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About Invoca

Fun fact: Sandy Pell is one of Muck Rack’s first customers. She started using Muck Rack way back in 2011 (!) when she worked for Hootsuite, which was a social media management platform at the time.

“I was the sole PR and comms person trying to create a global movement for Hootsuite, and I needed powerful tools,” she says.

Over the years, she’s tested a variety of PR and communications tools, including Cision, Meltwater and Vocus, but Muck Rack has remained a constant throughout the different roles she’s stepped into over the past 14 years.

So when Sandy Pell joined Invoca, an AI-powered conversation intelligence software in 2021, she naturally introduced Muck Rack to the team. Since then, Muck Rack has helped fuel Invoca’s proactive and reactive PR strategy with its media database, real-time monitoring, reporting features and more.

The challenge

Invoca wasn’t using any PR software when Sandy joined the team as senior director of corporate marketing, so she was keen to introduce Muck Rack.

“There were a whole bunch back in the day that I tried,” she says. “I always just like to have a tool that I can have an unbiased, unfiltered perspective on what’s going on in the market in-house. There’s a lot of benefit to that.”

Sandy harked back to the days before Muck Rack—when she’d have to email an account manager to pull reporting at Hootsuite.

“To me, it was both a ridiculous waste of time and also such a simple task that I would just be boggled with how that wasn’t a built-in filter system,” she says.

The solution

Sandy knew Muck Rack would be a valuable addition. In her role leading corporate brand strategy, analyst relations, media relations, content marketing, internal communications and more, she knew she needed an all-in-one platform to help with:

• Journalist outreach
• Media research
• Media monitoring
• Reporting
• And more

But one of Sandy’s top requirements? The solution must be easy to use. If it’s not, her team won’t use it—and she’s wasting budget. She must be able to prove the platform’s worth.

With Muck Rack, Sandy’s team can focus on achieving two main goals: gaining visibility into what’s being said about the brand—and gaining visibility into what’s not being said. This proactive and reactive communications approach, “ensures we’re producing the best brand experience when people think of Invoca,” she says.

This PR pro has used Muck Rack for nearly 15 years—here’s how she uses it

Sandy says while the agencies she’s worked with have always had their own tools and PR software, she likes having access to her own software.

She said when time is of the essence, she needs to be able to have access to her own tool to get things done.

“That’s why I've always brought Muck Rack in as my single source of unbiased truth,” she says.

Targeted journalist discovery

Sandy and her team use Muck Rack to get out of spreadsheets and curate a dynamic media list that stays up to date when contacts change beats or media outlets. With accurate contact information, her team can stay focused on building relationships with the most relevant reporters.

This is especially important because Invoca targets media that C-suite revenue leaders across industries consume. This can be highly niche.

Sandy also appreciates Muck Rack’s AI-powered Recommended Journalists feature, which creates lists of journalists based on existing media lists and pitches. They recently used Recommended Journalists to help pitch a data report they’ve historically struggled to gain coverage from— and for the first time, saw quite a lot of industry specific coverage.

She also likes that Muck Rack notifies her if a reporter has changed roles or publications with Journalist Job Updates, so she can keep up with contacts and focus on targeting pitches.

Real-time monitoring and alerts

Sandy’s team, like many PR and communications teams, has to react quickly—there’s no time to rely on an agency or cumbersome tool to find a reporter’s information or monitor the news.

They use both Google Alerts and Muck Rack Alerts to track media mentions. However, she finds Google Alerts sometimes misses links whereas Muck Rack monitors digital content, print media, broadcast TV, radio and more.

Being able to monitor coverage in real time is extremely important with both a proactive and reactive communications approach.

Credible reporting and analytics

Sandy works closely with Invoca’s executive leadership team, which has high expectations on ROI delivery from every channel—including PR and organic pitching.

Using Muck Rack to create weekly, quarterly or yearly reviews of coverage is simple. And better yet, Muck Rack makes it easy to create coverage reports that are easy to understand, even for those not in PR or communications. For example, Sandy can pass along a report to her CFO, who then can easily digest it and present it in a board meeting.

Harnessing AI to improve brand reputation

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is changing how buyers interact with products or services they want to purchase from. For example, if you’re planning to buy a car, you’re going to do a lot of research and you’re probably going to engage with some sort of generative AI tool.

Even the AI spotlights on Google surface a lot of data to consumers and have a major impact on manipulating initial brand perception. PR pros have way less control over what’s said about their brand than they did a decade ago.

Sandy said she uses PR—and Muck Rack’s tools—to help power those LLMs to produce a really strong brand reputation when someone is interested in a solution like Invoca.

Final thoughts from Sandy Pell

Sandy says without Muck Rack, her job would be very manual and very slow.

“I would depend on other people to tell me what I need to know. With AI and how fast consumers are interacting with brands, having a tool like Muck Rack to get me what I need very quickly is just invaluable these days,” she shares.

Sandy is in it for the long haul with Muck Rack. With over a decade of experience using the platform, it’s a key tool she brings with her to every new role or challenge she takes on.