.

What to consider when choosing a PR reporting tool

Ease of use and time savers

One of the benefits of using PR reporting software is that you can save a lot of valuable time instead of manually creating reports.

For that reason, you want to find a tool that is intuitive to use and has many time-saving features, so you can showcase the impact of your work in just a few clicks. A powerful tool should allow you to create a client-worthy presentation for delivery within minutes and most importantly — all in one place.

There should be no need to use any extra platforms; manually searching for clippings, using Excel to gather your links for coverage, taking screenshots, and designing your reports in PowerPoint are all time-wasters that can drive you up the wall.

Ideally, you should be able to see all your screenshots, store your social media post embeds, and even play videos without leaving the report tool.

Collecting media coverage

Besides manually adding press clippings, a powerful PR reporting tool will allow you to automatically find press hits with a built-in media monitoring feature.

By entering keywords and filters of your choice, you’ll be able to quickly discover relevant media coverage and generate press clippings in just a few clicks. 

This feature isn’t only useful for creating an initial PR report – you can also use it to find and add any new coverage that appears later on.

Automated PR clippings

Instead of manually creating screenshots or adding other details of the coverage you’ve received, a PR reporting tool should automatically create client-worthy clippings from the press hits or URLs that you’ve pre-selected.

Looking for tips on creating a media report? Read our latest article, "How to Create a Comprehensive Media Report?" for helpful insights.

Coverage metrics

While deciding which PR reporting tool will be best for you, compare whether metrics are automatically generated from the media coverage that you’ve selected.

This means that you’ll automatically see the most important PR metrics at the clipping level and summed up to see the bigger picture and overall results of the PR campaign.

These metrics can include:

• Publication category
• Article category
• Estimated views
• AVE
• Sentiment
• Backlinks
• Domain authority
• And more

You can use charts to visualize your data, engage your readers, and compare data from various reports. By adding your own tags, you will highlight and categorize the mentions.

Tracking distinct metrics will allow you to see all the details and the bigger picture in one place, allowing you to adapt your strategy and showcase the impact of your work to your clients or your in-house team.

Outreach metrics

Apart from coverage metrics, some PR reporting software platforms include the ability to add the performance of your media outreach campaigns.

These numbers will help you measure the performance of your pitches, inform others about the size and success of your campaign, and evaluate any future improvement opportunities.

For example, in Prowly, you can track the following metrics:

• number of emails sent
• recipients and unique recipients
• open rates
• click rates
• response rates

If your PR reporting tool is part of an all-in-one PR software, these metrics will be generated automatically. If you send email pitches with a tool like Gmail, these metrics can be added manually.

Some programs may require upgrading to more expensive monthly subscriptions to access enhanced metrics.

Customizability

While drag-and-drop reporting layouts are definitely what you need to generate reports quickly, it's worth finding out if the tool also provides an easy option to tailor your reports to your client’s brand. 

Every client has their own logo, unique visual identity, and brand guidelines. Creating reports for multiple brands can quickly add up to a lot of extra manual labor per month.

What’s more, some tools allow you to create branded templates that you can quickly reuse for every additional PR report you create—all you have to do is add the clippings, and the software does everything else automatically.

Sharing options and security

When deciding what tool is best for you and your team, it’s important to think of how you will share the results of your work with your team or clients.

As your clients can have different preferences (e.g., some would be happy with an Excel file they can incorporate into their reporting tool, and some may prefer a more visual report), being flexible with the format of your PR report will allow you to tailor the final result to your clients’ needs.

Functionalities worth considering:

• multiple formats (for example .pdf or .xls)
• direct link sharing
• password protection (the last thing you want is someone looking at your clients’ sensitive data)
• being able to embed your reports directly into emails

Most tools allow you to share your reports in different formats, with PDFs being the most common. But some provide more options and flexibility, such as allowing you to export to PDF, PPT, or XLS format (Prowly) or embed your reports directly into an email (Releasd, Prowly).

Check if the tool you’re testing lets you share reports as a private link or has access to password-protected options. That way you can create your own custom password and share it only with a select group.

Free trials

Even if you know what’s important to look out for when choosing a PR reporting tool, a free trial can help you quickly identify how each feature works in each tool and if the UI suits your needs.

All the companies on our list offer either free trial periods with no credit card required or let you book a demo to understand the product better.

This allows you to look around the tool and see if it matches your needs.

Other features

Many tools don’t only offer PR reporting but also other useful features for PR professionals, such as a media database or online newsroom.

Unless you’re solely looking for PR reporting software, it’s worth looking into what other features the tools might offer. 
There are multiple benefits to choosing an all-in-one PR tool, such as:

• Saving costs (an all-in-one tool is cheaper than buying two or more separate tools).
• Having all of your work in one place instead of having to switch between platforms.
• Features are often integrated, allowing you to streamline your entire workflow.

Pricing

When picking the right tool for you and your team, it's worth considering what the final costs will be and how they will fit into your budget. Some PR reporting tools are only available through annual subscriptions, like Cision, MuckRack, or Meltwater which start at $6,000 per year and can even cost $30,000/yr.

While comparing pricing for different providers, check if the vendor offers various plans, especially if you’re a part of a PR firm or an integrated PR team. You don’t want to end up paying more than you need.

