PR CLIPPING – How to do clipping using Brand24?

Anna Rudewicz
March 8, 2021 ・ 7 min read

PR clipping is an essential method for public relations, or marketing teams as well as agencies as it helps to evaluate their work, measure their efforts, and check the effectiveness of campaigns. Pr clippings also help to stay up to date with the company’s online presence and reputation.

pr clipping

Measuring your efforts and effectiveness while working in a PR or marketing team may be difficult sometimes, but one of the best methods that help teams deliver results to their supervisors is PR clipping. This multi-purpose method is the evaluation of your work or certain campaigns.

Inside this article, I will do my best to explain what PR clipping is, why is it beneficial and how can you do it in the best way possible, to save your time and resources. Here is an agenda if you want to jump into any specific topic right away, or you are interested in what we are going to have a closer look at.

Want to learn more? Let’s get started!

What is PR clipping?

Let’s start with an explanation of what exactly PR clipping means. I will guide you through a definition of PR clipping, its purposes and then, you will learn how to prepare such clipping.

Definition of PR Clipping

PR clipping is one of the methods that help businesses or agencies measure how many times a certain company has been mentioned in either print, online, or broadcast media. In this article, I will focus on online media such as online editions of newspapers, social media, news sites, newsletters, blogs, or articles. 

Measure and perform your PR efforts with PR clipping

PR clipping is an evaluation of company’s online and offline presence.

PR clipping can be presented in the form of a report that includes all of the results, collected materials, online publications. 

PR clipping is also called Press Clipping.

PR clipping purposes and benefits

PR clipping has a lot of purposes and pros that make this method very valuable and useful. 

  • helps to measure the effectiveness of PR or marketing efforts
  • helps stay up to date with all mentions of a company
  • helps agencies evaluate, summarise and report their work
  • helps to improve public relations 
  • helps to check the brand reputation of a company
  • helps to check the effectiveness of certain campaigns 
  • helps to measure brand awareness

As you can notice, PR clipping can be beneficial not only for agencies that need to prove their value to clients but also for businesses that need to control their reputation, brand awareness, or measure their PR or marketing efforts.

Evaluate your work, measure your efforts, and check the effectiveness of campaigns with PR clipping

PR clipping services

There are PR clipping services that can help collect mentions of a company and create reports. Some of them can additionally analyze metrics that can be valuable supplements to the clippings. 

One of the services that perform exquisitely when it comes to PR or press clippings are media monitoring services. Media monitoring is a method that makes collecting online mentions easier and less time-consuming.

PDF Report from Brand24

There are many media monitoring services that you can choose from. Your decision will surely depend on your resources, since these tools vary not only when it comes to their features, but also their price.

  1. Google Alerts is a free alternative to media monitoring services. It can be helpful for PR Clipping but obviously, it does not offer many possibilities. If you don’t have any resources to spend on a PR clipping service, you may go with Google Alerts at first.
  2. Brand24 is one of the best media monitoring services that give you a high value for a reasonable price. This service will make PR clipping a lot easier and more time-effective.
  3. Talkwalker is another media monitoring service that will work great for PR clipping, but it is much more expensive. If you have a big budget to spend on clippings, you surely can choose it over cheaper alternatives.

Start using PR clipping services!

How does media monitoring help with PR clipping?

Brand24 is one of the media monitoring services that allow you to automatically gather online media mentions of your company or brands that your agency works for. 

Media monitoring is all about staying up to date with everything that is being said or written online about a certain brand name, topic, industry, or whatever that may be useful or interesting for you. This method and media monitoring services allow you to monitor keywords or hashtags and automatically find all the mentions of them from all over the Web.

An example PDF Report

Brand24, for example, tracks multiple sources that are valuable both for public relations and marketing teams as well as agencies. Why? Because it not only covers media such as newspapers, news sites, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, forums, but also social media, including Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook.

Monitor a brand and find out how it’s performing online

An example of a PDF Report

How to: PR clipping

PR clipping done manually, especially online where mentions of companies are many, would be almost impossible. The process would be very time-consuming and inaccurate.

It gets definitely easier if you decide to conduct a PR clipping with a dedicated clipping service, which monitors automatically all of the web content and finds mentions of a specific company, industry, or campaign for you.

Here are three steps to do PR clipping:

  • Find a media monitoring service that you want to use. Start a free trial if it offers one. You can start using Brand24 for free for example.

Start a free trial now!

  • Set your first monitoring project. Enter keywords that you want to monitor. They can be associated with your company name, your competitors, your industry, a specific product that you offer, or a campaign that you run. You can also enter hashtags if you want to track any specific ones.
Project Creation
  • From now on, the tool will automatically collect all the mentions of the keywords of your choice. All you need to do is go through them from time to time and browse the results. Voila!
A screenshot of Brand24 Dashboard

Brand24 monitors multiple online sources and media types, it browses through all the public sources available on the internet, to find all the mentions for you.

Brand24 covers social media, including Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, and traditional media such as web pages, news sites, newsletters, blogs, forums, podcasts.

A screenshot of Dashboard with Instgaram mentions
A screenshot of Instagram mention

It works very effectively as a PR clipping service because it gathers automatically all the mentions in one dashboard.

A screenshot of mentions

Two really cool features that also come in handy while creating a PR clipping is the Importance filter that puts the results in order taking their importance into consideration.

Another one is an Influence Score that measures how influential is a specific author or website. In the Analysis tab, you will be able to see which influential public profiles are mentioning your brand.

A screenshot from Alaysis Tab showing top public profiles

There is also an online Presence Score that Brand24 automatically measures. It is a metric that is potentially very useful for public relations and marketing teams that need to check and compare the level of each brand’s online presence and compare it to its competitors.

Presence Score

Measure valuable metrics with Brand24

PR clipping reports

Brand24 is not only a media monitoring service, but also offers analytical and reporting features. You can use such a tool not only to automatically gather all the mentions that prove your PR or marketing efforts but also to create a dedicated PR clipping reports, ready to deliver to your boss or client.

Create a PR clipping report with Brand24

PDF Reports

Brand24 gives you the possibility to generate and export the most important monitoring data into PDF reports, Excel reports, or Infographics. This service makes PR clipping easier, as it helps you create personalized reports, that include the most important metrics and mentions of a brand.

A screenshot showing PDF Reports creator
PDF reports creator

Excel Reports

A screenshot showing Excel Reports creator

Email Reports

Brand24 also can send you email reports that will notify you daily or weekly about changes in the dashboard. These emails save a lot of time as they deliver the newest mentions of a company directly into your inbox. This feature really makes a difference for PR clipping.

A screenshot showing Email Reports creator

Brand24 and PRclipping: Summary

Find out what are the benefits of using Brand24
for PR and marketing

  • Monitoring keywords, hashtags and collecting mentions in the real-time
  • Automated, but personalized PR clipping Reports (PDF, Excel, or email reports)
  • Importance filter, that helps you discover the most important mentions in the beginning
  • Storm alters, that notify you about the important changes in the dashboard
  • Mobile App (push notifications) and email reports notify you about the results. You don’t need to check the dashboard often.
  • Media monitoring services make PR clipping a lot more time-effective.
  • Presence Score helps to measure a brand’s online performance and brand awareness.
  • Influence Score helps to measure the influence of authors or sources mentioning a brand.