This Polish female entrepreneur is on the prowl for your media contacts.

Right.

3, 2, 1. Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. I am thrilled to have with me Joanna Drabent who is joining us from Prowly. She's the CEO and founder of Prowly. And this is an amazing platform to help business owners to find the right media contacts and to manage the outreach, all using technology.

Thank you Jim for the invitation. Thank you for this introduction. I'm not sure if I would be able to introduce myself better than you, so thank you once again. I'm really excited of having this possibility to talk to you.

Now, you ran a PR firm before and then you started a business to help your clients and other PR owners, but also business owners. So can you just tell us how does Prowly solve a problem for business owners?

Okay, so in the simplest words, I would say that Prowly is a PR software that enables to win media attention in the most effortless way. I would say thanks to the tool, business owners can easily find journalists and their contact data, build powerful media lists, create eye catching press releases, and then also they can make the online newsroom a definitive source of information about the brand. It all just got simple and easy for actually like everyone who's dealing with PR on a daily basis. I think that it also includes business owners because in my opinion and from my own experience, I know that PR from the perspective of PR business owners can be the really big PR resource for the company and the brand itself.

So Joanna, there are a number of different software solutions out there, some quite big and some quite small. Now how do you differentiate then Prowly from all these other companies? Because you say you've got a million contacts.

First of all, we offer a free trial period. During this period, everyone can actually try all the features that are available at Prouty. So we are completely transparent on the matter of the product. You can get an instant access whenever you want. The pricing is also much more attractive than in the case of other PR software solutions available on the market, which is also very important from the perspective of the business owner. There is no lifelong commitment. So you can try proudly during this seven days of free trial, upgrade whenever you want, downgrade whenever you want. We've got monthly subscription, no annual commitment, so it all helps to make a decision about trying the tool. And also from what I've heard from our customers, they really appreciate our chat support, our general support. Along the way we help our users by offering free PR consultancy calls. So that all makes Prowly. That's what I think. That's my personal opinion. But I think that all makes probably the most accessible tool in the PR space.

Let's just talk then, Joanna, because you've mentioned price. What does it cost then for a business owner? Is it by number of press releases or how do you price it?

Pricing is flexible. The monthly price depends on the resources, like the number of users you want to have on your account, number of newsrooms you want to create and manage along the way, number of media contacts or emails you want to send to journalists during a month. So the starting point is US$210 per month if you want to use all the features. Basically, most of the business owners are okay with this plan.

Let's just talk about for a practical point of view, because to have that much functionality and that many media. Do you have teams of researchers then? All over the world. Joanna, how are you connecting this data?

Okay, so this system works like a Google search, but it was personalized and customized to the PR needs. So instead of putting in Google contact, I don't know, for example, the name and the surname of the journalist that you want to reach out to. And doing the research manually, we did it the same, but it is customized for the PR needs. So we've got only contact data that are available in the web. And we make the research process much more shorter than it could be once you would use, for example, Google Search. So it's a matter of technology. There are no people behind who are updating the lists every day. It's a system. You can call it AI, but it's the best word nowadays, so I would rather avoid it. It's just a system that helps us to identify the contact data using different sources available on the web.

And how accurate is that compared to, say, a person doing the research? Joanna, are you talking about it being equally accurate or a margin on it?

It's really hard to compare for us. At the end of the day, you pay US$100 for the access to over 1 million media contacts. You can use around 1,000 per month. But you choose which media contacts you want to use. So you've got a full control on that and it takes you seconds. On the other hand, you've got a PR person who needs to do the manual job, do the research. It takes hours. So it's really, you know, hard to compare the accuracy without having in mind the efforts and the costs related to the time that you need. You know, that takes this kind of research while doing money.

Great. So I'd be able to find the contact details and what sort of profiling of journalists would I have? Because if I've, you know, if I've got a business and I want to go into certain niches, have I got the name of the contact, the publication, what they've written before? Just take us through a little bit more of what I'm going to find.

Sure. So in general, you can search by different parameters. You can search by topics that journalists are covering, you can search by region, by city, by country, by influence score. And also once you will find the journalist that you're potentially interested in, you will get the full contact data, including email address, phone number, phone numbers, if there is more than one available on the web. You can get their social media profiles and the latest publications from the press.

Can I personalize the press releases en masse or one on one? Because it's the workflow that actually takes a lot of the time right when you're sending emails out to many journalists.

Yeah, that's true. The personalization is the key when it comes to the mass mailings. We tried the best we could by offering different personalization methods. You can use, we call it personalization tokens. You can use different elements of the contact data in the dynamic fields in the email. So in this case, you can send the press release to 100 or 200 or 1000 journalists with one click and it will be personalized at the same time. Journalists will only see your email address as a sender. There will be no branding in the email itself. It will look exactly like the one that you are sending using regular mailing systems like Outlook or Gmail. And right after that you are able to track the results of the mailing. So who exactly opened your email, who clicked on your materials, who, who came to your online newsroom to check what's there? You can see the general statistics, so the general open rate and click rate. We also, during the email creation process, we show you suggestions regarding the email content to make it more powerful from the results perspective. And those results you can also compare with the general statistics. So if you will see for example that you've got a 30% open rate after your email was sent, you can see if it was good enough, if it's below the average, above the average for the industry, etc. So we are trying to help our users all the time also like both by suggesting, suggesting showing different tips inside the app, but also via chat.

