Each business owner is pleased when their brand is known to people and known for its quality and reliability. In most cases you have to apply some PR efforts to showcase your brand to more future happy customers. However, to run a successful and sophisticated PR campaign, you need a comprehensive set of tools. I’ve compiled a nice list of PR tools that cover different parts of marketing activities. Bonus: you can try all of them for free.

1. Grow brand awareness

It is much handier to build your brand awareness on the basis of your competitors’ strategies and audience’s interests with a social media monitoring tool Awario.

The tool provides the real-time social insight to every corner of the Web by collecting mentions for your keywords and categorizing them according to their degree of impact.

It is possible to set up an alert for any competitor, campaign, or hashtag to gather data on all the insights: best-suited content + mentions, shares, and discussions from the major social platforms and the Web. This way you can see what efforts of your competitors were truly successful and what were in total vain.

Free version: 14-day free trial of the Starter plan, no credit card details required.

SEO SpyGlass is a great tool to make sure that your list of backlinks is comprehensive enough. It is possible due to integrated Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The tool also keeps your clear in the eyes of Google’s Penguin algorithm by identifying spammy and harmful links and neutralizing them with the help of the built-in disavow file generator.

As the software allows you to find the links to any website, you can take a look at the list of your competitors’ backlinks. Compare with your own stats, check link intersection, and apply the most successful strategies for link building for your website.

Free version: Free license with no time limitations, with limited capacities, no credit card details required.

3. Save time with efficient media sourcing

If you do not have time and resources to search for story leads, stay abreast of upcoming trends, and make your industry-related contributions, HARO (Help a Reporter Out) will bring reporters right to you.

It is a free email service that, once you are subscribed, will send you expertise-related story leads which are descriptive and clearly stating the type of a source the reporter is looking for (expert, personal experience, location, etc.) In case you are interested, you can quickly contact a reporter/writer and make a good case for your source to be chosen.

HARO subscribers get three emails a day, five days a week, filled with queries from reporters from top news outlets like Forbes, CNN, ABC, Entrepreneur, INC, and many more. Emails are organized by categories like Biotech and Healthcare, Business and Finance, Education, Entertainment and Media, General, High Tech, Travel, etc.

Free version: Free email subscription.

4. Connect with professionals from your industry

Have you ever searched through a couple of Google pages to find an email of a person you need to contact by work? Did this process seem a bit tedious to you? There is just the tool to do this kind of search graceful and speedy.

Hunter lets you find legit email addresses in a second and connect with people that matter for your business. The Domain Search lists all the people working in a company with their name and email address found on the web. In many cases it is possible to see people’s titles and telephone numbers.

The tool also has a nice Chrome extension. You can click the button and pull up all the emails from the webpage you are on. After that you can click on any of those emails, and they will be checked for their validity.

Free version: Free version with the limit of 100 domains per month.

5. Find the most engaging content and the most important influencers

BuzzSumo is one of the most suitable tools for researching and analyzing actively shared content on a particular topic and seeing engagement values across the major social networks.

On top of this, the tool lets you explore backlinks to any website. This will allow you to understand what types of content people care about to link to in their posts.

For greater efficiency you can set up the alerts for keywords, brand names, links, author names, or domains and do the analysis on the basis of the competitors’ content.

Free version: 14-day free trial available, no credit card details required.

6. Build engaging landing pages

In case you have a problem getting people to take action on your landing page, Unbounce will help you out.

This tool will help you to build and test custom high-converting landing pages, plus it allows integration with Email, Marketing Automation, Analytics, or CRM tools. It is equally suitable for both newbies and pros, you just drag-and-drop and make your landing pages look awesome.

You can further follow the performance stats of your pages (that you can create as many as you want) on your Unbounce dashboard and make changes if necessary. Plus, you can use available quality templates and run A/B testing with two designs to see which one converts better.

Free version: Free demo account, no credit card details required. 30-day free trial, credit card details required.

7. Orchestrate your media campaign

It would be great to know in advance the way your media campaign is going to perform. Queue is the tool that can let you sneak peek at the possible performance metrics.

This platform helps digital agencies, brands, and influencers to manage as well as to grow their leads, customers, fans, and users. The tool uses dashboards to set up campaigns and track their performance. Dashboards provide a real-time view of activity metrics by using interactive graphs and charts. It is perfect for events, crowdfunding, presales, apps, etc.

Queue builds an early buzz around an event by means of a virtual queuing system. Users can move up in the queue and earn bonus points by engaging with others in the audience. It is also possible to customize reward programs in the tool.

Free version: 14-day free trial, credit card details required.

8. Stay organized

In case you lack smart and visual tools for self-organization and for keeping your team alert and alive, Trello is a brilliant way out.

Trello is one of the most recognizable apps for project management. In your working dashboard you can create boards – for example, for projects; and then cards inside the boards – for example, for tasks. The cards contain fully customized lists which can be used to track the progress of a project or to simply categorize things. You can further on invite members to your boards, add attachments, set due dates, and so on.

It is a very handy tool for self-organization, but it also shines when it comes to managing a team, especially when it is geographically dispersed. Trello enables members to discuss a project or a task in real-time. You can set up alerts, and whenever anything changes – all the members of the particular board will receive notifications.

Free version: Free with limited capacities.

I hope at least some of these tools will turn out really useful to push your PR campaign, save you heaps of time, and give you new bright ideas for engaging your customers. You do not need to have a huge business to act big – small steps may turn everything around.