Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a service owned by Cision (via the merger with Vocus) for reaching out to journalists.
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Hunter
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Hunter is a cloud-based email search solution that helps businesses find and verify professional email addresses from domains, companies or a specific professional on the web.
I believe I explained the main scenarios. Haro is a simple tool that pretty much gives you feedback on media opportunities you can pitch for and allows you to get in touch with the reporter, so you can get exposure and they can find people for their news. It's better suited for b2c or smb-focused companies for sure.
The scenario we most commonly use Hunter for is to quickly find and retrieve contact email information. Phone numbers are an added bonus, but they tend to only be available for contacts in the US. SDRs have the extension in order to confirm or to help them "guess" as to what a contact's email address might be. This speeds up our prospecting time considerably. Where Hunter falls short is not being flexible where companies have more than one email format.
I've noticed that some queries are incredibly vague to the point where they could or could not apply to me. I feel like they should implement more strict parameters on what the query has to include.
Sometimes the outlet is marked anonymous which is not beneficial at all to those who are browsing queries. I think the outlet should be required as that is a pretty essential piece of information to consider.
I think they email slightly too often. My inbox gets flooded with HARO emails and I'm not able to go through all of them because they get buried. Maybe explore a new strategy to organize the huge amount of queries that get submitted every day.
Hunter is only as valuable as the information it is able to scrape from the internet. If a company has not listed any email addresses online, then Hunter is not going to be able to find it.
Sometimes Hunter is only able to identify non-personal-specific email addresses (ex: info @, support@, etc.). This makes it difficult to identify personnel emails
Sometimes companies will have different email domains that Hunter is not able to correlate. For example, when searching for an email address at Lead.com, Hunter is not able to point to ParentCompany.com email addresses that would be more useful.
They are different tools. While HARO pretty much gives you feedback on media opportunities you can pitch for and allows you to get in touch with the reporter, so you can get exposure and they can find people for their news. Cision allows you to syndicate your press releases. You need to have a written press release in order to use it.
We have been trying to get lead information on SalesTools and PLENTY, however, these two tools are mostly oriented to create follow-up campaigns and the setup is pretty complicated. If you are looking to create just a list of semi-qualified leads, you may try Hunter, but SalesTools has already an inner feature to build prospects in a better way.
A hard thing to measure in terms of actual sales dollars, however, being able to provide fresh content is essential to any brand. When someone mentions they saw the published piece or it grows organically from social media, that is a win.
