In the latest of our PRmoment Tool Reviews Chloe Deans from Hallam reviews SEO and influencer relations tool Buzzstream.

Tool name and maker

BuzzStream

What this tool does

BuzzStream is a tool which is designed to allow companies to build relationships through link building and social media relationship management. The outreach tool has many different functions and is designed to make outreach easier and more efficient.

The contact management and email distribution functions allow you to send out relevant content to your own personalised media list, allowing you to secure meaningful placements and coverage.

Price as reviewed

BuzzStream plans start at $24 per month, with the price increasing based on the number of users that have access and the features available.

The four different plans mean that you don't have to pay for services that you won't use, so in a way you can choose a plan which is personalised to your business’s needs.

The test

For the test we used BuzzStream to outreach a piece of content marketing with an automatic follow up, from a media list we built externally.

How it performed

Setting up a new project is easy enough – if you work for a variety of different clients or brands, you can also ‘nest’ the project under that specific folder, so all outreach activity is stored in the same place.

Once you have created the new project you are able to add your Link Partners from three different methods. As we built our media list externally for this specific project, we imported an existing list.

Once you have imported your media list you can begin writing the email template. You can use the dynamic fields section to automatically pull data through to personalise the outreach emails – this saves a lot of time!

Once you have finished putting together the email template (both your initial email and follow up email), you are ready to distribute and outreach. You can do this in bulk or individually. The emails will pull through to your regular outbox, so you can see how the email looks to the receiver.

Likes

• You can upload and import your own personalised contact list from external programs, so if you use a different tool to build your media list you can still use BuzzStream to distribute your content.
• The automatic follow up through their ‘Sequence feature’ is very helpful and saves a lot of time and effort doing it manually. Journalists get hundreds of emails a day, and chances are high that they could have missed yours. Take the time to set up a friendly reminder for them to have a read through the content you have sent across to them – you never know, this could be the reason for successful coverage.
• Being able to send emails individually, rather than just in bulk as this makes it possible to outreach with a personal touch. This boosts your chances of standing out amongst many other PROs in a very crowded inbox.

Dislikes

There’s not much (if anything) to dislike about BuzzStream, my only improvements would be:

• Adding a press monitoring and clipping management feature, so that everything can be done on one platform – from setting up the email template, to building your media list and monitoring coverage
  
• When importing an external media list, the automatic research function doesn’t always recognise the correct contact information using the dynamic fields, so I tend to distribute individually rather in bulk, which can be quite time consuming.

Rating

Written by Chloe Deans, digital PR and outreach executive at marketing agency Hallam