Say goodbye to messy media contact spreadsheets, ho-hum press releases and juggling multiple platforms. Gone are the days of worrying about whether that journalist saw your email pitch. Warsaw-based Prowly, a startup media technology company operating in the nexus of PR and content marketing space, has created an innovative way for PR and marketing professionals to promote their brands.

Prowly is a cloud-based suite of tools that helps brands effectively manage their communications with the media and key audiences. CEO of Prowly, Joanna Drabent, explained that they built Prowly to be more cost effective:  “Everyday PR work often consumes a lot of time, this applies mostly to media pitching and follow-ups. In 2013 we introduced an all-in-one app that saves resources on the one hand, but provides insights & analytics on the other. All the data is secure and stored online, so you, your team and your clients always have access to it. The feedback and financing we’ve received so far proves that our thinking is right and there’s a need for such tools.”

Major companies like Spotify and Ikea have taken advantage of Prowly’s services and they just received $1.1 million in funding. Needless to say we were intrigued and decided to try out their services.

We reviewed Prowly’s features one by one for a comprehensive overview of their service to share with our readers. Here they are based on the three main tools currently available:

Brand Journals

The Brand Journal feature is Prowly’s claim to fame, and rightfully so. At its most basic, Brand Journal offers a streamlined aggregation of a brand’s relevant content. Instead of a hodgepodge of brand information, however, Prowly allows you to tell the story about a brand, to relate what makes it special in one compelling narrative. It combines content from all different platforms, including integrations with many popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more.

Brand Journal comes ready and optimized for Mobile to reach the fastest growing user group. You can customize everything from the appearance to the SEO focus. Best part? It was quick and easy to create but looked like a graphic designer poured hours of work into it. Coming from a marketing communications firm, we also loved that if offers a chance to generate potential leads with a newsletter subscription feature. Check out the example of National Geographic Channel’s Newsroom created using the Brand Journal feature:

Media Pitch

According to a new study 68% of journalists are unhappy with how corporate communications people are pitching them. Looks like it’s time to change how we are pitching media. Prowly’s media pitching tools offer an alternative and more personal way to get your story picked up. First, it offers a way to organize and consolidate your media lists. All you have to do is upload a CSV file of your contacts (as long as all the columns are consistent) and Prowly creates a clean, organized media contact list. If you are starting from scratch, you can also create contacts and media lists within Prowly and heavily customize each entry with how they will be addressed in emails, links to all their social media and other valuable information.

After your create your pitch then you can launch an email campaign without it looking like a campaign. It allows you to seamlessly integrate videos and images so the pitch is visually appealing. Afterall, 75% of articles published contain multimedia so you should probably include it in your pitch! You can set a customized greeting for each contact so that the pitch looks personalized.

Then it’s time to analyze. Prowly even allows you to learn and track behavioral attributes of journalists. Prowly tracks the number of views and engagements your pitching campaign received. All of this happens on one simple platform… no need to have multiple apps running. Check out how Prowly analyzes campaigns below:

Story Creator

Stories are the heart of PR and marketing. Telling a story is the best way to build a relationship with your audience. Billed as a Content Management Tool, Prowly’s Story Creator allows you to compose blog posts, interviews and press releases with clean, customizable templates. You can easily manage your content with the app’s editorial calendar, which allows you to assign tasks to members of your team. Got an exclusive message you want to send out to some VIP journalists, then you can take advantage of the Private/Public function to keep content walled off from the general public. Uploading PDFs, presentations and images directly into a story is a snap. In short, Story Creator is extremely useful for marketing communications teams in need of a single platform to easily manage a wide variety of brand communication assets while targeting relevant audiences.

While we saw the services are incredibly useful, we acknowledge that Prowly might not benefit all companies equally. For example, a company with a website that displays all their content from different platforms might not see use for the brand journal. Prowly’s services seem most useful for companies whose media contacts, post scheduling, content generation, brand collateral, etc. is spread across many different platforms and are difficult to keep in sync.

App Pricing

Prowly allows you to customize your own package upon request to suit the specific needs of your company, which means the pricing is also flexible. The pre-made packages include a small, medium and large subscription. The smallest package starts at $89 / month and jumps to $369 / month for the medium package, but that level allows brands to have their own domain name on their brand journals (think .com not .prowly.com) plus 7 more gigabytes of storage. Given how much time and effort Prowly can potentially save certain brands over time, these prices are fairly negligible.

Final Thoughts

We like Prowly because it offers a comprehensive web-based service that can potentially change the way anyone working in media relations and content marketing goes about everyday business. With everything in one place, the headache of juggling multiple platforms is eliminated and the ability to build an elegant brand narrative is easy. In short, we recommend giving Prowly a try for your brand.

About Lily Aguillard: Lily Aguillard is a PR associate/intern with Swyft, a tech marketing and PR communications agency based in Austin serving international clients. Lily specializes in helping clients with their social media, blogging and media outreach needs.