PR Clipping: Track PR Results & Mentions (2022 Guide)

12 min readSep 7, 2022

How do you know if your marketing campaigns are working? One of the most effective ways of measuring your pr efforts is through the old-fashioned work of press clipping services.

Marketing rules have always mandated your keeping track of mentions of your brand on print, media channels, or online publications. The analysis of these print, broadcast media and online mentions is equally important for your brand’s progress evaluation.

In this guide we’re going to discuss the following:

What’s PR clipping
Why is PR clipping important
Who can use PR clipping?

Moreover, we’re going to talk about how to leverage press clipping services, as well as answer some frequently asked questions.

Want to find out more? Let’s start!

What is PR Clipping?

PR clipping is essentially about what media monitoring services do nowadays.

As the name suggests, it is a compilation of clippings of media mentions about a particular brand.

Through this method, marketers measure the number of times a brand has been mentioned in either print, broadcast, or online media.

Above all, one can get these media clippings in real-time and share them.

To give you a bit of context, PR clipping is not a new concept. It has been around since the 1850s when it was used through print media and known as press clipping. Since then, it has changed its form with different stages of technology development.

With the advent of radio and television in the 20th century, press clipping services expanded their work to broadcast monitoring. It wasn’t until the 90s when press clipping became digital media monitoring due to the explosion of the Internet. Nowadays, it’s all about social media monitoring, where pr campaigns take the shape of Instagram hashtags or TikTok videos.

Last but not least, PR clippings in online media evaluate the online presence of a brand.

It includes online editions of social media platforms, e-newspaper articles, news media, email newsletters, articles, and online media coverage. Obviously, other PR publishings, like specific topics on web pages, forums, search engines, and website blogs are still being tracked. In fact, today’s pr professionals employ more advanced features, like visual metrics, sentiment analysis, and notifications to top their analytics game.

6 Ways of Using PR Clipping Effectively

As many case studies show the purpose of all pr efforts, like tracking online sources and compiling press clippings, is clear: Improving your marketing strategy, media relations, and social ranking placements.

According to the client request section of the Holmes Report, 44% of clients ask for media clippings. That’s because PR clipping and essentially brand monitoring tools can benefit your business in several ways.

Here are some of them:

Way #1: Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing

The first reason why you should turn to press clipping services is to know your marketing performance’s worth.

PR clipping is a great strategic method to measure the performance of your PR activities or marketing efforts.

After a product launch or a campaign goes live, media attention’s quality defines your actions’ effectiveness.

These results impact your future complicated multichannel marketing decisions and strategies.

Way #2: Stay Up-to-Date

Another reason why media clipping is important is that you always need to know what people say about your brand.

The method of PR clipping collects data from all over the web and illustrates it to you in one place. As a result, you stay effortlessly updated about all the mentions of your brand.

If you discover something negative surfacing about your brand, you can take immediate actions to solve the issue.

It is necessary to do so since 45% of people step back from a business opportunity after discovering something negative in an online search.

Way #3: Understand the Consumer’s Perception

Audience intelligence is not something you can acquire easily by yourself.

By reading a PR clipping report, you get to know what people are saying about you. Consequently, you understand the perception of your brand in the mind of consumers.

Over time, the graphic illustration and the quality of your mentions in media outlets can help you derive a conclusion.

If their outlook is not how you want them to perceive your brand, just change your marketing campaigns’ design process.

Way #4: Efficiently Manage Your Brand Reputation

Undoubtedly, maintaining a positive brand image is just as hard as creating it in the first place.

In media conversation, speed is essential. One negative review or comment can go viral and damage your brand reputation.

In a global survey report on the reputation risk of Deloitte, 41% of companies reported the loss of brand value and revenue after a negative reputation event.

However, if you track PR clippings on a real-time basis, you can handle the situation.

Therefore, respond promptly to discussions, reviews, or queries. It not only depicts that you care about your customers but also builds trust and loyalty.

Way #5: Measure Brand Awareness

How do you know if your brand philosophy is clear and appreciated?

You can measure the reach of your paid media sources to measure brand awareness. However, it is earned media that measures the true statistics of brand awareness.

For example, unsponsored brand mentions dominate Instagram influencer marketing and website blogs. If people are talking about your brand organically, your brand is reaching them in all the right ways.

Way #6: Build a Press Page

Press pages don’t exist only to feature all your press releases and news.

