November 7, 2025
Updated
Finding the right tool shouldn't be harder than using it. But for most PR and marketing teams, it is.
There are more options than ever, tighter budgets, and no easy way to tell which one actually fits. So the search quietly eats hours that should go to the work itself.
Gina Milani spent two decades watching that happen. After years in enterprise software PR and running her own agency, Milani Marketing & PR, she turned the frustration into a business: PRToolFinder, a database that helps people find the right tools without losing hours to the hunt.
We talked with Gina about how to think about tools before you buy, what actually keeps a small team moving, and the one thing she'd never hand to AI.
The Passion Project That Turned Into a Business
Gina ran her agency with a small team of four for about fifteen years, handling media relations, analyst relations, and marketing support for a handful of enterprise software clients. Tools were always part of the job. Media contact databases, monitoring software, reputation management, market research, and now podcasts and a dozen categories that barely existed a few years ago.
The problem was never a shortage of tools. It was the opposite.
There's a lot of really good tools that people don't know about, just because they don't have the marketing budget to get the word out,
Gina Milani
Founder, Milani Marketing & PR, LLC and PRToolFinder.com
There are around thirty categories of PR software now, and Gina reviews them twice a year to see who's still around, who got acquired, and who quietly disappeared.
She points to a moment that stuck with her. Twenty years ago, she paid someone to help her choose a single media contact database. It took fifteen hours of research and analysis.
Multiply that by how many PR people are making a buy decision about just this one area of tooling. It's a colossal waste of time.
– Gina Milani
For almost a decade, PRToolFinder was a side project she chipped away at because she genuinely enjoyed it. "I love research," she says, and it shows. Eventually she decided that if she wanted it to be a real business, it needed her full attention. That's what she's been building ever since.
1. Different Budgets, Different Needs
Part of what makes tool selection so hard is that no two teams are shopping for the same thing. A solo consultant, a growing mid-sized agency, and a large firm all need software, but they have wildly different budgets and very different definitions of "the right fit."
Gina uses media suites as an example. Some of the big ones can run $12,000 to $25,000 a year, which is why she's seen groups of consultants pool together to share a single license. Her point isn't that expensive tools are bad. It's that most people never see the full range of PRTool Tech options, so they can't tell whether they're overpaying or missing something better.
We shouldn't be spending hours looking for the tools to do our jobs.
– Gina Milani
That thinking shaped how PRToolFinder is set up today. There's a free tier where anyone can browse the database and see every tool in a category, with links out to each vendor. There's also a growing consultants' directory, an area Gina is especially invested in, since plenty of directories exist for agencies but very few serve independent consultants well.
💡 Key takeaway: There's no universal "best" tool, only the right fit for your budget and stage. Do your research before you commit, because most teams overpay by settling for the first options they come across.
2. Small Teams Run on Communication, Not Tools
Ask Gina what keeps a team effective and she doesn't start with software. She starts with talking to each other.
Like alot of start-ups Gina’s team is solving for a specific problem that no one has addressed before in the same way – how to give back the colossal amount of valuable time PR people spend searching for tools. Her current team is small and spread out. Her developer is based in Italy, her social media specialist works from the UK, and she relies on their expertise with tools she hasn't used before. Just as importantly, she regularly asks for their perspectives on what's working, where the team is struggling, and the challenges they're facing.
The minute you start adding more people to your team, communication becomes absolutely crucial. But it also creates a tremendous opportunity to uncover fresh insights, spot emerging market trends, spark creativity, and discover new ways to overcome challenges.
– Gina Milani
She learned that lesson years ago while working on-site with a small overseas client. During her visit, she asked a simple question: Had they ever brought the entire team together to hear everyone's ideas? They hadn't. So they did.
The amount of input and ideas from the staff was incredible.
– Gina Milani
That single meeting became a turning point—not only for her relationship with the client but for the organization's future growth.
It's a practice she's carried into every team she's led since. Give people a voice, and they'll often show you what your company is truly capable of.
💡Key takeaway: Involve the whole team and give everyone a voice. That, not the software, is what keeps a small team working well.
3. AI Every Day, But Not for Everything
Gina takes a practical view of AI.
"I use AI every day," she says, mostly for ideation, organizing her thinking, and content development. One example: her newswire and press release distribution category has grown past thirty tools, which is useful, but also overwhelming for anyone who just wants to make a decision. So she used AI to help her think through how buyers actually choose, and how to group those tools into subcategories that make the decision easier. The output becomes the basis for a more nuanced report she can share with her her subscribers.
Where she draws a hard line is relationships. AI can help you prepare. It can't build the relationship, or the trust that comes with it.
She recently sat on a panel where the topic of using AI to pitch editors came up. Her answer was blunt. "Don't do it," she says. Not because the technology can't write a pitch, but because a good pitch depends on knowing what a journalist has covered, what they're working on now, and what they actually care about. That takes time, and it can't be faked.
The math backs her up. By one figure she cites, there are roughly six PR people pitching every journalist. Automated, generic outreach doesn't cut through that. It gets you ignored.
The alternative is doing the slow work: being useful to a reporter over time.
Give them what they need, be a partner in it," she says. "And that takes commitment. AI is not going to replace that.
– Gina Milani
💡Key takeaway: Use AI for research, ideation, and organizing. Don't expect it to replace the relationships that take real time to build.
4. What She'd Tell Someone Starting Out
For all her experience in PR, Gina is candid that running a company was a separate skill she had to learn on the job.
I was really good at PR. I didn't know how to run a business and why would I know how to run a business?
– Gina Milani
Her advice to anyone going out on their own is practical. An MBA would have helped, she admits, but short of that, join an association and learn from people who've done it.
Ask the unglamorous questions early: how much to bill, what a proposal should look like, what to pay a subcontractor, which tools are worth it.
When you're starting out, you wear every hat yourself, and there's a hidden benefit to that. You end up understanding each role well enough to hire for it later.
She's served on PRSA’s Independent Practitioner’s Alliance executive committee for over a decade contributing her experience, with the other EC members, PR consultants themselves, channeling that into a program for independent practitioners, aimed at helping first-time founders skip a few of the lessons they had to learn the expensive way.
💡Key takeaway: Being great at the work isn't the same as running the business. Learn the practical side early by asking peers the questions no one teaches you.
Where This Connects to Digital Asset Management
There's a thread running through everything Gina describes, and it isn't really about PR tools. It's about the cost of searching.
The hours lost comparing software are the same hours marketing and creative teams lose hunting for the right file, the current version, or the asset that's actually been approved.
The tool changes, but the drain is identical. Time that should go into the work goes into looking for the work instead.
That's the problem digital asset management is built to remove. Just as PRToolFinder cuts the time spent finding the right tool, a DAM cuts the time spent finding the right asset, keeping everything in one organized, secure place your team controls.
Want to give your PR or marketing team some time back?
Start with the files. Daminion helps teams organize campaign assets, visuals, videos, presentations, and brand materials in one searchable media library — so finding the right asset doesn’t become another task on the list.
Final Thought
Gina's story is a good reminder that efficiency rarely comes from adding one more platform. It comes from cutting the friction around the work you already do, whether that's choosing a tool, keeping a team talking, or finding a file you know exists somewhere.
Fix the searching, clear the communication, and you get the time back for the part that actually matters.
