PR professionals need to be everywhere all at once, and the best AI tools for PR let them do just that.
Maintaining a strong public image takes a lot of work. Public relations experts need to capitalize on every opportunity to make their case. Knowing where these opportunities are at all times can help PR pros send the right messages at the right times.
Let’s explore the role of AI in PR and the best AI tools for PR that can help you spread the word.
Contents:
Why Al Tools are Essential for PR Professionals
Choosing the Right Al Tools for Your PR Needs
7 Best Al Tools for PR
Getting More from PR with Meltwater
Why Al Tools are Essential for PR Professionals
Public relations has many moving parts, from crafting narratives to analyzing data to engaging with audiences. AI can play a role in all of these.
For instance, machine learning algorithms can help PRs sift through large amounts of data quickly. Emerging trends and changes in sentiment are often buried in data, so having a real-time way to find these insights can help PRs stay proactive rather than reactive.
AI-driven analytics can also offer deeper insights into how audiences think and act. Technology is bringing us closer to laser-precision messaging. Companies need straightforward ways to tell people what they need to hear at key times, making their PR efforts more effective.
The push for personalization has never been greater, and AI is leading the charge.
When you create relevant messages that your audience cares about, you stand to build stronger connections and trust — two cornerstones of an effective PR strategy. With resources increasingly tight and no shortage of competition, AI tools for public relations can provide a strategic advantage when used correctly.
TIP: Download our Data-Driven PR Playbook to learn more about AI tools and strategies to help your PR team work smarter.
Choosing the Right Al Tools for Your PR Needs
When adding the best AI for PR, your priorities should be to choose tools that add value and make your work easier. With this in mind, let’s dig into a few of the top criteria to go by.
Ease of use
You want something that’s intuitive and easy for the whole team to learn quickly. A tool that’s clunky or overly complicated will slow things down instead of speeding them up. Look for demos or free trials so you can take your tools for a test drive.
Budget
Cost isn’t everything, but it is something. There’s a wide range of pricing for AI tools for PR, each with varying features and levels of service. Align cost with features to find your sweet spot.
Customization options
Your AI tools for PR should be able to adapt to your goals and generate custom reports on data you care about. Make sure your AI tools can capture your preferred PR statistics, such as audience sentiment, share of voice, engagement rates, and audience insights.
Integration with other public relations tools
Tools for PR work better together. An AI tool that works with existing tools can save time, simplify workflows, and help you run a better PR campaign.
Scalability
As your brand grows, your PR needs might change. Make sure the AI tool can scale with you. This means handling more complex campaigns, larger datasets, or more users as you expand.
Customer training and support
Good customer support can help you get the most from your investment. Learn more about the support and training that’s available, including how to access it (e.g., live phone support, email, chat). Seek feedback from other customers about their experiences, if possible.
7 Best Al Tools for PR
The best AI tools for PR are subjective, based on your needs and how you prefer to work. This shortlist of tools for PR can give you a jumping-off point as you explore new ways to add AI to your public relations strategy.
1. Meltwater
Meltwater gives you an all-in-one AI-driven PR platform. It caters to all aspects of the PR machine, from tracking brand awareness to developing a PR strategy based on sentiment, share of voice, and other data.
Our media relations suite lets you be everywhere your audience is, online and offline. Users can access the largest media database of podcasts, publications, reporters, bloggers, and other contacts to help you get the word out.
Social listening lets you be part of more conversations online, discover trending topics before they blow up, find relevant hashtags, and even identify potential influencer partners.
However, none of this data matters if you can’t make quick sense of it. That’s where AI shines brightest, boiling down insights into easy-to-read, easy-to-understand statements. It analyzes the data in human terms, so even if you’re not a data analyst, you’ll know what the data says, why it matters, and what to do next.
Use your PR measurement insights to improve your strategy, compare your performance to competitors, and prove the value of your PR efforts, all from a single platform.