You can enrich an offline or online professional press page by collecting the best of your PR clippings. This way, you can educate possible visitors about your brand but also show off your past efforts and successes.

Last but not least, it helps you gain credibility in the industry from fellow brands as well.

Sharing your core values and mission statement with potential customers is what makes a good brand community come to life.

Who Can Benefit from Using PR Clippings?

Displays of media clippings aren’t essential only to influencers and large corporate organizations. In contrast, you’ll be shocked to find out that every professional needs them in one way or another.

The following examples are some of the main customers of press clipping services.

1. Startups and SMEs

Small businesses have a restrained credit card budget to market their brands.

However, if you do not track the organic media coverage, how else will you leverage your marketing efforts?

These mentions are the ultimate credibility definers for young entrepreneurs.

2. Large Businesses

The monitoring needs of large businesses are no different than that of small ones.

PR clipping helps them to determine their performance and demonstrate the ROI of their marketing efforts.

This information plays a key role in the presence of stakeholders.

3. The Not-for-Profit Sector

NPOs need support for a cause that donors and volunteers provide.

Here, the goodwill of the groups plays an essential role. Exercising control over the PR clipping helps them to regulate their opinion in the public.

Learn what the benefits of Social Media Monitoring for Nonprofit Organizations are.

4. Government and Public Organizations

These organizations are funded by the public, so having the confidence of the public matters the most.

PR clippings help them determine the way they are portrayed in the media and in the eyes of the people.

5. Public Relation Agencies

To monitor the success of campaigns of their clients, PR agencies need to demonstrate unpaid positive media coverage.

It defines their efforts for the existing clients and contributes to an effective pitch for potential clients.

Learn how to track campaigns for marketing and PR agencies.

Now you know who benefits from press clipping, but do you know how can you leverage press clipping services?

4 Methods to Leverage PR Clipping Services

The goal of PR clipping is to make marketers realize how they can take effective future decisions by collecting data.

The improvement of each marketing department relies on an insightful reading of the clipping results.

Depending on your needs and budget, you can choose one of the following methods to apply to your marketing strategy.

Method #1: Use a media monitoring tool

Undoubtedly, using a media monitoring tool to track web and social mentions of your brand is the most effective method.

Whether you are a startup, an established business, or a PR agency, a monitoring tool can offer customized PR clippings. No matter the industry you’re in, you can monitor your brand all over the web through relevant keywords and hashtags.

A feature of most monitoring tools that comes in handy in pr clippings is the ability to create customizable reports. Social media reports are one of this generation’s most prevalent and effective self-evaluation methods. They allow your boss, clients, and marketing team to know how well your marketing strategies are doing. Social media reports are a great way of organizing and analyzing the value of your online media mentions.

An acclaimed web and brand tool, like Mentionlytics, can help you track a detailed collection of media clippings. Every mention it curates is first assessed and analyzed with advanced machine learning algorithms. It extracts valuable information in this process and then displays it while adding useful information and graphic visuals.

Mentionlytics is a dedicated PR clipping service that keeps you updated with your brand mentions. It does the work of the original PR clipping services effortlessly and in no time while empowering its insight factor.

How does PR clipping work with Mentionlytics?

First, set up your account on the website of Mentionlytics. Then, provide us with the name of your brand, product, or a related keyword. We ask for your business email to log in. Once you do so, we send you an activation link on your email account. Then, you’re able to begin your free trial.

Starting off, you’ll be setting your first monitoring project for the desired brand name, hashtag, or keyword. Straightaway, the tool’s software will showcase what everyone is saying about the key term on different cross-media platforms.

Mentionlytics will collect all the mentions of your brand in real-time in different formats. You will see the main data under the following groups:

Total Mentions
Social Reach — a metric that depends on the number of followers of a social profile that mentions your brand and the number of their posts
Social Engagement — the actual total number of likes, shares, comments, videos, and pins from every supported source
Sentiment Analysis — Positive, Negative, and Neutral

The detailed analytics will be shown under the previous metrics in the following boxes:

Overview Chart
Mention Trackers (includes your trackers, keywords, and/or social profiles) for Brand Monitoring, Competitors, and Marketing Leads
Social Media Mentions for every main social channel — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram
Pie Charts — A pie graph of your positive & negative results and one with the mentions per channel
Web Mentions and Other Mentions
World Map — a geo-location demographic division of mentioners
Top Social Media Mentioners
Top Website Mentioners
Keyword Cloud — Words related to your main keywords and/or social profiles.
Followers Growth Chart (Beta)

