Ever wondered how to edit those photos which are so bad you can’t quite believe they’ve been taken on a modern smartphone? Or find a quick and easy way to demonstrate the value of your PR campaign to a client? The good news is, there are so many useful free content tools available to make your lives that little bit easier every day.
Here’s some of our favourite tried-and-tested tools at R&Co which we regularly use to support our PR and social media campaigns.
1. CoverageBook – PR Activity CPM Calculator
The PR Activity CPM Calculator from CoverageBook is one of the best PR tools we have come across. Simply by inputting the estimated coverage views from your PR campaign and the cost of that activity, you’ll get a Cost Per Mille (CPM) figure – or cost per 1,000 views.
The reason this is useful as a digital PR tool is because clients are always going to scrutinise the return on their investment. As CPM is a widely-used metric in marketing for calculating the value of advertising spends, it’s a handy way of seeing how PR stacks up against those numbers.
2: Free AI Image Upscaling Tool
This one’s a new entry in the R&Co list of social media tools for marketing – and it’s so useful it goes straight in at number two. This AI Image Upscaling Tool does a fantastic job of taking low-resolution, poor-quality images and upscaling them to make them usable. It’s not only useful for social media, you’ll also love it when you’re dealing with supplied pictures to send out with press releases. You’ll be able to salvage images which had your finger heading for the delete key and make them good enough to use.
3: Gratisography
Let’s face it, stock images are usually boring. Stock images on social media, they’re extra boring. But as we all know, sometimes they’re unavoidable. If you’re stuck for a good photo and you need to roll out a stock image, you might as well make it a good one. Cue Gratisography, a free image site where vanilla photos are in short supply. It’s one of the best content tools to fall back on when you need something to brighten up a social media post at short notice. Check out our floppy-eared friend above as an example…
4: Talkwalker
Media monitoring tools are expensive and as we found out earlier this year, not always reliable either. It’s why Talkwalker Alerts is one of the best PR tools around to sweep up vital media coverage and social media chatter which your regular media monitoring service may have missed. It’s a great alternative to Google Alerts and the free version gives you a lot of information.
5: PDF to JPG
The best PR tools such as Coverage Book have really taken the pain out of collating media coverage for PR professionals, but their cleverest feature is how much data they can pull from online links. You still need to make the time to cut your print coverage manually and present it properly to the client. That’s where PDF to JPG comes in. If you use a media monitoring service, you’ll most likely get your coverage delivered in PDFs. This handy free tool enables you to quickly convert that to a JPG, then you can quickly edit it and present it to the client exactly as it looks on the page.
We do the research, so you don’t have to!
Part of the reason for researching the best content tools for PR and social media is to ensure we keep up with the changing demands of our job. Put simply, we do it so our clients don’t have to! Using R&Co for your PR and social media isn’t just about the headline results, it’s about us covering every base to ensure our clients’ content is optimised every time.
Our results speak for themselves. Take a look at our case studies to find out more about our PR and social media campaigns or learn more about our services.
