5 Best CRM for Public Relations

So, you are in the market for a CRM that suits Public relations.

Ideal, because in this article we have our compilation list for our top picks, and we compare the features and pricing for you. 

If you just want the best choice, we’ve added that right at the top of the article as this was what is most requested by our customers. So, that’ll be the “can’t go wrong” option. 

Otherwise, feel free to explore all the options we’ve reviewed on the market to find something that might fit you a little better.

Enjoy the list!

What is the #1 Best CRM To Use?

In short, It's Hubspot.

It's very well rounded, well priced, feature-rich with a large community of support and a very top-notch set of tutorials for every use case. You can't go wrong with Capsule.

Hubspot is a user-friendly CRM platform that provides advanced solutions with its robust marketing tools. It allows larger companies with complex workflows to perform efficiently and produce nifty results. Hubspot has you covered for your: Service, Sales, CMS, Operations, and Marketing needs.

For more details, read our Hubspot Review.

The Best CRM specifically for Public Relations

Public relations help people earn media exposure without spending money on ads, so they can reach more audiences and make a bigger impact. It's a part of a marketing strategy that aims to promote your firm' image. A CRM that allows you to spread your message, devise exciting marketing strategies and gain insights into your public image will be the perfect fit for this category. Have a look at the products below to choose the best CRM for public relations:

1. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a free CRM full of customer management tools, support and marketing automation features. Available in the cloud and locally, for mobile devices and desktops. Includes all essential tools: sales funnels, channel management, sales reporting, 360 degree customer view, repeat sales support and sales automation.

In addition, it comes with dozens of available integrations, and you can also create your own applications using its REST API.

Bitrix24 Features

In the corporate world, most of the marketing-related work is done collectively, and using different software for each task can be costly as well as inefficient. Bitrix24 offers all necessary tools for businesses within a single platform and makes it easier to collaborate with your team members. Bitrix24 has its virtual ecosystem where you can tackle every task with ease on an interface.

 Here are some exclusive features of Bitrix24:

• Activity stream: It is the most happening place inside the Bitrix24 and is a perfect tool for communicating the project details with your employees. Think of it as a social media platform; where you can post project updates, create polls, follow relevant tags, and comment on posts.
• Virtual workspace: It is a great collaborative tool that helps you connect with the employees through video conferencing. Each call can have up to 48 members, and you can invite participants who don’t use Bitrix24. Moreover, you can track each employee’s work hours and progress through a Virtual workspace.
• Project Management: Bitrix24 offers the ability to create workgroups based on projects and assign tasks in several ways. You can approach each project differently, sort them according to the deadlines, and cumulate reports.
• Bitrix24.Drive: You can use the virtual drive inside the Bitrix24 to keep all your business-related files organized inside the system. Moreover, you can decide who gets access to each file and create new documents.
• CRM Space: It is your one-stop for all sales and marketing-related activities. You can customize the existing process templates or create a new one with the “Smart Process automation” without programming. CRM Space is designed: specifically to help you organize leads and lucidly automate processes.
• Sales Intelligence: Here, you can manage the traffic sources and see the ROI for each platform. It’s a perfect tool to assess your marketing strategy and see which sources generate more traffic. Users can connect their business website and get information on every lead through Sales Intelligence.
• Bitrix24.Sites: Bitrix24 has an inbuilt website creation tool that is easy to access and offers several templates to choose from. You can browse through the layouts according to your business niche or use an empty template to design a website from scratch.
• Marketing Campaigns: Bitrix24 allows you to target a specific audience through social media, Phone and E-mail. CRM marketing tool will identify genuine clients and help you connect with potential customers.

Bitrix24 Pricing

Bitrix24 currently offers 4 pricing options for users interested in getting the most out of CRM services.

The “Free” plan is best for the new users who want to get accustomed to CRM software and costs absolutely nothing.

 The “Basic” plan is priced at €49/month and offers customer support service along with some simple collaboration tools. 

The “Standard” plan offers advanced collaboration tools and an increase in user capacity. It is priced: at €99/month.

The “Professional” plan is worth €199/month and unlocks all features of Bitrix24. You can add unlimited users, which makes it suitable for established businesses.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the best known CRM tools in the world, and one of the undisputed references in the field of inbound marketing. Hubspot's CRM functionality allows you to manage all marketing and sales activities as you see fit. For example, it allows us to group by campaigns that generate detailed reports of metrics on the real return on investment in the entire conversion funnel experienced.

