Founded in 2011, Zapier helps people grow their businesses with the power of automation. The company connects over 2,000 apps to help people be more productive at work, saving users an average of 10 hours a week.

Trends 

We use Muck Rack Trends to see how certain topics are being covered in the media so we can create potential story ideas based on the trends we’re seeing in the space.

Zapier is a 100% remote company and always has been, but when the shelter-in-place orders were announced in March, many knowledge workers were forced to work from home. We had a big opportunity to teach others the remote work tips and best practices that we’ve learned over the years. We wanted to help others learn that it’s possible to be successful, productive, and collaborative, even if your team isn’t in the same office.

We looked at Trends around remote work, then used that information to determine how long we should ride that coverage wave and when it was time to shift the conversation back to our product.

Trends also give context to our internal team by allowing them to see what people are talking about and sharing at a given time. If a story we’ve pitched isn’t performing as well as we expected, we can see what else was trending at the time. We don’t have control over what’s going to dominate a given news cycle. The top story for March and April was a medical story, which forced many other communications teams at tech companies to really think about whether they actually fit into the story.

Media Lists and Research 

Muck Rack helps my team see who we should be reaching out to and what my best targets might be.

Muck Rack’s journalist database is helpful when targeting unfamiliar regions. When you don’t live there, it can be difficult to determine who the right reporters are, because you don’t have the context of seeing their work every day. What may look to an outsider like a small blog could actually be one of the region’s most influential publications.

For example, if my team has a story for people who live in San Francisco, they can go into Muck Rack and search for journalists working for those local publications.

Muck Rack Alerts 

Thanks to Muck Rack Alerts, we start off every morning knowing what coverage we’ve secured.

We used another platform previously for coverage tracking, and we had to submit many special requests because really spammy blog posts and scraped content would get pulled into our reports.

1. In addition to results, what other benefits have you experienced from Muck Rack perhaps in terms of process or time-saving?

It definitely saves time! One of the things my team likes is that Muck Rack pulls in a reporter’s Twitter bio. It’s usually difficult to keep up with media moves, but journalists will update their Twitter bios when they make a change. Even if a reporter is temporarily covering a different beat, you can see that all right in Muck Rack.

Muck Rack also prevents us from having to manually search for all the contact information for journalists. If we were, it would be a wild goose chase. Journalists’ emails aren’t always easy to find.

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

We’d be spending a lot of time hunting down contact info and doing research, and way less time pitching.

3. How would you describe your experience with Muck Rack in three words?

Simple, effective, reliable

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

I would tell them it’s the easiest database I’ve ever used and to give it a shot. The learning curve is much easier than other things we’ve tried.