The best PR reporting tools

Now that you know what you’re looking for, let's take a closer look at some of the top PR reporting tools available.

Prowly

Pricing: From $258/mo
All-in-one PR tool: Yes

Pros ✅

Prowly is an all-in-one PR tool with a reporting module designed to help you create visually appealing PR reports both quickly and easily. 

From the ability to add interactive and responsive design elements to comprehensive security at every step, from automatic metric tracking to integrating automatic press clippings, all without leaving the platform.

As Prowly is an all-in-one tool, you’ll get your full array of reporting tools and a toolset to boost all your PR operations from the ground up. It lets you track social media mentions and easily add them to your PR reports.

Releasd

Pricing: From $95/mo
All-in-one PR tool: No

Pros ✅

Releasd is known for its easy-to-use, drag-and-drop reporting layouts that pull coverage from websites and social media. You can then showcase all reporting on one digestible page. The software includes automated metrics, and they claim their winning feature is their proprietary metric of coverage impressions. You can build your PR report further by adding additional PR activity information like press releases.

P. S. If you want to dive deeper (not only) into PR metrics, check out this reach vs. impressions comparison.

Cons ❌

You can receive a free 15-minute demo, but no free trial is currently offered. Their enhanced presentation features and metrics require upgrading to a more expensive monthly subscription.

CoverageBook

Pricing: From $99/mo
All-in-one PR tool: No

Pros ✅

CoverageBook provides significant time savings versus manually creating monthly pr reports. Creating a PR report is as easy as inserting your feature links into the tool and letting it do all the work. This includes pulling in the readership numbers of the media outlet and estimating the article’s total reach.

Сons ❌

On the other hand, some users report that while the reports are robust, clients may need some hand-holding to make sense of them. CoverageBook currently doesn’t offer results-focused data like website traffic from mentions or customer sentiment analysis. The software includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest data, but does not support TikTok data yet.

Prezly

Pricing: From $140/mo
All-in-one PR tool: No

Pros ✅

Prezly is a full PR CRM that includes a PR reporting tool. In addition to reports, you get online newsrooms, and PR pitching software.

Prezly lets you link each news mention with performance data in just a few clicks. 

Because it works as a full PR CRM, you can store and track your coverage against data for your email pitches and press releases. Media contacts and outlets are automatically linked to coverage so you have a full picture of where you are in your PR campaign progress. You can either upload coverage manually or import it through a URL. This is true for online articles, videos, and social media mentions.

Cons ❌

With Prezly, the PR reporting functionality isn’t sold separately and requires you to purchase the entire tool. While an all-in-one tool is useful, Prezly doesn’t offer a media database or monitoring yet.

Brand24

Pricing: From $39/mo
All-in-one PR tool: No

Pros ✅

Brand24 is a media monitoring tool at its core, but it does include PR reporting assistance that can be considered by your team. 

Through your pre-set keywords, the software calculates social media reach, share of voice, and hashtag performance. The results are formatted nicely into a PDF report. You have access to several measurements for building results-driven reports. 

Metrics are provided around:

• Influencer Score
• Sentiment Analysis
• Discussion Volume
• Mentions

While limited in coverage reporting, this is a good option for budget-conscious teams willing to build fuller reports from media monitoring data.

Cons ❌

Although it can provide data and easy reporting around brand mentions, Brand24 is not a dedicated PR reporting software. As with any media monitoring tool, you’ll still need to collect digital clippings and build a custom coverage report that includes them.

Summing up – how to choose a PR reporting tool

The hunt for comprehensive and easy-to-use PR reporting tools can be an exhausting process. Apart from the specific features that you need, the best software choice for you will come down to your team’s budget, reporting layout preference, and estimated time savings.

We recommend you take the free trial products for a spin to experience the reporting options firsthand. Then, choose your favorite and start creating great-looking, easy-to-produce PR reports moving forward.

And if you want to try out Prowly, we offer a free 7-day trial.

The post The Best PR Reporting Tools Available To You Right Now appeared first on Prowly.

PR professionals need reliable, accurate, and timely results, so most are now turning to Google Alerts alternatives that are dependable (and by far superior) media monitoring tools.

The perks of the best Google Alert alternatives

There are several benefits to consider when choosing an alternative to Google Alerts or, generally, in finding the best news alert service for your team.

In this article, we’ll break down some of the biggest advantages you’ll gain from switching. We will cover:

1. Cost 
2. Project set-up
3. Alerts
4. Data coverage
5. Notifications 
6. Volume of mentions 
7. Data export 
8. Analytics
9. Feed
10. Other media monitoring tools to consider

The true cost of Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool but comes with a price. That price is an unreliable alert that can miss the media mentions that prove your PR work’s value.

Paid media monitoring services are constantly updated, and sophisticated filters save time that would otherwise be spent sifting through poorly matched alerts. This alone makes them better than Google Alerts.

A paid service doesn’t need to cost a fortune, either. For example, Prowly offers a budget-friendly monthly subscription option starting at $258 monthly (billed annually). It includes a free 7-day trial, and no annual commitment is required.

In addition, Prowly’s media monitoring is just one of the advanced tools in its PR software suite of solutions. Your subscription includes their full PR CRM experience, which includes an extensive media contact database, digital press release and newsroom building, and media pitch tracking.

This makes Prowly one of the most attractive Google Alerts competitors for PR specialists.