In addition, it is a complete CRM tool that is completely free of charge. 56,500 customers in more than 100 countries trust HubSpot for their growth.

Hubspot Features

Hubspot is a user-friendly CRM platform that provides advanced solutions with its robust marketing tools. It allows larger companies with complex workflows to perform efficiently and produce nifty results. Hubspot has five modules: Service, Sales, CMS, Operations, and Marketing, so you can include them in the package as per your business requirements.

Here are some impressive features available on Hubspot:

• SEO Tools: Hubspot is one of the few CRM services that provide SEO-related analysis for your website's content. Once you integrate your business website with Hubspot, it automatically scans it and recommends better optimization. Alternatively, you can paste your website's URL and get an SEO report.
• Content creation tools: You can create new blog posts for your website and edit the existing ones by simply integrating the website with CRM. Hubspot records all comments and edits made to the original content, so you are always in touch with the changes. Moreover, you can use the editor to start a new blog and add relevant images.
• CPQ Functionality: Every business needs to create quotations for products or services to assist sales reps in negotiations. Hubspot allows you to do it inside the CRM with its “Quotes Tool”. You can add unit price, discount offers, conditions, regulations terms, or any other information that will benefit the buyer and sales process.
• Campaigns Tools: Hubspot has several relevant automation tools that enable smooth interaction with clients and organize workflow. You can make posts on social media, send customized emails and run paid search campaigns to get leads on potential customers. It is one of a kind collection with all the necessary marketing tools and a great addition for larger businesses. 
• Contact Attribution Reporting: Hubspot can help your management team understand the latest trend related to customers' sales processes and identify the sources that influenced their decision. You can customize the attribution parameters to get different insights into your business and recognize the market-making activities.
• Data Quality Automation: It allows you to automate properties like; time, date and add new automation to manage the incoming leads swiftly. Hubspot will follow all the pre-entered instructions and give a reminder every it finds a promising opportunity.

Hubspot Pricing

Hubspot offers you the option to create a customized subscription plan by adding the required services. Alternatively, you can choose from the existing bundles and get a general subscription. The “Starter” plan costs $45/month and offers fundamental marketing and sales features. The "Professional" plan starts at $1600/month with advanced marketing tools and customer service software. The "Enterprise" plan offers all available features of Hubspot and is priced: at $4000/ month, with the price set to go up to $5000/month From December 1, 2021.

3. Salesforce

Another tool to highlight is Salesforce, quite similar in the mechanics of employment to Pipedrive, is one of the most popular CRM programs, despite having a paid subscription, recommended for large companies but not so much for entrepreneurs or SMEs. It is a program that adapts perfectly to the size of your company, with a great usability adaptable to any device and with the possibility of using it anywhere you have a network.

Salesforce Features

Salesforce is a sales, marketing, and collaboration powerhouse that lets users accomplish business tasks and share ideas smartly. It was launched: in 1999 with the idea of helping organizations build long-lasting relationships with clients and providing a seamless transition to CRM software. Salesforce has since established itself as one of the most sought-after CRM tools due to its constant strive for innovation and philanthropic values.

Here are some features offered by Salesforce that can affect your business experience positively:

• Industry-focused services: Salesforce provides tailor-made CRM services for every business, irrespective of its niche or size. It is a multi-feature platform that allows every industry to benefit from its wide range of tools. Users can select their line of business to get recommendations on services or customize their own CRM plan.
• Salesforce Sustainability Cloud: Salesforce enables the inflow of your entire business data on a single platform, making it easier to accurately analyze your carbon footprint. In today’s age, when environmental awareness is more significant than ever, Salesforce Sustainability cloud lets you conceive a detailed plan to limit carbon emissions and provide a detailed report to the energy regulatory authorities.
• Slack Collaboration: Salesforce recently acquired Slack, and users can now integrate both platforms for secured communication and collaboration purposes. Slack has a unique interface that allows users to create distinct workflows for each task and automated responses to keep clients engaged till you assign a customer representative. Moreover, it brings different subsections of a business together and facilitates sharing of ideas.
• Workplace Command Centre: Salesforce tracks employee health and ensures their well-being during the pandemic; by carefully managing work hours. It builds a strong community where your company’s employees can connect with each other and resolve issues while you can dispatch resources faster.
• Lightning Platform: Salesforce provides an app development platform with the latest technologies like blockchain and AI. Users can handle every aspect of the process and customize a mobile application that empowers the company's ecosystem. It's an unequaled innovative experience that streamlines IT-related tasks and lets anyone contribute towards app development.
• AppExchange: Salesforce has an inbuilt marketplace where users can integrate the additional application to get a more customized experience. It amplifies your sales experience and browsing through several applications while using external tools within a unified platform for business purposes.

