Sales / CRM

5 CRM uses for PR pros

Laura Dolan

Updated: Apr 20, 2023 · 3 min read

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public relations crm

Customer relationship management, or CRM, helps sales, media and PR professionals manage their interactions with current and potential clients and grow their businesses. But a CRM for small business is so much more than a sales tool; a public relations CRM, for example, helps PR reps nurture client relationships in a more sustainable and organized way. Being organized streamlines your daily tasks and ensures clients have a rewarding experience with your business.

You can expect the best CRM for small business to easily eliminate the need for spreadsheets, sticky notes and whatever else it takes to manage your client correspondence. You also won’t have to do business out of your inbox anymore. This is valuable for anyone working with media lists, media outreach and social media in general.

Here are five ways a PR professional can benefit from using a media relations CRM:

1. Manage contacts efficiently

A CRM for small business allows you to store all your contact information in one place, including birthdays, social media handles, files, documents, contracts, meeting history, payments and invoices, email correspondence, follow-up tasks and more.

Most CRMs allow you to customize your fields so you can organize your information and make it easier to find.

2. Track your metrics

A small business CRM like Keap provides a wealth of information when it comes to analytics. Just from this one tool, you can gauge whether someone opened your email, looked at your website, how much time they spent on your site and if they made some kind of conversion.

A CRM will reveal all the data you need so you can see where your messages might need improvement and if your media contact is truly interested in what you’re offering. For example, you can see how long someone read your last email campaign before they bounced, giving you a chance to see what the email was lacking and what you could update to get someone to increase their time on the page.

You’ll also have the ability to set up notifications if your goals are achieved — for instance, if your website received a specified number of visits, or if your latest email surpassed your previous message’s open rate.

3. Follow up consistently

Using a small business CRM eliminates the back-and-forth it often takes for you and your client to agree on a meeting time. CRM software allows you to set availability on your booking page, email the link, and schedule and manage appointments from there.

This kind of automation allows you to set follow-up dates, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. You can also set a follow-up schedule that will prompt your CRM to send messages to your clients after initial contact is made.

4. Create segments and tags

Segmenting your contacts in a CRM by industry, job title, location, and whether they’re potential clients or long-term customers can help you stay organized and locate the correct contact when needed.

Once you’ve segmented your contacts, you can create tags for each topic. Make sure you tag each contact when you’re adding them into the system so you don’t have to worry about doing it later. Tagging will streamline how you sort your contacts and ensure that you send a proposal to the right person.

5. Develop more personal relationships

PR reps measure their success based on their relationships with their contacts. A media relations CRM will allow you to collect more informal data about your media contacts, including what their interests are — from preferred music genre to their favorite food. The more information you have along these lines, the better conversation you can make, resulting in stronger, long-standing connections.

Again, a public relations CRM can be so much more than a sales tool. It offers endless possibilities for connecting with your contacts, enabling you to follow up consistently and gain your clients’ respect for expressing interest in them on a professional and personal level.

Ready to explore how a CRM for small business can help you level up your media outreach? Check out our five-minute demo video to see what Keap can do.

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