How HubSpot Helps PR Pros

HubSpot can be very helpful for PR efforts in a number of ways, Improve the overall impact of your PR campaigns by clearer measurement and actual behavioral data. See what the impact actually is on different target groups and your overall awareness, HubSpot empowers your team and provides evidence of the impact of their efforts. In this blog post, we lay out how you and your PR department should be using HubSpot to take your PR to the next level.

Key Benefits:

Attribution: No more trying to account for the value of your efforts to the C-Suite, bring data to your CEO, CMO, and others that are real-time and clear in the role it played for your brand.

Automation: Repetitive tasks can be incorporated into workflows or sequences to eliminate repetitive tasks and ensure that these tasks are getting done and done right every time.

Insights: Get a clearer picture of brand interactions across all target groups. Know what is being said about your brand and improve your approaches.

Track Real Results
Historically, the predominant hurdle for public relations (PR) specialists was demonstrating how their efforts positively impacted the business, a challenge primarily attributed to the absence of advanced analytics. There simply wasn't a method to indicate to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Chief Executive Officer (CEO) how activities like content creation, outreach, or media coverage directly or indirectly affected the business performance.

In those times, PR professionals were limited to measuring metrics like impressions, reach, and Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), which are now largely viewed as superficial metrics and somewhat irrelevant in today's business environment.

Fortunately, with modern tools such as HubSpot at their disposal, PR professionals are veering away from these obsolete and imprecise metrics, gaining the ability to establish clear connections between their activities.

Leveraging HubSpot can provide insight into how a PR outreach or content creation campaign boosts website traffic, conversions, or sales, to keep it straightforward.

For instance, establishing a campaign in HubSpot and tying all PR efforts to that campaign (as simple as setting the campaign tag for each activity executed via HubSpot), allows you to monitor all related aspects. This encompasses views, conversions, new contacts, initiated deals, sales revenue from deals, and much more.

The creation of custom tracking URLs for inclusion in pitched content is also feasible, enabling the tracking of inbound traffic from external sources to your website. It not only enhances domain authority (particularly when published by a reputed publication) but also showcases the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.

A tip: Ensure the tracking URL leads to another piece of relevant content (or even a downloadable one) to facilitate conversion through your PR activities.

Improve Journalist and Stakeholder Relationships
Maximize the value of your current directory of the journalists you interact with, especially those who frequently report on your clients' specialties. However, when you're communicating with hundreds of journalists every week, of which only a handful may be genuinely interested, keeping track of all activities can be challenging.

A simple notebook or a Google document packed with email addresses won't suffice, and let's not forget the GDPR compliance issues with the latter.

HubSpot offers an affordable and scalable solution for managing journalist relations through its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The HubSpot CRM empowers you and your team to not only create records for the journalists you engage with but also schedule tasks, notifications, and meetings (highly useful when competing for journalists' time), take notes, and much more. With HubSpot's CRM, you have an always up-to-date log of all your journalist interactions – from the moment they open your emails to when they connect with one of your team members.

Additional key advantages include the capability to automate emails (aiding your team in reaching more journalists) and call recording. Say goodbye to forgetting the context of a PR call ever again!

What is the real buzz? Know more with HubSpot Monitoring.
Public relations (PR) centers around effective communication, but are you aware of the discussions involving your brand or those you represent? If you're not equipped with social media monitoring tools, you're likely missing opportunities to shape your brand's perception.

Media monitoring, especially on social platforms in our increasingly digital world, is a fundamental component of any PR strategy. Yet, many still lack the resources to track what's being said, including the when, where, and why. This is where HubSpot's social media monitoring tool steps in.

With HubSpot's social media monitoring tool, you have the ability to:

Spot discussions about your brand and include specific terms you wish to keep an eye on (these could be brand-related terms, products, or phrases connected to your activities)
Post content and messages directly to your social networks from the same platform where you build campaigns
Tag social media initiatives to PR campaigns, thereby facilitating performance tracking
Engage with those who are fans of your brand and its content
Review every interaction with your messages
Link your social media initiatives to your business's bottom line through ready-to-use social reports

As a PR professional, social media represents one of the most crucial and influential channels. Understanding how your online messages are interpreted will guide your campaigns in the right direction and ensure you deliver the content your target audience desires.

Take the Power Back: Easily create blog pages and web content

Picture this: you're swiftly constructing blogs and web pages to bolster your PR campaigns, without having to wait for your marketing team or a web development agency to do it for you. Sounds perfect, doesn't it?

Sadly, this is often not the reality.

We're all aware of how PR campaigns heavily depend on the creation of fresh content and downloadable resources, but there's usually a delay in how fast that content can be published. PR professionals put in the effort to generate press releases, news announcements, blogs, opinion pieces, and market research reports – only to have the content wait for marketing to "construct" and "release" it because they're the only ones versed in the "overly complex CMS".

Platforms like HubSpot simplify the process for anyone – regardless of their background or expertise – to publish new website content (blogs, web pages, landing pages, thank you pages) for campaigns effortlessly. The HubSpot CMS operates with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor, allowing you to visualize exactly how a page will appear once it's live.

One other nifty feature of the HubSpot CMS is its drag-and-drop functionality. You don't need to be a coding expert to design stunning pages. It's easier than ever to make adjustments on the go. Plus, there's an SEO recommendations toolbar on the side that offers tips on enhancing a page, so you don't need to be an SEO guru either.

Like all other tools discussed earlier, any new pages you design using HubSpot can be connected to a campaign – yet again providing you with comprehensive visibility of your actions and their contribution to the business's bottom line.

Tasks become easier with HubSpot automation

Reaching out to journalists and editors in hopes of them featuring your story can significantly drain your and your team's time, particularly if every email has to be crafted from scratch.

Even with a standard response, you're still required to input the recipient's name, attach the content (or provide a link to it), mention the client, and include your preferred contact methods.

This process can easily take several hours each week, so why not streamline it using HubSpot’s email automation?

HubSpot's email automation allows you to set PR outreach on autopilot, freeing up your time to focus on providing value. Simply select from an array of email templates and task options, and enroll a contact from your HubSpot database (as discussed earlier).

You can then customize the email using tokens and/or recipient-specific contact/company details (which are stored in your CRM), making your emails more personalized and engaging.

For optimal results, consider segmenting your journalist and editor contacts into separate lists, such as those you frequently collaborate with versus those less interested. This way, you can efficiently pull contacts into an automated email workflow.

Supercharge your PR Team

HubSpot equips you and your PR team with all the necessary features – and a couple of other exceptional functionalities to boot.

If your goal is to construct comprehensive PR campaigns that can be tracked, evaluated, and optimized with ease, HubSpot is the ideal option.

Moreover, you'll be in a position to impress your CMO and CEO when they inquire about the contributions of PR to the business's bottom line!

If you're interested in delving deeper into how HubSpot can be utilized for PR (and perhaps how we might assist you), get in touch with us.