Project setup: Google Alerts vs. Prowly 

Prowly is just as simple to set up, but unlike Google Alerts, you can tell from the set-up options alone that you’ll get a better media monitoring experience with Prowly.

Here are your set-up options with Google Alerts:

1. Frequency
2. Sources
3. Language
4. Region
5. Quantity
6. Email address

Here is the setup for Prowly’s media monitoring:

1. Required keywords
2. Excluded keywords
3. Language
4. Sources
5. Notifications
6. Country

The setup is just as easy, but you can see how Prowly will get you more precise results. This benefit increases tenfold when monitoring a common word, like collecting brand name mentions about some project management software named “Monday” or “Monday.com.” The excluded and required keywords change everything.

Alerts: get excited about them again

Remember when receiving a Google Alert was exciting? It meant the prospect of a new media mention for your client or new information about a brand competitor. However, over time, the annoyance of irrelevant mentions has made Google Alerts more of a headache.

Both Google Alerts and Prowly media monitoring alerts can be set to real-time monitoring, but the similarities end there. 

Google Alerts are basic, new-mention alerts that may or may not be relevant. Meanwhile, Prowly alerts capture more precise brand mentions.

Setting up alerts in Prowly will help you be the first to know when something important is happening. There are even four distinct options available:

1. New mention alert - receive a notification for all new mentions
2. Negative sentiment alert - receive a notification for mentions with a negative sentiment
3. Unusual spike alert - receive a notification for an unusual increase in mentions
4. Top Tier publication alert - receive a notification for mentions from top-tier publications

For example, to avoid a brewing PR crisis, you can set up alerts and receive email notifications through your mobile app whenever negative sentiment spikes. This will help you react to any negative public feedback and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Are you beginning to see why alternatives to Google Alerts are growing in popularity?

Additional filters put Prowly ahead of Google Alerts

Additionally, alerts will reflect the filters and search options you used when creating your search query. For example, if your search query is limited to English, you’ll only get alerts with English results.

Once you create a query, you can filter alerts even further. For example, you can be notified whenever there is a mention from a Tier 2 website. This way, you’ll reduce the number of irrelevant results and only get the ones you’re searching for.

Prowly filters include:

• Article sentiment
• Article category
• Article backlinks
• Domain category
• Domain authority 
• Domain rank
• Domain tier

You can also allow other recipients to receive alerts on your desired demographic for smoother team collaboration. You can also choose an email subject line for any alert to distinguish it from other daily reports in your inbox easily.

Data coverage: more than just Google search finds

The biggest difference between Google Alerts and Prowly alerts is that Prowly doesn’t simply pull results from indexed Google results, which can take days to show up, but directly from news sites, blogs, and discussion forums. 

This means you can count on Prowly alerts to be truly real-time, while Google Alerts’ “as-it-happens” alerts are based on when Google search engine indexes an article. And you’ll rest easy knowing Prowly is capturing more instances where your brand is mentioned online.

Notifications: Prowly vs. Google Alerts

Creating your personalized dashboard will help you easily present various metrics relevant to your goals and KPIs. It's all done with customizable drag-and-drop widgets.

Take a look at the difference. 

What you get with Google Alerts:

Emails:

What you get with Prowly media monitoring:

▶️ Emails:

▶️ An app interface:

▶️ And specific query details:

Mentions: see an increase in volume 

With improved filtering and more SEO data coverage, Prowly, a Google Alerts alternative, will give you more visibility on more media mentions than basic Google Alerts.

The difference in the number of mentions is considerable. 

99 mentions per day in Prowly media monitoring translates to approximately 10 mentions per day in Google Alerts.

You can even filter mentions for additional insights. Seeing the number of mentions for your keywords is useful if your PR goal is to increase overall chatter in the media. But with Prowly, you can filter your results by sentiment, estimated reach, domain rank, languages, influencers, countries, and more.

You can also get a full summary with all available statistics for the total number of mentions on your chosen chart. You can also see mentions in real time and spot day-to-day changes.

Data export: see what you’re missing 

Data exporting is another key tool to point out in Prowly.

From your Prowly dashboard, you can set up any widget and choose the chart type and time range it will show. 

You can also export that data to a CSV or XLSX file later and choose to export mentions or data from charts.

Google Alerts has no export option, so this is a big plus.

Analytics: measure your results

PR is driven by results (does anyone else live in reporting tools like Google Analytics?). Analytics help you measure the impact of your strategy, compare the estimated reach of different campaigns or periods, and see which publications need better targeting.

There are no analytics available with Google Alerts. But here’s what you get with Prowly Media Monitoring:

• Mentions in time
• Mention reach
• Mention sentiment
• AVE
• Share of voice
• Domain rank
• Domain reach
• Custom metrics

Create customizable reports that showcase your PR wins!

Sentiment analysis 

Filtering articles by sentiment is useful to determine your target audience's perception of your campaign, brand, or competitor. 

You can also use sentiment to prove your strategy is effective in recovering from a PR crisis or negative mentions by looking at increasingly positive sentiment in articles, blog posts, comments, and reviews.

Also, to make that data more presentable and easy to understand, you can transform it into different charts to display on your dashboard. Use other filters, like sentiment by country, on top of sentiment to further break down your analysis.

