Mastering PR Clipping: Importance, Benefits, Strategies, and Tools

What is press clipping?

Today, an online presence is necessary for any business. As much as the online world is helpful for your brand, negative reviews, unfair assumptions, fake information, and many other factors can all negatively affect your business reputation.

PR clipping, also known as press clipping, is an essential component of any media monitoring service that analyzes how effective public relations activities are.

You can use PR clipping to find out how many times your business was mentioned in online media, broadcasts, or print. Also, you can receive these clippings in real-time and share them.

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about PR clipping, its importance, benefits, strategies, and tools for effective media monitoring.

Reasons why PR clipping is important

PR clipping is important for your marketing campaigns and public relations strategy. Press clipping services allow you to evaluate your efforts, and measure your results to determine how effective your strategies are.

It is also used for tracking an organization’s online presence, visibility, and reputation across both online and traditional media platforms. However, let’s dive deeper to learn why PR clipping is important for your business.

Helps you stay informed

PR clipping helps you gather data from different sources and presents it to you all in one place. With press clipping, you can keep track of all your brand mentions in real-time and react when needed.

Allows you to learn how your customers perceive your brand

PR clipping lets you know what customers are saying about your brand and this allows you to learn more about what the customers’ needs and thoughts are regarding your business. When you know what the problem is, it’s always easier to solve it.

Effective brand reputation management

Tracking PR clippings within your public relations efforts allows you to respond to discussions, topics, or reviews. It shows that you are concerned about addressing customers’ concerns and this helps build trust and loyalty.

Helps you in future decisions

PR clipping allows you to collect data from across the internet, allowing you to make much better future decisions based on the insights you gathered.

Promotes improvement

Analyzing PR clippings helps spot any room for improvement and allows you to modify your communication strategies.

Main benefits of PR clippings

Analyzing each press clipping and making changes to your PR strategy can all be done with the help of media monitoring services.

We mentioned the importance of PR clippings, now, it’s time to look at the benefits it offers.

Allows you to instantly identify opportunities and leverage content creation

Have you ever had a hard time trying to find new opportunities in the media? PR clippings help you find new trends and emerging talks in different channels. This way, you are finding new opportunities that will help you start discussions or initiate discussions that align with your brand’s goals.

When collecting insights for your PR clippings, you can use this data to leverage content creation in the following ways:

• Highlighting positive mentions: Using positive media mentions in your marketing materials, social media posts, and newsletters to engage further with your audience and build up your credibility.
• Address all negative feedback: Create content that responds to negative feedback that comes from the media, showing how committed you are to improvement.
• Leverage trends: Identify and create content based on emerging trends and topics highlighted in your PR clippings so you can stand out from competitors. To effectively capture attention, you can quickly convert your insights into dynamic video content using text-to-video tools. This approach not only aligns with current trends favoring video consumption but also ensures your message is more memorable and engaging for your audience.

54.5% of businesses claimed that they are thinking about spending more on their content creation marketing this year compared to last year so leveraging content creation plays a highly important role.

Campaign performance management

A good media monitoring tool helps you assess your campaign performance by analyzing PR clipping results and other relevant metrics.. Data-driven insights are great in providing you with results and showing you if you need to make any changes to your strategy or not.

Press clipping tools will show you a metrics page that grants you access to main performance indicators like:

• Online piece of coverage
• The total number of estimated views
• Average sentiment
• Average domain authority
• The number of tweets by media outlets

Campaign performance management provides you with timely and accurate updates on campaign performance.

Responding in real-time

The ability to respond in real-time is what helps make your business successful. PR clipping services allow specialists to systematically gather and analyze mentions across different sources.

Regardless if you want to be ahead of your competitors, or up to date with your mentions, collecting PR clippings is an excellent way to do so. Responding in real-time based on your PR clippings is an excellent way to increase brand awareness.

Compliance audit software

Alongside PR clippings, it’s always important to make sure that you are following data compliance requirements. Understanding the difference between data privacy regulators might sometimes be challenging, especially for companies that are working globally.

The whole goal is to make sure that your media monitoring activities are complying with legal and regulatory requirements. This includes intellectual property rights, industry-specific compliance standards, and managing data privacy.

Compliance audit software can help you comply with regulatory requirements and key features include:

• Data privacy management
• Intellectual property management
• Risk management
• Regulatory compliance

With the help of compliance audit software, online businesses can easily manage regulatory and legal risks that are associated with media coverage analysis and make sure that their PR strategies follow all compliance standards.

The best ways to effectively make PR clippings

It’s almost impossible to do PR clipping manually since you need to browse through Google results and check the results one by one. It’s a very difficult and time-consuming process, and not worth it since there are always new mentions that will appear.

Media clipping tools help solve this problem but let’s dive deeper into learning more about how they can do so.

Find a PR clipping tool

Your very first step should be to find a monitoring tool that is worth investing your money and time into. The tool shouldn’t be too complex to use, and easy to master.

