By Rachel Peck

As we approach the holiday season, we often reflect on what we’re thankful for. We’re all looking forward to the coming days of extra time with family, holiday food and the hustle of the season. Here at Eclipse Media Group, we’re also reflecting on a few public relations and marketing tools we’re thankful for this year. From project management and reporting programs, to social media management software, we’re grateful for the daily assistance of these four tools.

Project & Time Management: Wrike
For those public relations and marketing professionals who like to work from a to-do list, project management tools couldn’t be more of a must-have. Sometimes an old fashioned written task list can bring a sense of achievement, but if you’re looking to upgrade, Wrike is a great option. For agencies with multiple clients, Wrike enables them to keep track of each client and their projects separately. As Wrike users, we are also able to create calendars for project due dates, content publication timelines, and task due dates on multi-month projects- which helps us more effectively communicate deliverables to clients. Additionally, Wrike enables the Eclipse team to stay on top of projects, while working remotely – another perk we’re thankful for.

Reporting: CoverageBook
One of our favorite reporting tools is CoverageBook. What did we do before the days of this handy application? Did we really spend hours clipping coverage for clients? Yes, we did. As a boutique agency with multiple clients of all sizes, we’re always looking for ways to maximize our efforts and eliminate time consuming activities. If you still subscribe to the ‘do it yourself’ notion of manually gathering coverage, consider an investment in CoverageBook. Like us, you’ll save hours in time and stress.

The program is simple to use. All we are responsible for is gathering coverage links, inputting them and within minutes, CoverageBook will pull screenshots of each item of coverage. It even tells us how much time we’ve saved – an average of four hours per client book. In addition to coverage, this application also shows us page views, social media shares and other useful statistics – a feature we love. 

Visual Programs: Adobe Spark & Reshot
Visuals are an important staple to any PR and marketing team. Without them, our content would be lacking crucial messaging. However, for a small agency, having an on-staff graphic designer isn’t necessarily possible – that’s where Adobe Spark helps. Thankfully, this handy tool enables us to create basic infographics, images with text overlay and other simple visuals to convey messages for our own channels, and our clients.

Additionally, finding useful images, that aren’t already overused, can be a struggle. A great resource is Reshot. Not only are their images free to use, with no attribution needed, but they feature a wide variety of stock images that are less “staged” than ones you pay for. Between these two tools, we never find ourselves hunting for images at the last minute.

Social Media Management: Hootsuite
It’s 9 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day and you’re getting ready for your annual turkey 5K, but you have to post social media content for several clients. What do you do? Thanks to Hootsuite, we’ll never find ourselves in that situation. Perfect for the public relations and marketing professional who’s managing multiple accounts, Hootsuite gives us the ability to schedule posts and manage social channels – enabling us to draft content in advance and schedule it. This leaves us with plenty of time to enjoy our turkey dinner (or 5k) without worrying about client social media. 

In a fast-paced industry where time is precious, we can never have too much help. As we head into the busy holiday season, these tools assist us in meeting deadlines, creating and distributing content and reporting deliverables to clients – while finding plenty of time to enjoy the season.