Feed: Prowly vs. Google Alerts

You’ll see a list of articles with a few opening sentences when you check your Google Alerts feed. The app’s dashboard just doesn’t cut it.

But with Prowly’s media monitoring, you’ll also see:

• Author
• Outlet
• Sentiment analysis
• Article reach
• Backlink information
• Domain authority
• Domain rank
• Domain categories

In addition, you’ll get the ability to filter article content so you can organize mentions to your liking.

The difference in language capabilities for international agencies is astounding: Prowly media monitoring covers 184 languages compared to the 46 that Google Alerts cover.

You can learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

Other Google Alerts alternatives

Besides Prowly, other Google Alerts alternatives can help PR specialists track media mentions, such as Social Searcher, Talkwalker Alerts, Awario, Brandwatch, and other brand monitoring tools. But let’s take a closer look at the following major tools:

• Meltwater
• Muck Rack
• Cision

Meltwater

Pros ✅

Meltwater offers media monitoring that covers online news, print, broadcast, and consumer review sites. Their reach is impressive. They claim to monitor over 300,000 online news sources and 300 million blogs.

Its brand monitoring tool tracks target keywords and aggregates content. Its social listening tool monitors Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, TikTok, blogs, message boards, and discussion forums.

However, since the (in)famous acquisition, more and more users have switched from Twitter to other social media platforms. You should be aware of the most popular alternatives to X. We listed them all in this article.

Cons ❌

In online reviews, some users report inconsistent tracking and scheduling of social media accounts, especially around Facebook and Instagram. These users recommend monitoring social media through parallel dashboards to cover these gaps.

There is no free trial or free training. Although the pricing for the most popular media monitoring services are not typically provided publicly, Meltwater’s subscription costs are estimated at around $4000 a year. 

The cost of an annual commitment instead of a monthly one can be a major drawback for freelancers and smaller PR agencies.

→ Find additional details on Meltwater pricing here.

Muck Rack

Pros ✅

Muck Rack offers media monitoring services for client and competitor news across social media, blogs, online news, radio, TV, and traditional media. Automated alerts deliver updates directly to your inbox.  

Users can easily follow their targeted journalists and their social media activity and create robust PR reports about which ones shared a brand link.

Reviewers report that media contact accuracy is strong, something that’s worth a lot in the PR industry.

Cons ❌

Reviewers share that Muck Rack’s media monitoring tool is sensitive to outside factors, like when news articles are republished with current dates. Though minor, these glitches in data can be time-consuming to correct. 

Reporting is not as flexible as many users would like, as some fields can not be deleted, which affects the look of client reports. While this monitoring tool is robust, it can take time to learn how to use it.

Also, based on insights, Muck Rack pricing starts from $5000 and offers only annual plans.

Cision

Pros✅

Cision is well-established in the PR industry and offers comprehensive PR automation software. Its media monitoring and PR listening tools track online, broadcast, print, podcast, and social mentions of your brand.

Cision can monitor an impressive amount of media contacts. Some PR agencies report tracking up to 1500.

Cons ❌

User reviews consistently refer to Cision as the most difficult PR software to learn and use. It’s a powerful tool, but its range of functionality can be overwhelming.

Their social listening tool has search limits based on your subscription plan, so PR pros that use Cision recommend new users confirm their limit in their price quote to avoid hitting their search max quicker than they’d like.

Some users also recommend setting up Google Alerts to catch media mentions that the software sometimes misses. Their pricing is on the higher end of all Google Alerts alternatives, and there’s no free trial, free dedicated training, or free set-up. 

The Google Alert alternative for you

When looking for a Google Alerts alternative, look for ones with built-in tools that go beyond email alerts and offers. You can get:

• Social media monitoring
• Customizable reports and –even better– automated reports
• PR campaign planning features
• A media database with audience segmentation
• A mentions feed
• Alerts statistics

Also, focus on alternatives with free trials that allow you to try them out before fully committing. 

Of all the Google Alerts alternatives out there, we think Prowly provides the best intersection of benefits and cost. See for yourself with a free 7-day trial.

The post The Best Google Alerts Alternatives for PR Pros appeared first on Prowly.

Like in any field of work, there’s a list of common challenges in PR that continually slow down an agency or in-house team and hamper peak PR performance.

Add to this list the need to research, price out, and test a growing number of PR tools for PR professionals, like PR monitoring tools and reporting tools, and it becomes undoubtedly overwhelming.

We know the thought of vetting, testing, and implementing each of these PR tools individually can sound as exhausting as doing the work by hand. So the key is to find one set of PR automation software that’ll bring your team the entire PR tool kit. If you focus your research on selecting just one PR platform to bring in all the latest PR tools, then you’re just one decision away from completely evolving your team’s processes and increasing your PR performance.

Don’t believe that it’s possible? Then allow us to run you through the 4 major challenges that PR pros face in their work daily, and we’ll show you how one automated PR software solution with all the best PR tools can solve every last one of them. 

You’ll find that once you’ve reduced the number of daily challenges your team has to manage, your team’s performance will quickly improve. A recipe for fewer headaches with greater success? Yes, please!

PR Challenge #1: Maintaining an Up-to-Date Media Database

You’ve sent out a newsworthy press release with personalized messaging and some fantastic story angles for a journalist to consider. So the pain runs deep when that beautifully-crafted pitch bounces back with a message that the journalist no longer works at that publication. Sigh.

