Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of the SPEAK|pr Podcast

Joanna Drabent is the CEO and founder of Prowly, a platform designed to help business owners find media contacts and manage outreach all using technology. It is a PR software that enables clients to win media attention in the most effortless way. Thanks to this tool, business owners can easily find journalists and their contact data, build powerful media lists, create eye-catching press releases, and make the online newsroom a definitive source of information about a brand. They've simplified these processes for anyone dealing with PR on a daily basis, but it's not just for PR people. Business owners can also make good use of Prowly, as these entrepreneurs are a big PR resource for the company and the brand itself.

Prowly offers a free trial period, during which anyone can use all the features available. They are completely transparent on the matter of the product, allowing instant access whenever needed. An advantage of Prowly is that there is no lifelong commitment. You can upgrade or downgrade whenever you want. Prowly's pricing plans for their monthly and annual subscriptions are flexible and said to be more attractive compared to other PR software solutions available in the market, which is also very important from the perspective of a business owner. The monthly fee depends on the resources, such as the number of users on the account, the number of newsrooms to be created and managed along the way, and the number of media contacts or emails to get in touch with journalists. The starting rate is $210 per month, which is the plan most business owners subscribe to. Customers rave about the chat and general support they receive along the way, and these all contribute to making Prowly one of the most accessible tools in the PR space.

Prowly has over one million contacts available on their media database, and users can gain access to up 1,000 contacts per month, with Prowly giving you total control over which media contacts you want to use. For what would take a person hours of manual research, Prowly will find you the right journalists and media in only a matter of seconds. The way their system works is similar to a Google search but it is personalised and customised to the PR needs, as it identifies contact data using different sources available on the web. They've shortened the research process, and it's all a matter of technology. There are different parameters to narrow down a search, like topics that the journalists are covering, by region, by city, by country, and by influence score. Once you find the journalist that you're interested in, you will get all of his or her contact data, including email address, phone number or numbers, social media profiles, and the latest press publications. For companies in niches or verticals that Prowly may not be covering yet or for anyone struggling to get the proper search results, they can always reach out via chat. They always try to help, but they will also be transparent if they are unable to in certain cases.

Prowly is geared towards helping their users and so they provide tips and tricks on their app as well as via chat. They also offer consultancy for any owners who want to speak with Prowly's PR team. Upon registration, there's an option to book a free PR consultancy call. During this session, they will try to help you get the most of of the tool, considering your biggest challenges in PR. And like every Software as a Service tool, Prowly is available anytime from anywhere in the world, and while the interface of the app is in English, the content created can be in any language. Also, their media database consists of media contacts from different countries all over the world, so their clients are global too. They have customers everywhere, because the PR challenges are similar regardless of location. 

Personalisation is key when it comes to sending out emails, which is why Prowly offers what they call personalisation tokens, wherein different elements of the contact data can be used in the dynamic fields in the email. With one click, personalised emails can be sent to up to 1,000 journalists, after which you can track the results or status of the emails, such as who opened the email, who clicked on the materials in the email, who went to the online newsroom, as well as general statistics like open rate and click rate. What's great is that there is no Prowly branding in the email itself. Journalists will only see your email address as the sender. During the email creation process, Prowly also provides suggestions regarding the email's content in order to help you get the best results, which can be compared with the general statistics. 

Though monitoring was not one of the services that Prowly offers, thanks to SEMrush's acquisition of Prowly, they have begun crafting their own roadmap for a media monitoring feature with the goal of launching this in the first half of 2021, making this one of their biggest product milestones. This will solidify Prowly as a complete all-in-one PR solution and enable users to track in real time all the effects of the PR campaigns through analysing media coverage, which is the end result of PR work.

In her own right, Joanna is a successful business owner, having built the business from Poland, and with Prowly now as a global business owned by an American SaaS company. They consider themselves a product-first company, meaning the product is always the biggest priority. Once they started to acquire their first customers from the US, those people would then recommend the tool to others, so the value for them comes from the word of mouth marketing from satisfied customers who would give reviews for others to hear and read about, and this naturally became the foundation of their brand. To learn more about Prowly, you can find Joanna on LinkedIn or check out their website. If you're looking to amplify your message through public relations, have a look at Prowly. It's a great software, it's affordable, and it's going to help you to get noticed.

This article is based on a transcript from my Podcast SPEAK|pr, you can listen here.

Cover Photo from  Joanna Drabent (Twitter)