How to Use Roxhill’s Pinpoint Tool for Smarter Campaign Planning

If you subscribe to Roxhill’s media database and distribution platform, you also have access to ‘Pinpoint’. This is a useful tool for ideation, content strategy and building targeted media lists.

Pinpoint lets you see how much the media is talking about a topic or keyword, and shows you trends over time. So, you can see what interest is like today, how it has fluctuated over recent months or the past year and make predictions.

The benefits of Pinpoint:

• Helps you plan content topics around peaks in media interest
• Helps you justify the timing of your activities to clients
• Helps you to identify media outlets and journalists writing about a topic the most
• Helps you pivot a campaign and be reactive to current affairs/viral trends

And I’ll talk about each of the above in more detail within this post.

How to use Pinpoint

Log into Roxhill and you’ll find yourself on the homepage. From here, click “Pinpoint” on the top navigation bar:

You are then prompted to type a topic or keyword into the search bar. Once you have written this, click analyse keyword.

An example keyword could be spiders. Bear with me.

In September, there’s a deluge of news articles about the annual spider invasion of our homes as their mating season starts. The stuff of nightmares.

You can see this trend in the search results.

Once you have your keyword(s), you’re presented with a range of options and data:

In the top right of your screen, you’re able to set the date range to see how media interest fluctuates. It automatically sets to six months, but for seasonal events a 12-month view is more useful.

The graph will highlight points when media coverage for your keyword(s) peaks or declines throughout your date range. If you hover over the graph, you will see how many mentions went live during that week.

You can also get the following useful information below the graph:

• Country – from experience, the UK provides the most data
• Outlet Type – this shows you what type of outlet has written about spiders the most over the past year. This is most likely to be nationals.
• Outlet – shows the top media outlet for publishing content on a topic. In this case it’s the Daily Express
• Journalist – shows the top publishing journalists for a topic and how many stories they have published during the year. You can click download to export an Excel.

So, next year we know for any relevant clients we could outreach a guide on how to stop spiders entering your home in early August and get ahead of the competition.

We can also use the outlet and journalist sections to start building a targeted media list.

This useful tool can also help back up your proposed PR and content marketing topics to clients, providing them with data on the popularity of a keyword and why you’ve scheduled it for a particular time.

There’s a lot more you can do with Pinpoint, too. You can search a keyword or topic on Twitter or Instagram and see the most active accounts. You can also compare two or more keywords against each other to judge which is more popular.

If you’re a Roxhill subscriber contact your account manager and they’ll offer you one-to-one or group training to get the most out of it.