We know your pain. In fact, many PR professionals claim that keeping their media database up-to-date is the single most time-consuming task for them and their team.

Identifying the right editors and influencers for your brand or client has never been more important. Along with the exciting growth of mediums for capturing PR (like print, web, TV, podcasts, and influencers), comes the lengthy and growing lists of contacts to collect, research, label, and update regularly.

That is why one of the first and best PR tools you should invest in is one that builds and maintains your media database for you. The savings in labor hours alone earn back your investment immediately.

In this article, we explain how to choose a media contact database for PR in detail and what to consider when choosing the right solution to meet your PR needs.

What the Solution Looks Like

With Media Database software like Prowly, you’ll automatically have access to over 1 million media contacts (yes, you read that right). Can you even imagine how long it would take you and your team to build a database of that size?

You and your team will then have the ability to search and sort media contacts by industry, location, and media type. You’ll find yourself making large custom contact lists for each of your clients in minutes.

Best of all, you’ll know you’re working with a dynamic, real-time database that is automatically kept up-to-date as media contact information is reported.

PR Challenge #2: Getting Personal and Building Media Relationships When Competition is Fierce

Always remember this one PR truism: the best way to befriend a journalist is to make their work life easier. This means delivering not only a newsworthy story pitch, but all the necessary details, spokesperson quotes, photos, and logos they will need to write and develop an article for quick review and publication.

Need more guidance in story pitching? Read the article “Following up on Your Media Pitch – How to Do It Right”

Therefore, you need to integrate PR performance and workflow tools into your team’s pitching process. These types of PR tools transform traditional documents, spreadsheets, and media kits into beautiful and easy-to-use digital spaces where editors can get everything they need in one place.

What the Solution Looks Like

Instead of a text-only email with a press release pasted in (or, gasp, attached), we’re talking about a visually-attractive press release email announcement with beautiful images built in and a link to an online newsroom full of resources just a click away. 

The editor will have the ability to click over to the online newsroom and easily download all the things they need to create that client article, like approved spokesperson quotes, brand logos, and high-resolution product photos.

These are the new PR spaces where you want to invite your media contacts to join you. Show them how you can make their writing lives so much easier, and you’ll show them they can count on you to deliver excellent PR pitches with everything they need at their fingertips.

PR Challenge #3: Tracking PR Efforts and Outcomes to Land Top-Tier Media Coverage

If you’ve selected one of the best PR automation softwares, like Prowly, you now have an impressive media database and an engaging digital PR kit to share with your media contacts.

Let’s tackle the next classic PR challenge: tracking your PR efforts so you can plan your next steps for journalist follow-ups.

In the case of Prowly, you can see exactly which editors opened your initial email pitch, giving you the opportunity to reach out to them again with a follow up that builds on the first. In this second pitch you might include more story angles, offer a video interview, or check back to see if they have any questions.

And how about finding out exactly where your PR efforts result in media coverage? Excellent PR automation software will include PR media monitoring tools too.

What the Solution Looks Like

The best media monitoring tools include multiple filters, sentiment analysis, media outlet reach, and estimated media mention value – all in a custom dashboard that provides you with the specific details you need most. Add in the ability to set up real-time alerts for the latest coverage and your team will save hours on tracking media mentions.

Prowly users can not only track their brand mentions but set up media monitoring for their competitors too. This gives them timely insights and opportunities to pitch to the same journalists and influencers who found interest in their competition.

If you’re new to the key advantages of media monitoring tools and just beginning to learn how invaluable this automated PR product can be, check out our in-depth article about Media Monitoring Cost and learn How to do Media Monitoring with the best practices and tips.

PR Challenge #4: Delivering PR Reports with Clear ROI

PR pros feel a bittersweet rush at the end of each month. It’s one part excitement reflecting on all their great work, and one part dread at the need to gather it all into your monthly PR reports, either for internal supervisors or your numerous clients.

Most PR pros block off days to complete this task. The steps for each PR report include collecting digital clippings, organizing them into a cohesive report, and then calculating and reporting on their estimated media value. Here's the Practical Guide to PR Clippings for your PR agency if you'd like to delve a bit deeper into the topic.

For decades, PR pros could only dream about PR analytics and PR measurement tools that could assess and calculate media mention values at the push of a button. That’s no longer the case, with PR reporting tools now here to save the day.

What the Solution Looks Like

Let’s talk about the dream scenario: a software program that automatically takes PR mentions from your media monitoring tool and creates beautiful, presentable PR reports with coverage images, media outlet details like estimated reach, and custom-selected KPIs like sentiment analysis and estimated media value. 

You’d get to choose how to best deliver this PR report to your client, with options like PDF, PowerPoint presentation, or a password-protected document. 

The PR report would wow your client with its interactive and responsive visual elements that showcase the undeniable value of your PR efforts.

Oh, wait! This is no longer a PR pro’s unrealized dream! It’s now a reality available to all PR professionals. And it’s probably way more affordable than you’d expect.

Conclusion

You’re fully aware that there are now many online PR tools available on the market, each offering ways to reduce the time and labor costs around all sorts of PR challenges. Addressing these challenges means not only reducing daily workloads for your team, but improving your team’s PR performance and output all round.