2. Otter.ai
Otter.ai is an AI-powered transcription service that can quickly turn any recording into a transcript. PRs can use Otter.ai to transcribe webinars, Zoom meetings, executive calls, and recordings of press conferences or interviews into written text.
This process makes it easier to repurpose your content, such as turning a recording into a blog post or press release. Transcripts also make your content more accessible, helping you reach people who prefer to read vs. audio or video content.
Save time during the content development stage so you can publish more content faster and with greater accuracy.
3. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the most accessible and widely used AI tools for PR. Developed by OpenAI, this language model generates human-like text in seconds based on simple user prompts.
PR use cases include:
- Writing first drafts of blog posts and press releases
- Creating social media posts
- Drafting appropriate responses in specific crises
- Rewriting content to appeal to specific demographics or audiences
- Offering ways to improve first drafts
ChatGPT offers flexibility in how you use it. For example, you can upload documents or files and ask ChatGPT to draft content, summarize information, or ask questions about data. You can also create your own knowledge bases for your PR team using ChatGPT by uploading your own resources.
And if you don’t mind springing for the paid version, you can access tools like DALL-E to create your own images.
TIP: Download our Data-Driven PR Toolkit for templates and other resources to drive productivity, including ChatGPT prompts specifically for PR pros.
4. Clara
Public relations professionals spend much of their time in meetings and interviews and can benefit from easy ways to schedule these sessions. Clara comes in handy by acting as an AI assistant who does the heavy lifting for you.
Users can add Clara to an email, and Clara will take over scheduling meetings with participants. It taps into your calendar for your availability and adds the meeting to your calendar once it’s confirmed. You’ll always have an up-to-date meeting calendar without having to do the back-and-forth tennis match of meeting matchmaking yourself.
5. Grammarly
Drafting content is a big part of a PR’s day-to-day. Public relations teams need to be able to create copy that is free of spelling and grammar mistakes but also conveys the right tone and style.
Grammarly is a common tool that offers spell-checking and more. You can use the web-based version, where you can type or copy and paste your content and get instant feedback on your writing.
Or, use the Grammarly extension to get help while using other programs. Install it once and let it guide your content in Google Docs, emails, and other programs you use. Its free version highlights spelling and grammatical mistakes and may offer other suggestions for improvement (although these are limited with the free version).
Upgrade to the paid version to understand your overall tone of voice and get suggestions for clarity, correctness, and more.
6. Perplexity.ai
If you want to tap into the things other people are talking about, Perplexity.ai gives you a user-friendly and direct way to do it. Its interface looks similar to ChatGPT and uses natural language inputs, so there’s not much of a learning curve. Just tell Perplexity.ai what you’d like to know.
For example, we asked it to find the top trends in Christmas decor for 2024. Here’s what it gave us:
You’ll notice it offers multiple sources for further review, a direct answer that‘s to the point, a longer answer that’s more in-depth, and even related questions at the bottom. You can ask follow-up questions to refine your answers and learn more about your selected topic.
It’s free to use, but there’s also a paid version that gives you access to better models, more Pro questions, and the ability to upload files.
7. Claude
For content summaries, Anthropic’s Claude AI can make light work of in-depth requests. It can handle up to 500 pages at once. Just upload your files, then ask Claude questions about the data or have it summarize your content.
This is the definition of working smarter, not harder. It would take a whole PR team hours to pore through 500 documents at a time. Use Claude to get summaries of information, then decide where you need to dig in deeper. It can save hours of time, plus it reduces fatigue in dealing with all those documents one by one.
Getting More from PR with Meltwater
Meltwater offers a complete PR solution complete with media contacts, social media automation, social listening, sentiment analysis, and AI-powered insights. Always know where your brand stands, and use data to drive your strategy forward.
Our suite makes it easy to equate actions to results. We analyze billions of data points on your behalf to help you find the right topics and messages and tailor them to your audiences. Get alerts when a topic you’re following shifts, discover potential crises before they boil over, and know your audience better than the competition.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below!
