Episode 175: 3 Best AI Tools to Get Featured in the Media
Are you a founder, expert, or small business owner struggling to get media coverage without breaking the bank on PR agencies? This comprehensive guide reveals the top 3 AI-powered PR tools that are revolutionizing media outreach in 2024. Whether you're looking to land press coverage, secure media interviews, or build journalist relationships, these artificial intelligence solutions streamline your public relations efforts.
Ultimate guide to AI tools for PR success: Boost your media visibility & outreach
How AI can enhance media outreach and press coverage
Perplexity AI Replaces Google for PR Research & Media Targeting
Using ChatGPT for follow-up emails and refining press pitches
Claude as best AI Tool for Long-Form Content & PR Storytelling
Leveraging AI to improve SEO, media mentions, and brand credibility
Ready to get your name out there without draining your bank account on PR firms? These AI tools are total game-changers for DIY publicity. With a bit of practice and these smart assistants by your side, you'll be landing media coverage and growing your brand like a pro. No fancy agency required – just you, your story, and some AI magic to help you share it with the world. Time to get started!
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: What's up, small business heroes? Welcome back to Small Business PR, where we make PR and marketing super accessible for the everyday small business underdog. I'm your host, Gloria Chou, Brooklyn-based, fast talking, fast walking, fast eating New Yorker.
00:00:12 Gloria: So this episode will also be a quick and dirty episode. Lately, I've been playing around with a lot of AI tools. And at the time of recording, which is Q1 of 2025, there are so many different tools out there that not only do we feel overwhelmed, but we feel like no matter what we do, we're probably behind, right? And so raise your hand if you have been overwhelmed by all of the different choices of what AI tools to use. I certainly fall in that category.
00:00:36 Gloria: But I've joined a couple of AI memberships and I've really took it upon myself to figure out what are the best tools that help me on a day-to-day as it pertains to my PR, visibility, and pitching to the media. So I'm not going to give a big rundown about all the AI tools that would take way too long. But this episode, I really want to narrow it down to the three tools for everyday use for PR pitching, research and follow-up.
00:00:59 Gloria: The first one that I use all the time is Perplexity. So Perplexity at the time of recording, this is better than Google search and it's pretty much replaced my Google search. And here's why. Instead of just you Googling things and having to click on different articles and come up with your own summarization, what Perplexity does is it scrapes the internet for all of the different answers, whether it's through Reddit, through a blog, through a publication, through anything, and it gives you the amalgamated cumulative answers.
00:01:27 Gloria: And then it gives you different accordion style kind of like expanders where you can say, ask this follow up question or ask that follow up question. And it's very intuitive. So it's cut my time for research in half and I'll tell you what I mean. So for example, if I wanted to search for apartment therapy, because we have a lot of product owners and a lot of them want to get into a place like apartment therapy, I might put something like, "Tell me what are the recent gift guides that Apartment Therapy published."
00:01:52 Gloria: And if you know anything about gift guides, which is something that we really cover in my PR Accelerator program, is that the gift guides aren't really new every year. Like the categories, they kind of get updated. So like fun gifts for dads or gifts for your newly divorced friend or best decor under $50. Whichever publication is publishing those gift or shopping guides, they probably will just renew it every year, but the category will be the same. And so a great way for you to figure out if you can get featured in this year's shopping or gift guide to get your product seen is to simply type in Perplexity. Tell me what are all the gift guide categories or articles that Apartment Therapy published in recent years.
00:02:29 Gloria: And when I do this on Perplexity, it gives me a really good rundown that's super organized about all the different things. And so it'll tell me things like from my research, apartment therapy tends to have these 10 gift guides and that's really gonna help you understand where your product fits in. So for example, if they have... something that is like a low cost, under $100 gift guide they do every year, but they don't include something about luxury gifts and you make a really luxe thing that's over $300 and you know that maybe Apartment Therapy isn't your best magazine to pitch to, right? So that's just helps you refine and do your research.