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce has a multifunctional ecosystem where you can add services based on your requirements.

Sales Cloud’s “Essentials" plan is priced: at $25/month/user, “Professional” plan is priced at $75/month/user, “Enterprise” plan costs $150/month/user and “Unlimited” plan is worth $300/month/user.

Small businesses can get a generalized subscription to enjoy Salesforce and choose from the following packages:

The "Essentials" plan is priced: at $25/month/user and can be used; by up to 10 users.

The "Sales Professional" subscription is priced: at $75/month/user.

The "Service Professional" plan is priced: at $75/month/user.

The “Pardot Growth" plan is priced at $1250/month/user and offers automation capabilities for every business.

4. SugarCRM

Another highlight is SugarCRM, with clients such as IBM, Audi or Zurich, which has a simple user interface and an intuitive personalisation platform, and has two types of CRM adapted to each user: a CRM for SMEs and a business CRM for large companies or multinationals.

SugarCRM Features

SugarCRM is a user-friendly platform built on open-source technologies like JavaScript and PHP to enable mobile computing solutions. It helps businesses build better professional relationships, work more efficiently and integrate with the complete customer lifecycle. SugarCRM has cloud portability, which allows you to switch data between public and private clouds depending on market conditions with minimal disruption.

Here are some unparalleled features offered by SugarCRM:

• Sugar Market: SugarCRM provides an all-in-one marketing automation tool that automatically prioritizes incoming leads based on client engagement. It also recognizes repetitive tasks and avoids them to ensure maximum work is done: in minimal time. 
• Revenue Generation: SugarCRM generates revenue for each marketing campaign to let you know where your funds are being used and whether they are yielding desired results.
• Google Ads integration: Users can access Google Ads management tools within the Sugar Market and create shrewd campaigns to target a new clientele base while maintaining the stronghold over existing customers.
• Ease of Use: SugarCRM is exceedingly easy to customize because of multi-API accessibility. Users can switch from their existing CRM service to SugarCRM by connecting the API's, which leads to a high adoption rate. It allows users to personalize the menu bar and homepage for quick response to the incoming queries.
• Asset Library: SugarCRM simplifies the process of uploading, managing and storing assets to leverage within the emails, business website and other marketing documentation with the asset library. It supports various file types like images, documents, audios, gifs and CSS. Users can integrate SugarCRM with other content management systems with pre-built templates to get a more robust library.
• Sales Automation: SugarCRM’s sales tool offers accurate predictions on the possibility of closing a deal with its AI-powered tools. You can change your marketing patterns and sales process accordingly to attract more clients. Moreover, SugarCRM also provides automated operations to follow-up on potential customers during off-hours till a sales rep is assigned; to the task. You can use SugarBPM to review price quotations by comparing your services to other businesses and getting a fair evaluation of your product.
• Customer support platform: SugarCRM enables businesses to emphasize customer complaints and rectify the situation quickly. It provides a knowledge-based platform: that can be customized to help clients solve minor problems themselves. SugarCRM’s service platform automatically assigns cases to the most qualified representative by analyzing past work.

SugarCRM Pricing

SugarCRM offers 4 pricing options depending upon the products you pick.

The “Sugar Market” marketing tool is priced at $1000/month and can be accessed; by unlimited users.

The “Sugar Sell” sales automation tool is priced at $80/month/user and offers 60 GB storage along with phone support.

The “Sugar Serve” customer service tool is priced at $80/month/user and helps you smoothly assist clients.

The “Sugar Enterprise” offers a generalized subscription plan and is priced; at $85/month/user. It offers SQL-based reporting and SugarBPM.

The “Sugar Professional” plan is priced at $52/month/user and offers a CRM solution for small businesses.

5. FreshSales

FreshSales currently has more than 10,000 satisfied customers with its refreshing interface, which offers - at a glance - everything needed on the customer flow. You will be able to have information about conversations with customers, agreements, tasks and scheduled appointments with them, as well as find out how they have interacted with the website and the product, among many other functions. In addition, it allows you to control potential customers to know when it is the key moment to impact them.

