Nellie PR and Marketing Tools
Useful Info
Here’s a list of marketing and PR tools that we at Nellie PR find really useful. Keep coming back, as we’ll regularly update this page, and if you have any recommendations for new PR tools, please contact us.
Useful Marketing and PR Tools
Blogs
Top 50 UK blogs as listed by Vuelio.
Business Diary Dates
For UK Manufacturers, don’t miss The UKMFG PR Diary for UK Manufacturers. This guide is focused on the key industry announcements, research and survey dates, UK events and awards, with a few national events thrown in. Many of these dates are used by journalists to help inform their editorial calendars, and plan news and feature items, so you’ll never miss a PR opportunity again. We also recommend using this diary to guide your social media posts, content creation and storytelling.
The Office for National Statistics provides regular reports on UK business stats, figures, and more. You can search specific areas, such as ‘manufacturing and production’ or ‘retail’, and they announce their publication dates well in advance, meaning you can plan your PR strategy accordingly.
Photography and Photo Editing
Canva offers a great free platform for photo editing, allowing you to create visuals for your digital marketing. We use the site to create our blog imagery as it offers a quick and easy way to edit photos and imagery without a large price tag!
Having said that, we often need more complex tools that Canva does not offer, therefor we also subscribe to Picmonkey. Perhaps consider trying Picmonkey’s free trial if you find yourself needing more tools.
Finding great imagery online can often be complicated by copyright. Have a look at our top 10 sources for free images online here.
Recording/Editing Video
Ecamm allows you to video Skype calls on Macbooks. By doing this you can create podcast or video content or just record your calls so that you can catch up with the information at a later date.
We use iMovie to edit our videos as it provides nearly every tool you would need for basic video editing and (as long as you already have a Macbook) is free to use.
Searching
Knowing what searches are trending on Google, Twitter, YouTube etc. can be a great way of matching your content to current trends and keeping on top of SEO. This blog from Lifewire is a useful starting point.
Media Alerts and Hashtags
We follow Media Updates on Twitter to keep on top of media moves and publication changes.
We like to keep on top of these hashtags:
ResponseSource provides a service to keep you up to date on contacts and journalist enquiries, and it’s worth noting that they do offer a free trial in case you want to give it a go before committing.
Media Information and Media Databases
It can be time-consuming to curate media lists and find the relevant journalists who will offer you rewarding media opportunities and coverage. For a quick time-saver, have a look at our Top SME Journalists to Follow on Twitter lists, or follow them on Twitter.
Our blog post ‘How to Grow a PR Email List‘ gives details on building and maintaining your press contacts list for little-to-no cost, and includes further resources on the subject.
Other sources of Journalists and Media contacts that we use are:
These sources are also good but unfortunately, you will have to pay to access their databases:
Proofreading
The economist style guide is now free online! The guide is a great way to ensure your grammar and punctuation are always perfect.
Grammarly will correct your grammatical mistakes whenever you are using your internet browser. Download the add-on from the Chrome Store, or equivalent, and you are ready to go!
PR Stack
PR Stack provides a great extensive list of tools other PR professionals and companies use. You can download their free e-books for step by step guidance on how to use the different tools for specific goals. The tools featured on PR Stack that we most commonly use and love include:
For more information on developing and understanding PR tech, read ‘How to Build Your PR Tech Stack‘.
SEO Tools
There are lots of ways to optomise your content and help drive traffic to your site, so here are some free tools we favour. Also, if you want to learn more about SEO – including the very basics – we recommend checking out the Yoast SEO online training, which is broken into small, managable videos for beginners. Their blog page is also helpful for any questions you may have.
- Google My Business – If you’re on Google, updating your business profile and ensuring you’ve completed all the sections (including customer reviews, services and location) will help boost your overall SEO ranking in a big way.
- Ubersuggests – There’s lots of pop-ups on this page, but if you’re able to see past them, this is a nice and simple tool (and free) that will allow you to track your rankings as well as search for keyphrases – although as with all the free SEO tools you’re limited to a certain amount of searched per day.
- Semrush – This is an all-in-one SEO tool. Unfortunately, you will have to pay to use this one, although it’s worth noting the free trial they offer in case you wanted to give it whirl without the costs.
- Google Search Consol – If you want to keep a close eye on your performance data, site visits, rankings etc., this is a excellent tool to use – and it’s free as well!
- SEO META in 1 Click – This is a free plugin that will run SEO diagnostics on any chrome page and displays all meta tags/data and main SEO information clearly.
- Keyword Tool – Nice and simple – this free tool is great for finding short-tail keyphrases quickly. It doesn’t have all the frills of the other all-in-one tools, but we quite like it for its simplicity.
Book a call
Here at Nellie PR, we love working with SME businesses, especially those that are hidden gems. We work with you to help you step out of the shadows for better business. Please book a free consultancy call with Ellen Carroll to find out more about the PR, communication, and marketing support we provide to help you flourish. Read more about our work and impact and don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter to get regular updates, PR news, and fresh resources delivered straight to your inbox.