Now you could spend hours of your precious time researching all the options for each PR tool and buying them a la carte, or you can follow our advice and shop for PR automation software that includes all of these PR tools. This means just one product to research and test instead of four or five.

We’re sure that you’ll find along the way that Prowly delivers this one-stop PR solution at the best cost out there. Book a demo with our consultants and automate your PR operations right away. We hope you’ll give it a try!

Cover image by Patrick Tomasso

The post How to Use PR Tools to Solve Any PR Challenge appeared first on Prowly.

This growth may make you consider testing the waters in a new PR market. Since US and UK businesses share a common language, a switch or expansion from one of these countries to the other feels like a natural fit. 

While there are similarities that will make the transition easy, you also need to be aware of some big differences. 

Just like New York public relations jobs can look different from Silicon Valley public relations jobs, PR looks even more different when you broaden your perspective globally and tackle London public relations. There can be huge surprises for PR professionals looking to leap from one country to another.  

Fortunately, if you plan and prepare for these differences in advance, you’ll enter your new market primed for success.

Similarities

You Need a Strong Story 🗞

Some PR fundamentals can never be skipped. This is especially true of brand stories. There is no side-stepping the most basic fact: your client needs to be newsworthy, whether it’s a new product, service, or company story. 

You’ll want to vet and select clients with story angles you’re proud to pitch. Ideally, they have multiple angles for you to work with. Even a seasoned PR pro cannot sell a story that won’t earn reader interest. 

Media Relationships are Key

In both the US and the UK, PR professionals are valued most by the strength of their media network. The most sought-after professionals usually have years in the business and have developed the ability to pitch the right story at the right moment to the right person. When launching a PR campaign, they’re more likely to have their emails opened, and they know how to craft PR pitches that appeal specifically to the editors they work closely with. 

Some of the very best PR professionals can pick up the phone and land placements immediately. At a minimum, they use PR automation software like Prowly to access media databases with hundreds of thousands of searchable contacts that can be categorized and pitched to based on their specific beats.

Editorial Calendars Matter 📆

Public relations professionals are some of the best planners in business, and whether you’re working in New York public relations or London public relations, you want to get editorial calendars for your targeted publications. 

Following editorial calendars ensures you provide relevant topic pitches at the right time. You can even use them as a guideline for brainstorming different story angles for your clients.

PR Professionals Are More Than a Mouthpiece

In parts of the world outside of the US and Western Europe, media relations and press events are the primary function of public relations jobs.  PR professionals are handed company messaging that they pass down to the media. 

It’s different in the US and UK, where the PR role is more closely-integrated into a company’s overall marketing strategy. This means that PR professionals are actively engaged in creating brand strategy and company messaging. PR pros don’t just act as a mouthpiece for the company; they are responsible for crafting the story too.

In fact, in the US and the UK, PR roles are still expanding as the media landscape grows. PR professionals in these countries should not be surprised when their roles include social media management, data analytics research, and crisis communications planning.

Differences

Topic Interest 

UK public relations efforts focus primarily on industry topics and take a global angle. UK PRs might be surprised to learn that US public relations is strongly US-based instead. 

On top of that, US public relations offers another angle that’s not as popular in the UK: focusing solely on one company’s news. This is a good thing!  It means there are lots of business publications willing to write about an individual CEO’s insights on leadership, industry trends, and market positioning. Stories about a company’s business growth and specific strategy are particularly popular.

This is also true of standalone product coverage. Where UK publications usually focus on product round-ups, US publications are open to an entire story on the features and benefits of just product or service (if the story is compelling, of course!).

Customer success stories also have more appeal in the US, so PRs there may focus on telling the story from a customer perspective. These stories focus on a customer’s challenge or pain point, then explains how their client introduced the solution.

The Role of PR Professionals

We discussed how both US and UK public relations jobs are broader than in other parts of the world. However, the US role is even bigger. At the top of the profession, PR professionals have been elevated to an executive role in companies. They are expected to advise and works directly with the C-suite to build and protect the company’s public image. 

In addition, US PR pros play a key role in developing and executing the communications strategies for the investor community and industry analysts. This is a significant responsibility tied to business recognition and investment funding. 

Next, add in the job of leading strategy for company awards and executive speaking opportunities, plus potentially leading employee communications. 

Finally, US PR agencies often work with outside research firms to develop studies that provide trending industry data to journalists that make click-worthy headlines.

Important to note: if you plan to leave a New York public relations job to take a public relations role in London (or vice versa), you’ll want to research the current average public relations salary in the UK and US. These could vary by more than you’d expect, due to this difference in PR role responsibilities.

Competition for Media Coverage 

This one shouldn’t come as much of a shock, as the US population is almost 5x larger than the UK population. 

This population difference means that the number of US media outlets is much larger. As a result, PR professionals need to manage a vast array of publications, websites, podcasts, and influencer channels. (BTW, a PR automation software like Prowly can definitely help you with this). 

While there are a lot more media opportunities, there’s also more competition for media coverage in the US  Research firm, IBISWorld reports that there are 54,581 PR firms in the US as of 2022. This number has grown 4.8% per year on average over the five years between 2017 - 2022. That’s a lot of PR pros pitching alongside you.