Freshsales Features

Freshsales provides a modern-day sale engagement solution to users that want to expand their business and maximize their marketing efforts. Managing leads takes up a lot of effort and hours of scouring through various sources, but Freshsales eases that with a smooth transition of Incoming leads onto the next phase.

Here are some dedicated features of Freshsales:

• Marketing Automation: Freshsales lets you set conditions to see desired customer leads and automate the marketing tasks for prompt communication. Moreover, you can create alerts for the sales team whenever there is progress in negotiations or; the clients respond positively to marketing activity. You can set up chatbots to deal with incoming inquiries and reach out to the client via Whatsapp, Gmail or other network sources with Marketing automation.
• Deals Management: Freshsales lets you manage and visualize the sales process to convert potential leads into permanent clients. You can prioritize leads that are most likely to come to fruition and analyze the conversion rate to forecast sales for similar deals in the future. 
• Workflow automation: Sales process involves many repetitive tasks that are essential to the working of the company. Workflow automation handles routine operations to reduce manual dependency and boosts sales efficiency by breaking complex processes into simple ones.
• Cloud Telephony: Calling is a vital part of the sales process: to update clients about the latest advancements and offers regarding new products. With Freshsales, users can get over 90 virtual phone numbers for employees: to connect with the customers over the computer. You can create notes and record a conversation to provide full context and reassign a task without any problem.
• Freddy AI: Freshsales identifies leads and organizes them to make sales tasks easier. You can set up instructions, and Freddy AI will cohere to them while processing client information. It provides you insight into the likelihood of closing the lead; so you know what the next step should be and approach the opportunity effortlessly.
• Product CPQ: You can maintain an updated product catalog on Freshscales to give clients and the sales team a reference about intrinsic features along with pricing details. Moreover, you can track individual unit sales and see which products are in demand and what audience you should target.

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales has 4 pricing options available for businesses looking to expand their sales through CRM. The “Free” version provides basic management services free of cost. The “Growth” plan is a CRM tool with automation that can boost your sales and prevent respective tasks; It is priced at ₹999/user if billed annually. The “Pro” subscription will help you customize the tools to your liking and increase sales revenue; It costs ₹2799/user if billed annually. The “Enterprise” plan gives you the AI forecasting to know the shortcomings and modify the strategy accordingly; It is priced at ₹4999/user if billed annually.

Why use a CRM at all?

Building successful client relations, maintaining a good public reputation and efficiently following up on queries is crucial for every business. Every market; has seen a rise in competition in recent years, making customer retention and lead conversion a complicated task. You can no longer depend on messy spreadsheets or countless tools to bail you out.

CRM helps you understand the market trend through data analysis and AI-powered insights so you can take necessary decisions to generate more revenue and move up in the industry. It assists your employees in regular tasks by automating reoccurring procedures and makes them more productive. 

Why should you use a CRM for public relations?

Any effort by an individual or an entity; to leave a positive impact on his target groups or the public, in general, is a public relations effort.

Public relations has many dimensions, but essentially, any PR effort is aimed; to achieve one goal only, i.e. building a positive market image. It involves two-way communication that establishes and maintains a mutually beneficial relationship between an organization and the audience on whom its success or failure depends.

A successful PR effort requires; efficient management of contacts and accounts, understanding your current reputation in the market, attractive campaigns or events that propagate your agenda and good social media marketing.

CRM simplifies contact management no matter how big your team or database is. You can import contacts from outside sources and tag relevant accounts to make them easily accessible. Moreover, it can help you identify your target audience. So you can direct your PR campaigns efficiently.

With a CRM, you can easily organize events; to generate excitement about a product launch or run coordinated social media posts to open up new market opportunities. CRM supports integration with third-party applications, making it facile; to manage all aspects of a PR effort.

CRM for Public relations, A Summary

Public relations are a cheaper and more effective strategy; that can achieve an incredible level of reach. With a CRM, you can identify the PR problem, develop a plan, implement the programme and evaluate its effectiveness.

Bitrix24 offers a customized solution for PR professionals to gain market insights and improve the public image. It's an easily accessible platform that boosts the effectiveness of your campaigns and makes them more credible. We recommend Bitrix24 for a CRM that suits Public relations. Visit the website to get started.