View all case studies Bollare

Before Muck Rack: Databases upon databases upon databases

Before Muck Rack, my job really revolved around a lot of databases. We had one for press tracking, one for media contact details and a completely different one for organizing our contact lists.

Unfortunately, these databases didn’t exactly make our lives easier.

One of the most consuming parts of my team’s week was pitching and keeping those pitches organized. It wasn’t unusual for us to customize 50 emails at a time. (Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a mail merge feature, and I wasn’t keen on installing a Chrome extension that had access to all our data.)

The discovery phase, of course, took up ample time as well.

Other parts of our process were simply cumbersome. For instance, our media lists were managed and owned by different team members. They were all very siloed. We used a database to keep track of our contact lists, but keeping those updated was a challenge. I’d have to take a break from my day-to-day to make any changes. Plus, not all of our team members even used the database because they weren’t very user-friendly.

Similarly, if someone reached out and asked us not to contact them or if they were moving into a new role or to a new industry, someone would send an email to the entire team letting them know not to contact this person again. Oftentimes, those emails got lost in the shuffle, leading to frustration on the contact’s end—and ours.

Basically, we had a lot of databases, but none of them were meeting our needs.

With Muck Rack: ‘It was like a lightbulb’

We began using Muck Rack around the beginning of the pandemic, and the timing couldn’t have been better.

Like other teams, we went remote, which was a big challenge initially. Having our teams all over presented communication challenges, but it forced us to figure those out, and it actually helped us communicate better in the long run.

A big part of us overcoming this challenge was Muck Rack. Everyone from our founder to our interns use it every single day.

Creating and maintaining targeted media lists

My team has various media lists organized by categories, including lead times and markets.

To create these media lists, we leverage Muck Rack. For instance, maybe we saw that someone wrote an article on a website, and we want to reach out to them. We can easily find them—and their contact information and preferences—in Muck Rack.

We can also do more advanced searches, which come in handy. Say we want to find a writer who covers fashion and beauty in Dallas. We can easily search Muck Rack.

The “do not contact” feature is also beneficial. Whereas we used to send an email to the team saying, “Hey, no longer contact this person,” we can now easily remove them from a media list and add them to our “do not contact” list on Muck Rack, so everyone can see it.

Collaboratively crafting and sending pitches

At the beginning of each week, my team meets and we discuss what pitches need to be sent, our main priorities and how we can all collaborate to accomplish these goals.

Because we use Muck Rack, we can work together to send these without fear of double-pitching, thanks to the activity tracking feature. I can easily go into the database and look at pitch history and see who’s sent what and what still needs to be done. We use this intel to keep our clients up to date, too.

We will even go so far as to co-write a pitch in the database. For instance, one person on the team will start it, and another one can hop in and finish it. Then I can jump in after and give it a quick edit, for example. Collaborating like this is easy, and it helps us all better manage our time and responsibilities.

Overall, we save at least 2 hours per pitch sent comparing the "old way" with our current process using Muck Rack.

Measuring and tracking media outreach

Once we send pitches, we use Muck Rack to collect intel. We can see who opened the pitch, who interacted with it (e.g., clicked a link) and spot any issues like bouncebacks. In the case of a bounceback, we can easily fix the issue—or delete that contact from our media list.

We also use this information to determine who we want to follow up with. If someone has opened the pitch and clicked a link, they’re showing interest, so it’s worth a follow-up. On the other hand, we can see who isn’t opening a pitch, and we can figure out how we can better meet their needs. Do we need to speak to them in a different way? Try a different angle?

Muck Rack utilizes Boolean search, which my team has loved. Each member of the team has set up campaign newsletters and alerts that land in our inbox at various times throughout the day. The Boolean search, which is basically an advanced search filter, allows us to easily find any specific mentions, like companies, topics, phrases, names and even hashtags.