On the bright side, there are many more niche publications. So, PR campaigns can focus on different angles for different media channels, like general business, industry-specific, consumer-facing, and investment publications. This means that writing press releases in multiple ways can result in several different media placements.

US PR Costs are Higher 💸

Since public relations professionals cover more territory (both in job responsibility and media landscape), PR is generally much more expensive in the US, whether through monthly agency retainer costs or salaries for PR executives. 

To give you a basic idea, a PR professional at the top executive level in the US could be looking at a $200,000-$300,000 a year salary. Monthly agency retainers usually start at $10,000 per month.

💡 Tip: To get to know the top magazines to pitch in the US market, explore this article.

Faster Timelines

US editors are asked to do a lot nowadays. As the media industry has become more competitive, and ad costs have shifted from print to digital, editorial teams have been reduced and current editors have to cover more topics at a faster timeline. These editors are expected to be very nimble in their work.

This means that PRs need to make an editor’s job as easy as possible by delivering as much content as they can in an easy-to-use format. A great example of this is the growth of the online press room, where an editor can find and download press releases, photos, and spokespeople quotes all from one place. 

In regard to US public relations, the pitch just isn’t enough. It needs to include statistics and data when available, along with hi-resolution images and videos.

How to do pitch effectively in the US?

Lately, we prepared a series of articles called Email Pitch Academy where you can learn to improve sender reputation and email deliverability and more. For more pitching tips for the US, check out Gini Dietrich's article - she's a US-based PR professional and the CEO of a wide-known Spin Sucks PR company with over 20 years of experience.

Making the Leap

Yes, there are some big differences between US and UK public relations, but there are some basic similarities that will make the transition easy for you. 

Armed with the differences, you’ll be able to make a solid plan for adjusting to your new PR role on the other side. You won’t be thrown by surprises, and you’ll get to focus on the fun that comes along with launching a new adventure in a new land.

You know that all of us at Prowly are here to assist you with the changes you’ll face in media database creation and pitching. We have your back – just let us know what you need!

The post The Similarities and Differences Between US and UK PR appeared first on Prowly.

Crafting a music press release follows a similar structure to crafting a standard one, with a few additional considerations to bear in mind.

We’ll walk you through the steps for how to write a press release for music and point you to some music press release examples.

Looking to create a music press release?

Use Prowly's AI press release generator or templates that you can use for free to easily create your own in a format that journalists expect to receive.

Prowly also lets you find relevant journalists and send out your press release to them directly from the platform.

When to write a music press release 

Before writing a single word, you should check if a new music press release is warranted.

You should write a press release for music when:

• You're announcing a new album release: Whenever an artist or band releases a new album, a press release should be crafted and distributed to generate excitement and inform fans and the media about the new music.
• You're promoting a concert or music festival: Before a concert or music festival, a good press release can generate publicity, attract the audience, and provide necessary details like date, location, and line-up.
• You want to introduce a new artist or band: A press release can help launch new artists into the music scene, providing essential information about them and their music.
• You need to highlight a big achievement or milestone: Whether an artist wins an award, reaches a sales milestone, or celebrates an anniversary, a press release can share these achievements with the public.
• You want to share updates about a music project or collaboration: If an artist is involved in a unique project or collaboration, a press release can effectively keep fans and media in the loop.

However, while all of these events give you the go-ahead to write a press release, the key will be to give the announcement an angle that makes it more than a statement of details. It needs to tell a story. 

So, identify what the story is first. For example, it can be about how a personal event inspired the album or the challenges the musician had to overcome to record the album.

How to write a music press release

Music press release format

As we mentioned, don’t worry that a music industry press release radically differs from what you’re used to.

However, when creating a music press release, it is important to include additional elements specific to the music industry. These may include details about the artist or band, the genre or style of music, notable collaborations, release dates, and any unique aspects of the music production process. To learn more about how to do a press release for music, refer to the best practices we list below:

Step #1 — Include the common elements expected in a press release:

• Headline
• Subheader
• Announcement date and place
• 2-3 body paragraphs, with the most important details in the first paragraph 
• A quote from the music artist or record label spokesperson (Keep the language informal and natural, so the journalist can include it in an article without sounding like they lifted it right out of a press release).

→ Read a thorough explanation of each component in our post: How to Write a Press Release (With Tips From PR Pros).

Step #2 — Weave in elements that uniquely make it an album press release or musician press release:

• Brief band or artist history
• Release date for album or ticket sales
• Excerpts from past reviews that lend credibility
• Band or artist photo and logo
• All social media platform handles

Craft a compelling narrative, delving into the lives of the artists. After all, music is an art form that calls for creativity and emotional expression. By infusing your writing with these elements, you'll captivate readers and earn the appreciation of journalists who cover such topics. Embrace individuality and make your story a unique and engaging experience.

Protip: Don’t include attachments. Instead, add links to the artist’s music on streaming platforms. If the artist’s music isn't publicly available, attach links to a private SoundCloud or YouTube channel.

Questions to answer in a music press release

To pique the interest of journalists and music fans alike, it's important to consider a few key questions before putting pen to paper. 

• What makes this particular release stand out? 
• What inspired the artist to create this music? 
• What can listeners expect in terms of sound and themes?

Answering these questions can help ensure that your music artist's press release is informative and engaging, sparking the curiosity of potential listeners and ensuring that your message is heard loud and clear.