If you want to have a better idea of what your tool should consist of, here’s what you need to know:

• Free trial availability: It’s always a good idea to test tools before investing in them.
• Real-time notifications: Real-time notifications always inform you of when something happens even when someone is negatively mentioning your brand so you can take action instantly.
• Ready-made reports: Good monitoring tools need to offer ready-made reports that you can instantly generate and provide relevant data.
• Sentiment detection: It’s really helpful when you have tools that have a feature that can automatically detect the sentiment of mentions. You can use this feature to find out if mentions are either positive, negative, or neutral.

Each PR clipping tool is different, but the important part is that when choosing which monitoring tool you’ll use, you need to make sure that it has the basic features mentioned.

For instance, Mention is a media monitoring tool that possesses all of these features and is a great option to consider. Google Alerts is an interesting option if you don’t have any budget to invest, although is it limited.

Set up your first keyword

After you’re done choosing the monitoring tool that is right for you, it’s now time to set up your first keyword, or the list of keywords that you’ll be using. Keywords are separated into primary, secondary, and excluded. Let’s take a look at the example below offered by Mention’s media monitoring tool.

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You can clearly see here that ‘’Samsung’’ is used as a primary keyword. Every phrase or text here has to appear in the publication for Mention to fetch the post in your feed, or it’ll be ignored.

Right after, we have secondary keywords, which you see ‘’tablet’’ and ‘’watch’’ are used. These keywords allow you to monitor multiple topics in your search query. In order for Mention to fetch a publication, it needs to find at least one of these phrases from secondary keywords to fetch a publication.

Last, you have the excluded keywords. In the example above, they are ‘’Fridge’’ and ‘’TV’’. Mention will exclude all posts that use these keywords.

You can also add negative keywords to filter out the wrong context. Mention allows you to use negative keywords to block out any posts mentioning another user.

Track your results

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After you are all set with your keywords, you are now going to use your media monitoring tool to collect data. The only thing left from your side is to regularly visit the tool and browse the results. You can filter the results by location, sentiment, author, language, and based on the influence score.

Also, you can select the sources that you want to monitor as well. This includes platforms like Instagram, Reddit, forums, Facebook, and all other platforms that your monitoring tool allows you to monitor.

Configure an alert

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Media monitoring tools alert you with real-time notifications as soon as something occurs. This is helpful since you can react instantly. The way notifications will be received will depend on how you choose to receive them.

This can either be through email, Slack, or any other mobile app available. Moreover, you can create custom alerts where you have all the details you need.

Create your report

Now, we have come to the last step where it’s time to create your report. While some businesses might not consider it mandatory, creating reports is going to help you better understand your campaign performance and media presence.

All the data will be presented with graphs, which will help you make a much more informed decision and make it easier to share insights with stakeholders.

Reports can either be basic or advanced, or even offer you the option to generate a competitive analysis. They include important metrics like sentiment analysis, key influencers, your reach, and the number of mentions. If you are using a tool like Mention, it will automate the reports for you. Here’s an example screenshot below:

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Frequently asked questions

While we answered some of the most important questions concerning PR clipping, it’s now time to answer some other important questions people also asked.

How is PR clipping structured?

PR clipping can be structured in a number of ways depending on the type of approach you give it, either to give relevance to a specific topic concerning your brand, an event duration, the media coverage it has been getting, or you can even focus on the geographical location and what kind of impact it generated.

How do you choose a good media monitoring tool?

Choosing the right media monitoring tool involves considering multiple key aspects that will help you get the most out of your solution.

Here’s what you need to look at when choosing which tool is the right choice for you:

• Coverage: Your media monitoring tool must cover a wide range of sources. This includes social media platforms, websites, blogs, and more. Believe it or not, some tools offer cover for TV channels, radio, and broadcast media across different regions.
• Features: Such a tool should offer real-time tracking that helps you stay updated on relevant mentions while they occur. Other important features include sentiment analysis, multi-channel integration, historical data access, and advanced query building.
• User-friendliness: The tool you choose should be easy to set up and navigate through. Well-designed dashboards make it easy for you to present data with charts and graphs that help in enhancing the user experience.
• Cost: Costs should be evaluated based on the support, features, and coverage that is offered by the media monitoring tool.

Always look at your options and compare media monitoring tools based on the key components we mentioned.

Who is PR clipping important for?

PR clipping is important for all public relations specialists who are tasked with social listening. Regardless if you are an agency, an in-house team, or even a freelancer, press clippings help you modify your strategy on how you communicate with your audience.

Effective media monitoring adds value to your brand

Media tracking tools add value to your brand by helping you stay updated about mentions regarding your competitors, brand, and even industries across different media sources.

Businesses can use press clipping services to quickly understand their audience on a deeper level and quickly respond to customer feedback. Monitoring helps in reducing noise by creating detailed reports and setting up alerts. This allows brands to modify their strategies and operations.

If you are ready to keep your conversations well-organized, track your media sources, and manage the noises, get started today with an ideal media monitoring tool like Mention.