And I think you've also got some consultancy, have you, for any owners that want to talk to your PR team. You've got people who can guide them.

I Think yes, we've got special button inside the app right after registration you can just book a free PR consultancy call with us. There is a calendar available so you can book a time slot that suits you. And during this session we will try to help you get the most of of the tool considering your biggest challenges in pr.

Now one of the challenges people have is going international. Joanna. So you're in Poland, you build an English language platform, can prowly work across multiple languages? How do people use it?

Yes, as every software as a service tool we are available anytime from anywhere in the world. In general, the whole interface of the app is in English, so you need to know at least the basics to be able to use it. But all the content you create using the app can be in any language you want. Also, our media database consists of media contacts from different countries all over the world. So at the end of the day we've got clients from the us, from South Africa, including for example South America. So for example Mexico, Europe, Portugal, uk, Germany, Sweden and many others. Also Asia and Australia. Basically we've got customers everywhere because and that is because the PR needs and challenges are similar everywhere.

If somebody has got say a niche, a vertical that you're not covering.

Can.

They give you instruction to find like a trade publication for example? Because that sometimes in some niche industries an issue with these media databases, they don't have a particular smaller sector.

It depends on the specific topic that the business owner or potential customer in general general is wants to cover. So basically anyone who is struggling with the search, with getting the proper search results can always reach us out via chat. We always do our best to help, but if we won't do it, we will be transparent and tell that we just simply are not able to help in this specific case. So that's fair.

Now, what about monitoring? Because I notice on the website it says that monitoring is not part of the prowly service and obviously if you use some of the bigger services they include the monitoring. How are people supposed to solve that part of the PR puzzle?

That's actually a great question. This is a very exciting topic for us because it looks like the 2021 is going to be a year of much faster product development for us than ever. And thanks to the previous acquisition and being part of Semrush now we've started to craft our own roadmap for media monitoring feature and we plan to launch it in the first half of the next year. It will basically be the one of the biggest product milestone for us and it will help us turn Prowly to a complete all in one PR solution. Because at the end of the day, all the effects of the PR campaigns run with Prowly will be able to track real time by the media coverage, which is the end result of every work of every PR pro.

Will that be part of the same sort of pricing package or do you think people will have to pay more for that?

I don't know it yet. It's too early to say. We are now considering different options. We will include it into the plans for sure, but I'm not sure how it will affect the pricing at all. But still we have in mind that we want to be the most accessible software for PR pros. So even if we will decide to offer it with like additional on additional price, it won't be a deal breaker for for a business owner from the now.

Johnny, you're also a successful business owner in your own right. So can you maybe as a final question, give us a little bit of advice of how you've built the brand of Prowley because you've done an amazing job. You've built from Poland a global business. You sold it now to I think an American SaaS company. What's been the secret of your success?

Oh, okay. So from the perspective of branding, I do not share your opinion. I'm not sure if we're happy about our branding for now. This is something that we have just started to work on. Everything what happened in the past was rather accidentally because we consider ourselves as a product first company, which means that product is always the biggest priority for us. And it turned out that once we started to acquire first customers in the U.S. they started to recommend the tool to themselves. They started to leave opinions and reviews on G2 Crowd and other services. That was actually the foundation of our brand of building a brand, which is good because it came naturally and we are able to talk about our ourselves with the words of our customers. So not sure if there's anything more precious than that. But on the other hand, this year will be the year when we will definitely fasten our brand marketing activities. We need to speed up a little bit on that matter.

Well, Joanne, I hope that being on the Speak PR podcast may help a little bit with that. Now if people want to find out about you, Joanna, where can they contact you?

Happy to connect via LinkedIn for example. I'm there almost all the time so I think that the LinkedIn is the best way to reach me out.

Just tell people Your address on LinkedIn.

My address on LinkedIn is JDRabant G? No, it's like J, D, J, my address. I will do it. Once again. It's like, that's, that's funny, Jim, because it turned out to be the most difficult question for me today.

I'll tell you what, I'll help out. We've been talking with and giggling with Joanna Drabin, the CEO and founder of Prouty Software. We're struggling with getting the final details from Joanna, so I'll just put them in the show notes for you about how to get hold of Joanna. Joanna, thank you for joining me, sharing and giggling with me online.

Thank you very much, Jim, for the invitation and it was great talking to you and yeah, thank you for all your support. It was really, really nice conversation.

You're more than welcome. So thank you for sharing. Speak PR with us. Today we talk to Joanna Drabent of Prowley. So in the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business and that if you're looking to amplify your message through public relations, that you have a look@prowly.com it's a great software, it's affordable and it's going to help you to get noticed.