PR Automation vs PR Tasks: How Much Time and Effort Can You Save?

PR professionals often face Monday blues. Despite being excited about new projects, the sight of piles of PR tasks can quickly dampen enthusiasm. This is where PR automation comes in. Automation is taking over every industry and influencing public relations as well.

However, undoubtedly, the added complexity in how information spreads has not made communications teams any less short of time, while AI-powered technologies can help PR professionals work more intelligently.

Understanding PR Tasks

The automation market is growing more and more, with an annual growth of 11.4%, reaching 83.7 billion euros in market value in the year 2023, and is expected to reach 93.1 billion euros at the end of 2024. The world is in a hurry, and PR professionals can only carry out some of the activities crucial for PR campaigns success. The challenge is that these activities take many hours and require manual human resources. However, all these activities can be automated to streamline the workflow. To understand the impact of automation entirely, businesses need to know about the daily activities of PR and the challenges that occur when trying to manage them manually.

Standard PR Activities

Public relations involves creativity, imagination, planning, and much thought. The average PR does this daily: Writing and Distributing Press Releases.

Writing an appealing press release is an integral component of PR. It involves not only the writing press release, but it also involves distribution to the media list. The distribution is a comprehensive process requiring detailed concentration to ensure the press release reaches the right people at the right time.

Creation and Management of Media List

An updated media list must be maintained for effective outreach. This includes researching and identifying critical journalists, bloggers, and influencers within the business’s niche. This is a continuous process of updating the contact details and categorizing lists to ensure the right message goes to the right audience.

Track Media Coverage

Media monitoring is indispensable to understanding PR campaigns’ faring on the field. This involves observing different media channels, including prints, broadcasts, and online, among other forms, mentioning a client or the brand name. This requires an activity that needs constant watch and an ability to sift through volumes of information in determining mentions.

Challenges of Manual PR Tasks

While the tasks mentioned above are of utmost importance in the success of a PR distribution, there are considerable challenges in managing them manually.

Time-sensitive Nature of outreach

One of the most significant difficulties with manual PR tasks is how time-consuming they are. Researching media contacts, constructing personalized pitches, and following up with journalists takes hours if not days. The nature of these activities can easily make a PR agency professional exhausted, thereby losing focus on the strategic aspects of their work.

Human Errors in Data Entry and Tracking

Manual processes are inherently prone to human error whether incorrect data is entered into a media list or one critical media mention is overlooked while monitoring; these types of mistakes can have serious repercussions—inaccuracies in data management result in missed opportunities, impaired relationships with journalists, and flawed reporting.

Tedious Collection and Analysis

PR professionals’ biggest headache is data collection by hand and then analyzing it, especially when trying to measure results. When automation is lacking, compiling and analyzing the data from various sources becomes time-consuming; reports may be incomplete or contain untruths. This causes problems in showing the return on investment and making a strategy based on facts.

What is PR Automation?

In this rapidly changing environment, public relations demand efficiency; thus, automation tools and technologies have been adopted. PR automation changes the way professionals handle and execute work on a vast scale. It enables professionals to focus on more strategic efforts. 

At the same time, it has to free up the least time and effort for the least strategic, repetitive tasks where manual involvement is called for. PR Automation is essential for any organization interested in bringing efficiency to PR work and making it most effective.

PR automation involves using diverse software tools and technologies that seek to make different tasks easier to carry out in public relations. All these software tools were designed with the aim of automating all procedural recurrence in both the outreach of media and the management of social media. These are, therefore, areas where PR teams can save time to avoid human error and ensure consistency and accuracy.

Types of PR Tasks That Can Be Automated

The Digital Media market in the United States is projected to grow by 8.08% (2024-2027) resulting in a market volume of US$250.10bn in 2027. PR automation can automate even the simplest creative jobs and many of the most common automated PR lead tasks. 

Media list building and outreach.

Traditionally, developing a media list entailed searching for contact information of journalists, bloggers, and influencers. Very often, that was a cumbersome, time-consuming process. PR automation tools make it easier with vast media databases constantly updated with contacts and media preferences.

Social Media Scheduling and Management

Even though managing social media accounts has now become part and parcel of PR in this modern era, it is also considered to be one of the most time-consuming tasks. PR automation allows the professional to schedule social media posts weeks or months in advance to ensure a continued online presence without constant manual updates.

Reporting and Analytics

Upon completing the campaign, a report, and analysis are needed to inform further PR strategy execution. PR automation tools can power reports from sources such as media coverage performance in social media and audience engagement.

PR Automation vs. Manual PR Tasks

How Press Connect Helps in PR Automation

Designed to eliminate all the disadvantages manual PR comes with, Press Connect offers an innovative automation platform for public relations practitioners working within streamlined systems. Using press release distribution and also automated media list-building capabilities, in a holistic, ideally streamlined manner, means the time and effort required to create an effective PR campaign are minimized.

This further extends to accuracy with minimal human errors and consistency in all communications. Also, its efficient reporting and analytics feature yields invaluable insights towards data-informed decisions by supporting PR teams to drive ROI and sharpen their strategy. Press Connect allows the PR professional to spend more time on creative and strategic work while delivering better results and overall value.