Create a music press release with AI

AI-powered tools for PR can help you create high-quality press release drafts, provide advanced editing suggestions, and even recommend who to send your press release to.

While it's worth knowing how to create an effective press release from scratch, using tools can help speed up the process and ensure you've ticked all the boxes when it comes to the format and content that journalists expect to receive.

Read more: Mastering AI Press Releases: Comprehensive Guide to Writing and Sending + Practical Examples

Here’s how to create (and send) a music press release using a tool like Prowly’s AI-powered Press Release Generator.

Step 1: Enter basic details about your music press release

1. Start the process by entering the type of your press release.
2. Once you select the type, Prowly's AI will ask you to pick your target audience. There are predefined options, such as industry players, customers, or local communities, but you can also add your own.
3. Choose the language of your press release draft.

Step 2: Enter key messages about your music press release

Here, you'll want to be as specific as possible and ensure that whatever you choose is the most relevant information.

Here are three key messages that you can include in your music press release:

• New Release Details: Clearly state the album/EP/single title, release date, and streaming platforms.
• Artist and Music Highlights: Provide a brief artist bio, unique selling points, and a description of the music's genre, sound, and themes.
• Upcoming Events and Call to Action: Announce any tours, events, and new merchandise, while encouraging social media engagement and streaming/purchasing the music.

Step 3: Answer the follow-up questions

Once you’ve entered the basic information about your music press release, Prowly’s AI will ask you more in-depth questions designed to mirror a natural conversation with the journalists you’re targeting.

You’ll receive ten questions tailored specifically to the content you shared earlier. This will complete your press release draft and reduce the need to answer many follow-up questions from the person you're pitching to.

Step 4: Customize and edit the press release draft

Whether you've generated a press release draft or written it yourself, you can adjust header font styles, fine-tune the content just like you would in a regular text editor, adjust your press release length, and cater it into a format you're happy with.

An AI Assistant trained in PR writing best practices reviews the draft and suggests improvements based on 11 key criteria, indicating exactly where to edit.

Step 5: Get contact recommendations for your music press release

Prowly’s AI will start suggesting music journalists you can pitch to based on the keywords found in your press release.

As long as you have contact information for the people you want to pitch to, you can always do deeper work and find out about their music interests, what they've written about before, or what they're hooked on at the moment.

Examples of music press releases

Looking for a press release example for music or a press release template for a music artist? Here are some recent examples we found online that we like:

Music event press release example

Music album press release example

Music artist press release example

Music single press release example

Music festival press release example

Music tour press release example

Sample album press release example

Starting with a new music press release example should get the ideas flowing. But, of course, when budget allows, there are music press release companies you can turn to for full-service press release writing as well (although we think you can achieve the same great press release easily with Prowly’s press release creator tool).

P. S. If you need a press release for an artist or art exhibition, here's a step-by-step guide.

Music press release template

No need to wonder how to write a music press release template when you're using Prowly — it's got you covered!

You can get your hands on a music press release sample, but you can speed up the writing process even more with a music press release template free in Prowly. 

It has multiple press release templates you can use. The templates include all the important elements that will get your story noticed by journalists and result in media coverage.

How to distribute a music press release

Once you've crafted your press release, the next step is to get it out there and ensure the media picks it up. There are several ways to do it, but some ways greatly improve your odds of securing media coverage.

Pitching your music press release 

Pitching relevant media contacts by email is the most effective method for sending out a press release.

While the approach might take a bit more time, it increases the chances of getting awesome press coverage in publications that matter to your industry.

Let’s look at a PR software tool like Prowly. Prowly's media database offers access to a media database with over a million contacts. On top of that, the software creates smart recommendations based on the content of your press releases. With this advantage, you’ll always pitch relevant journalists that are more likely to be interested in your news story.

Over 5000 journalists are covering music, and that's just in the US! You'll find famous media outlets like Rolling Stone Online, Billboard, and Spin. 

Why not take a chance and craft a music press release for your cause?

💡If you're seeking more exposure for your press release, explore these 10 ideas on how to effectively promote a press release.

Utilizing email personalization

Your chances of catching a journalist’s attention increase significantly when you write a custom pitch just for them. A personal pitch addresses their typical beat, past articles, and target audience.

That’s why Prowly offers 1:1 email personalization to address that advantage, allowing you to create campaign media lists and craft individual emails when needed. It helps to personalize every aspect of your pitch, from the greeting to the email content and attachments. This level of personalization enhances press coverage, ensuring your music resonates with the right audience.

Following up

That press release is now out in the world, but you wouldn’t be a PR pro if you weren’t focused on the follow-ups. Be considerate in your follow-ups, though, allowing journalists some time to read your first email and staying out of their inbox after a few follow-up emails go unanswered.

Alternative: Using a wire service

Wire services are another common way of distributing a press release, and compared to pitching, this method can be quicker (though more expensive). 

You may even find a special music press release distribution service or free music press release distribution website. However, the quality of media hits from a wire service can be lower. Your best bet will always be to contact your media contacts individually.

Conclusion

You’re all set! You know how to determine if a music press release is right for your announcement, what to include, and how to distribute it.

If you still need more support, you can always access the Prowly free trial for templates, a press release creator, and a media database.

The post How to Write a Music Press Release (Examples & Templates) appeared first on Prowly.