Coveragebook is an online PR solution that automates the compilation of PR coverage books. Users input the url links of their online PR coverage, and Coveragebook pulls in screenshots, as well as website visits, social shares & Domain Authority from sources like SimilarWeb & Moz. Users can customize each coverage book by choosing to show/hide metrics, apply high impact backgrounds, add their own commentary, and then share online or print. Coveragebooks also stores all past…
Coveragebook is great for any organization that needs to regularly track client media coverage or even just trending news stories to send to clients in a professional looking report. It is ideal for small, medium, and large PR and marketing firms. For firms or companies more focused on internal communications, this would not be a regularly used tool. For those focused on external communications, it's a must-have tool that helps save time and makes it easier for people at every level of an organization to create branded coverage reports that are easy to download or link to and share with clients
PR Newswire is well suited for organizations with a significant public relations budget that want to quickly disseminate a news release over the wire to a specific targeted group of recipients. It's probably not a suitable solution for smaller companies or "boutique" public relations agency unless the distribution cost is to be directly passed on to the client because it is quite expensive.
I think PR Newswire's reach is very good. It's a well-known service that's been around a long time and has a solid reputation. You can trust it.
I think PR Newswire helps increase the visibility of news. So although I would also recommend pitching the news, using a wire service, particularly when there's major news to announce, can help in spreading the word.
It's pretty easy to use. You may need someone to walk you through it at first, but you can save distributions and so forth so that it gets easier over time.
More ability to customize cover (title page) of report
Provide total (collective) backlinks for all pieces of coverage as a metric (currently you can only do one at a time)
Allow custom metrics for the offline coverage (currently, you can only add add'l info in the comments section so it looks like a quote vs. numerous metrics on the slides for online clippings)
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Coveragebook is incredibly easy to use--so easy to use that we've never run into any issues that required additional support from the Coveragebook team. In the event that there is an issue, they have a detailed help section on the website with answers to FAQs to assist professionals at every step of the process.
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
I didn't look too closely at the other services above because it was quickly apparent that they do different things than Coveragebook. We were looking for a reporting and valuation tool but didn't need help creating or distributing releases or finding client mentions. (Our PR programs are very targeted towards relevant trade press; we aren't looking for thousands of mentions in any/all media outlets.) Coveragebook accomplishes all the tasks we required at a reasonable price.
PR Newswire is considered one of the two gold standard newswire services because of its wide reach and high quality reporting. Pricing is almost identical to its biggest competitor, Business Wire, so it winds up being a matter of preference and ease more than anything. We actually made the decision to move our business away from PR Newswire due to their growing desire to have editorial oversight over the news we're distributing on behalf of clients.
The ROI is mostly on time. I used to spend hours upon hours designing and inputting information for reports. Now, Coveragebook does all of the hard work for me.
ROI is difficult to calculate in my company's specific industry, but we do know our visibility has increased when we send out a release via PR Newswire.
We send out a relatively small number of press releases a year, so we know when we send out a report if our target audience is receiving it.
With Google and other search engines being the primary way people research information about company's today, we know that when we do a press release via PR Newswire that release will "live" indefinitely on the web, so we know our press release will go much further than the initial distribution.
