KWT Global is a global brand strategy and public relations agency that employs an interdisciplinary, design-thinking approach to marketing and communications. They synthesize the most impactful elements of PR, influencer engagement, social and digital media, and content marketing, to help clients identify and demonstrate their best 'selves.' Headquartered in New York  with offices in  London  and  Toronto, KWT Global serves clients across dozens of industry sectors, including American Express Global Business Travel, Amway, Ricoh, Cirque du Soleil, Vanguard, CGI, IRONMAN™, Orangetheory Fitness, Deloitte, Dataminr, Hisense, Park Place Technologies Canadian National Exhibition and PURE Insurance.

Search 

After successfully securing a variety of stories in medical trade publications, our client, Medicare Advantage company Clover Health, challenged us to broaden our reach and identify opportunities for their Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Kumar Dharmarajan, to provide expert commentary in national consumer outlets. As a practicing geriatrician, Dr. Dharmarajan is well-versed in nearly any health condition impacting older adults. However, this is a tremendously niche subject area, meaning we had to not only overcome the hurdle of crafting interesting narratives, but also identifying reporters to which they would appeal.

Through Muck Rack’s intuitive and precise search functionality, we capitalized on highly-refined keywords and a comprehensive analysis of past coverage and social media usage to uncover the most appropriate targets. This proved tremendously helpful, particularly when reviewing the vast array of contributors to Forbes who often cover fairly vague and wide-reaching subject areas. By having the ability to more strategically focus our efforts, we drastically reduced our time spent conducting outreach and secured a great feature piece in Forbes about the rise of alcohol consumption among seniors, which featured quotes from Dr. Dharmarjan, as well as his helpful tips for those looking to safely imbibe over the age of 65.

Media Lists 

The media landscape has changed so much over the past few years. Prior to using Muck Rack, we spent a lot of time searching for journalist email addresses for media lists on LinkedIn, Twitter or a freelance writer’s personal website. It became second nature to go to Twitter, which is part of the reason we love Muck Rack’s social media integration.

Muck Rack’s media lists save us a lot of time. Initially, we created media lists in Excel, then eventually switched to Google Sheets. It’s difficult to maintain a lot of information in one area -- copying and pasting names, phone numbers and email addresses becomes time consuming. Since there’s a lot of turnover in journalism and inconsistencies within email addresses, we were constantly trying to stay on top of our media lists. With Muck Rack, we can add journalists to a media list with one click, and they update automatically as journalists make changes. It’s easy.

Right around the time we joined Muck Rack, we worked with a client who did a lot of targeted local outreach. We sent Muck Rack a media list with seven different regions and the customer success team went through the lists, imported them into Muck Rack, and even scrubbed outdated emails and replaced them with the correct ones for us.

In-Platform Pitching

Muck Rack’s in-platform pitching is seamless -- just click and send a pitch! We love the ability to personalize pitches.

We’ve found the most value in understanding who is opening and reading our pitches. When you’re pitching top tier publications that get thousands of pitches a day like the Associated Press or USA Today, it’s helpful to know if a reporter has actually opened our email.

This type of visibility is a gamechanger in the office -- being able to understand in real time if and how a pitch is landing is super important. What subject lines work best? What content within a pitch resonates? If reporter John Smith always opens surveys, we make sure he’s on the list for future survey stories. This data is tremendously useful and helps us to understand if we need to pivot, giving us more information to inform our clients. That level of insight is really transformative. It’s been just great to take those insights and incorporate them into best practices.

1. In addition to results, what other benefits have you experienced from Muck Rack?

Muck Rack really helps KWT Global as a whole. We surveyed everyone on the KWT Global team and unanimously everyone reported improved productivity and capability. Overall, we’ve cut out time for all media relations efforts by about one-third.

With clients looking at to us for new ideas, we now have more time for high-level strategic work rather than spending time shifting through the crowded media landscape we're able to more effectively forge meaningful connections between our clients and their audiences; and we’re able to take the time to better understand what we need to drive coverage. We have the time to do it! The more administrative sides of media relations have been streamlined.

We’re epitomizing the adage of working smarter instead of harder. That’s been the mantra for understanding how Muck Rack is helping us.

2. How would you describe Muck Rack in three words?

Resourceful, streamlined and efficient

 3. What would your job be like if you didn’t have Muck Rack?

Our jobs would be more time consuming. Without Muck Rack, we would not be able to effectively see what’s going on in the cultural zeitgeist and figure out how to connect our clients to those trending stories.

For example, one of our clients is an insurance company. With previous databases we used, if we were to search for reporters, we’d search by beat and find insurance reporters. However, with Muck Rack, we can dig deeper and see all of the articles a journalist has written recently. So when we click into an insurance reporter and see they cover the financials of an insurance company, we’re easily able to see that our pitch about how insurance companies are gearing up for California wildfires is not something they’re going to be interested in.

Having the ability to go more in depth with Muck Rack helps us make stronger connections between what clients want and what the media is actually covering.

4. What has your experience been like working with Muck Rack’s customer success team?

We’ve not been shy in working hand in hand with Muck Rack’s customer success team. The team has helped us with simple tasks like updating a reporter’s profile to more complex asks like uploading media lists with 80+ journalists. The team says Muck Rack turns tasks around quickly, and every single request has been handled.

Our team appreciates that conversations often start with Muck Rack’s chat bot, but then transition to a real team member. Recently, we had a media list we wanted to import into Muck Rack that needed to be categorized by different parameters. We were able to walk a real person through the spreadsheet and avoid any of the complications an automated system might present.

Muck Rack’s customer success team makes everyone’s life easier.

5. What would you tell other companies considering using Muck Rack?

We’d tell them it’s a great opportunity to help improve the productivity of every employee. It streamlines processes and reduces segmentation. Ultimately, using Muck Rack allows you to hit higher level achievements and thinking, making a broader impact and educating, engaging and driving action for clients.