00:03:02 Gloria: You know, you can also search things like what are the best seasonal stories that Vogue usually covers for beauty. And if you're a beauty founder and you can see all of the different ways that the beauty stories are being written about, whether it's related to sustainability or shopping guides or whatever, that's going to allow you to help categorize your pitches so that you can pitch according to those categories.
00:03:23 Gloria: Um So I found Perplexity to not only be a great everyday kind of search engine that has really replaced Google, it's also really helped me with PR and doing research when I decide, okay, I'm going to start to pitch to these magazines and it'll give you even more detailed information on exactly the types of gift guide. And in my program, we teach you how to write the pitch from start to finish from the subject line. But this is a very good way to start is to figure out, well, what have they written in the past? Because chances are they're probably going to be writing it in the future. So that's the first thing that I would replace Google with right away is Perplexity.
00:03:5 Gloria: The second thing that I use all the time, and you've heard of it many, many times, is ChatGPT, honestly. ChatGPT is great for writing follow-up emails, and I'll give you a couple things that I use ChatGPT for. So I use it for follow-up emails, not the beginning email, because they don't really understand your voice and your tone. So obviously, don't have ChatGPT, just write an AI pitch for you. Start with your own pitch, like watch my masterclass, get the framework of what I teach, the CPR method down, and then you can put it into ChatGPT to refine it a little bit.
00:04:29 Gloria: So with one pitch, you could say, okay, I'll give you an example. I'm working with someone who makes a consumer product, which is an electric flosser. And so I wrote a pitch for her that got her featured on all these places around Valentine's Day, right? About Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, it's a gift category. Now she could also pitch for something in a parent magazine because her product is also good for anyone five, like five years old to 95. And so I can put that pitch that I wrote for her in ChatGPT and say, please repurpose this pitch that worked well for this angle, but now we're trying to steer it towards this audience. Make it relevant and enticing for the journalist who writes about parenting and stuff for kids, you know, so that it's a great pitch for that audience.
00:05:15 Gloria: And boom, it'll give you that. Another way I use ChatGPT is to help me refine my press releases. So I've done a couple episodes on press releases in the past. I think it's like episode 40 or 41. And press releases are a great way to build SEO. It gets published onto a newswire, it gets distributed to hundreds of different outlets, and you can find yourself in the news section of Google.
00:05:38 Gloria: Now, I do this on my VIP day, especially if you are launching something. It's a very specific snapshot in time, and it's a very good way to launch something, whether it's a new product, a module, or announce that you have a partnership with someone or that you want an award. Those are kind of the things that I would use a press release for.
00:05:55 Gloria: Now, let's say you've written the press release and you want to refine it a little bit more, make it more concise, then you can put it into ChatGPT. So notice the pattern of what I'm saying. I'm never using ChatGPT to write something from scratch, but it's really a hell of a tool for you to refine what you've already written, whether it's repurposing for a different angle or getting it to be more concise.
00:06:16 Gloria: Another way I use ChatGPT for our founders is a lot of our founders are in our program because they also want to get into podcasts. So whether they are, you know, sustainable beauty founders talking about sustainability, or they have something that's eco-friendly for parents and they want to get onto parenting podcasts. What I have done for our clients before, who I've been working with on a monthly basis and startup clients is that I actually take the previous podcast episodes and interviews that they've been on.
00:06:43 Gloria: I get the transcript, and by the way, this should be all like public knowledge. If you've gotten featured on a podcast, your host is probably going to include the transcripts on either iTunes or Spotify or however they host that episode page. And you copy and paste it and you put it into ChatGPT and it could be a transcript from one or five or 20 different podcast episodes you've been on. And you can ask ChatGPT where the answers that you have given are like really great answers that really make the host light up and where you can improve on the way that you deliver an interview question.
