If the idea of technology invading the practice of PR freaks you out a little, perhaps all you need is a different perspective. Yes, technology can be daunting, but it can also make your life a lot easier, help you achieve better results and demonstrate the value of your work.

These three tools can do just that:

1. A digital newsroom

There are many vendors out there that will provide this service, but you can also work with your webmaster or IT department and build one in WordPress or your Content Management System.  A newsroom allows you to house your PR content in one place and prepare complete story ideas for the media, making their job so much easier. You can gather all the elements – test, images and video –  a reporter would need to cover the story right in your newsroom.  Then you send them just one link to that content with your pitch.

2. A social media management dashboard

Again, there are many available to pick from. Most are adequate, but there are few that are really excellent.  My choice is Sendible – it has everything you could possibly need:

• Monitoring online conversations for brand mentions and industry keywords
• Engagement – shows who is responding to your social content. You can reply right from the dashboard or assign the action to another team member,
• Create content. Sendible is connected to Canva so you can quickly and easily create high quality visual content.
• Identify influenc/meritusers
• Email lists of reporters and influencers
• Content suggestions for posting to your social accounts
• Schedule posts and fine-tune each post for each platform
• Reporting and analytics

3. Google Analytics

The biggest advantage digital tools give us is the ability to track and analyze our work and show value from our results.  This is the number one skill CMOS are looking for in 2018.

The custom PR Measurement Dashboard in Google Analytics was created specifically to help PR practitioners get started with analytics and tracking the results of their work.  It’s a free download in the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

If you’re new to Google Analytics and have no idea where to start, talk to your webmaster or IT fellas and get them to download this dashboard and show you how to access it. You should be able to track what happens with the content in your blog and newsroom.  You want to be able to show how many people visit the content, which content is getting more traffic, where they came from and what they do once they’re on the site.

This post was originally published on Proactive Report.