Experience the following benefits while using Mentionlytics:

Change the date of the mentions and make a custom range according to your needs.
Export the PR clipping mention report to an Excel or a PDF file.
Gather all the groups of mentions under a single dashboard.
Filter the results according to your specific needs in different channels, categories, sources, relevance levels, sentiments, countries, and languages.
Get the depiction of information in various formats — pie charts, graphs, maps, growth charts, etc. to facilitate easier understanding.

Once you set the desired keyword, the PR clipping tool keeps updating the mentions in real-time.

Method #2: Use Google Alerts

There’s a chance that the pricing of a social media monitoring tool seems too much for your capabilities. In this case, you can try using free media monitoring services, like Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a free tool to leverage PR clipping services and the closest free alternative to a monitoring tool. All you have to do is add keywords and filter the result type.

However, it doesn’t provide users with the same amount of possibilities as a monitoring tool. For instance, it offers limited keyword tracking. Also, Google Alerts isn’t a comprehensive tool. Therefore, it doesn’t include complex features or metrics.

To create your media clippings, head over to Google Alerts and follow the next steps.

Log in with the Google account you want to receive the alerts.
Choose the keywords and/or use case you would like to monitor. For example, you can use your brand name or a term from your market.
Specify which alerts you’d like to receive and how often you’d like to receive them.
Determine your sources. You can pick anything from news, blogs, video, and other types of content.
Select your desired language, the region you’d like to scan, and the number of results you’re expecting.

Method #3: Use Google News

Another way of performing press clipping is to do quick online research on Google News.

Print news and information services were the first sources of press clipping when they first appeared on the map. News exposure is still a big part of creating a compilation of pr and media clipping. Significantly, today’s news outlets are mostly online sources and Google News is one of them.

Perform a quick search of your brand name on Google and click on the news results. You will find the recent media coverage of your brand. That is to say, it’s most likely to show you results from big news websites from the last 2–3 weeks.

If you want to simulate the real-time analysis of a brand monitoring tool, set up Google News Alerts. It’s a free system that automatically searches the web, scientific journals, and newspaper articles. You just have to set up Google Alerts, as mentioned above, and select the News options, when asked about sources.

However, there’s a coverage problem with this solution, as it only picks up the mentions of Google’s listed sites. Hence, Google News won’t track mentions on other important websites.

Method #4: Use Google Organic Search

The final free alternative to pr clipping services and social media tracker tools is the use of Google Organic Search.

Through Google Search, you can search your brand name or related keywords and filter the timeframe. However, it’s not an automated, effortless, or fast process and you’ll have to do it yourself. Tracking your brand name/keywords and selecting the correct time will get you the results of your online media features.

In this method, you start simply by searching Google for your brand name/keywords. Subsequently, you have to edit the parameters. to display results from the last 7 days, 2 weeks, or 30 days. As a result, this will narrow down your results from your previous marketing campaign or evaluated time period.

However, it is not a ready-made solution, and hence, you need to look out for unfiltered content. To clarify, this strategy can lead you to a lot of weird results, scraped content, and PR syndication websites. In this case, you must perform this type of process very carefully.

While the last three methods are free, using a monitoring tool remains the most popular way of creating pr clippings.

Now Over to You

The PR clipping method has been a big part of the decision-making process of marketing strategies for years now. It’s safe to say it’s going to stay in the working life of a marketer or a PR agent.

All in all, what preceded was a gathering of the fundamentals you need to know about press clipping. Don’t forget to plan your next media clipping report and keep on improving!

Start your free trial at Mentionlytics today!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1. How do you calculate press clippings?

You can calculate press clippings by measuring the volume of press mentions of your brand over a given timeframe. The mentions can derive from print, broadcast, or online media. The easiest way to measure your mentions is by using an online brand monitoring tool.

Q2. What is a PR clipping service?

A PR clipping service is a professional service that collects mentions of a brand or company and creates reports. Nowadays, the term PR clipping service is interconnected with the term web and media monitoring service. Media monitoring is about automatically collecting online mentions while analyzing and visualizing the social data that has been tracked.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/pr-clipping