00:07:16 Gloria: And so you could ask it something like, here are transcripts from three of my podcast episodes. Please tell me the questions that are always being asked so that I know how to prepare for that. Please tell me the parts where the podcast host really was enthusiastic about my answer. And please tell me where the podcast host either didn't respond or felt like they needed more clarification so that I can improve.
00:07:39 Gloria: And I've done this for one of our retainer clients where I kind of gave her a one pager of like, not like a scorecard, but almost like a checklist of like, okay, every time you go on a podcast, here are the top five questions people love to ask. You do really well on these three, but these two, you should come up with different anecdotes or get to the point quicker. You see what I mean? So that's really great.
00:07:58 Gloria: Another way that I use ChatGPT is to create a media kit or a speaking one-pager for some of our clients. And so what this means is that if you are going to speak on stage or if you want to get any kind of conference speaking or even a podcast speaking, you can put in your bio, your about section, and maybe the previous places you've been featured, and then a couple of numbers about your following or like what you've achieved. You can put it into ChatGPT and it will make a media one-pager for you.
00:08:26 Gloria: And the best way to do this is to give an example, give it an example by uploading a screenshot of another one-pager that you really like. And so that's a great way to be like, I really like this person's one-pager. Can you do my media one-page speaking sheet like this? And obviously, ChatGPT is not a design software. So the first step is to get the text right in ChatGPT, and then you can put it in something like a Canva to make it pretty and to make it stylized. But the first step is the text. It's always the text.
00:08:55 Gloria: The last thing I want to say is I have been using Claude, which is from Anthropic, and it has absolutely transformed my business. I have taught it about my tone, about my audience, about the things that they like, about the things that they don't like, about my values. As you know, my people are mainly women of color. So that whole like bro marketing hustle culture, it's not going to vibe with me or my audience. And so I've trained Claude, which is kind of a more of a creative writing tool that's better than ChatGPT. I use it for long form content. So that's my captions and also my email newsletters.
00:09:30 Gloria: Now I'm never starting to tell Claude, write a newsletter about this and that's it. I usually brain dump so many things that's on my mind and I have a lot of things on my mind, especially as we are on the heels of this inauguration and people's rights being taken away and DEI being taken away. I kind of brain dump kind of just train of thought, it's not complete. But because it's so good at analyzing where I am and how I feel, and it takes that kind of train of thought, maybe like a 10 or 15 sentence brain dump, and it puts it into an email form. And that's really helped me be able to write long form newsletters to my audience in a way that's authentic and true to me.
00:10:11 Gloria: And it doesn't sound like AI because it's really coming from me and my values and my authenticity. And so Claude is really great for that. I like Claude for creative writing more than ChatGPT again. So I use ChatGPT for research, for polish, but I do not do any of my long form content, even social media captions on ChatGPT. I now use Claude to do that.
00:10:30 Gloria: Now at the time of recording this, there are so many tools, right? I probably will want to record another episode because there's like five or six other tools that I use, but I want it to be very specific today with these are the three that I use every single day that if you are looking to do more outreach, more PR, more visibility, connecting with journalists so that we can get that SEO, especially as ads are so expensive and the algorithm just seems to hate us and also just censor us if we talk about anything that's diversity related.
00:10:58 Gloria: We need to think about how we can get that earned media and create that traffic and SEO so that we're not relying on the algorithm. And PR is a great way to do that. So those are the three tools I recommend to use. Like right now, check it out. So Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude. And as usual, if you know any small business owners whose value is mission aligned, and would love, love, love to hear a little bit more on this podcast, please send this to them. It's the only way that it gets found. And as always, I so appreciate you being here.
00:11:27 Gloria: And if you have an extra 20 seconds, if you can rate and review this podcast, I would just be so thrilled. Thank you so much and I will see you next time.
00:11:38 Gloria: Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
00:12:06 Gloria: Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at GloriaChouPR.com/Masterclass. That's GloriaChou, C-H-O-U-P-R.com/Masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.