Prowly Review: The Best Way to Boost Your Media Relations Game?

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Starting a business is only half the battle. The secret to success is reputation.

There are many ways to build your reputation. The first step is providing a great experience for your customers. Still, to build a high profile, you inevitably need to get into the social media game.

Prowly promises to help with that. This SaaS tool by SEMrush lets you manage media contacts, shape your narrative, and create winning press releases.

Is Prowly the real deal? Let’s break it down.

Getting started with Prowly

As mentioned in my Demio review, the convenience of SaaS allows you to quickly use software through your browser. Signing up for Prowly is as simple as clicking the “Try it for free” button in the upper right corner of the site.

Prowly pricing

Prowly offers a 7-day free trial so users can try before they buy. Beyond that, they offer an Essential plan for smaller-scale users and a Professional plan for agencies.

The most basic form of the Essential plan starts at $119/mo, while the Professional plan starts at $189/mo. You can add features to your plan—including media monitoring and access to Prowly’s media contact database—for an additional cost.

What can Prowly do?

Remember that thing I said about customer experience? Prowly clearly got the memo, because as soon as you sign up, they invite you to schedule a meeting with them. This shows a real dedication to customer support that you don’t see every day. But since I’m only trying out the product for a review, I opted out.

Dashboard

Prowly’s dashboard maintains a simple, inviting design. This is especially helpful since the choices you’re presented with are a bit overwhelming. As someone with limited PR experience, the very idea of starting a press release feels daunting.

Still, front and center on your home page is a simple timeline you can use to wrap your head around Prowly. It breaks it down into four easy steps: creating press releases, finding media contacts, setting up a newsroom, and sending email pitches.

Let’s take a look at each of those features.

Making press releases with Prowly

Prowly has a wide array of options for crafting press releases. You can upload a .docx file, start from scratch, or choose from various templates like event announcements and new hires.

These templates are designed to get your mind jogging, rather than filling in the blanks Mad Libs-style. The text editor is fairly simple with limited font and formatting options. Still, you generally don’t want to get too wild with a press release.

Make sure not to hit “Publish” before it’s fully done, as you can’t go back and change it. 

Finding media contacts

Like with the press release tool, there are a few ways to get started with finding media contacts. You can import or manually add your existing contact list, but you can also peruse Prowly’s extensive database.

Media contacts range from entertainment to politics, business to beauty. They include some of the biggest names and publications in journalism. Just keep in mind, you’ll have to buy an upgraded plan to get access to the contact database.

If you just want to get started, importing existing contacts makes for much less hassle. At the bare minimum, you can put in a few emails and move on to the next step…

Creating a Prowly newsroom

A Prowly newsroom is a custom webpage designed to compile your brand’s content, press releases, and other news. While it’s less customizable than your own website, it allows your media contacts to easily find all of your content in one place.

This can be a useful tool for shaping your narrative. You can organize your PR output into tabs and categories, and customize the design to suit your brand. Still, I’d argue you could probably do better making a media tab on your own website.

Sending an email pitch

Finally, the main event. You’ve made your press release, your newsroom, and compiled all your contacts. Time to pitch!

You can choose to select certain recipients or email your whole contact list. Prowly gives you the tools you need to create an engaging email, with a dozen professional fonts and a bevy of text options.

Where the newsroom layout is fairly one-size-fits-all, you have much more customization options with your pitches. This makes sense since the email pitch is the thing that gets your media contacts hooked.

You can add images, tables, files, and links to your pitch, as well as additional press releases and a call-to-action button.

Like many CRMs, Prowly includes personalization tokens. These are variable text elements that can be tailored to specific recipients. For example, you can add a Greeting token that inputs different greetings for different recipients. Then, by applying values to people in your contact list, you can ensure they each get a greeting that’s specific to them.

After that, simply review your email and send it off! Prowly recommends you sort your emails into campaigns, which makes it easier to keep track of different releases and review their success.

Monitoring and reports

One of Prowly’s more impressive features is its media monitoring dashboard. Above and beyond keyword research, this tool includes widgets to track sentiment, reach, domain authority, and much more.

While easily sending out and keeping track of pitches is great, this tool makes Prowly worth your while. Every tool at your disposal from WordPress to Google Ads has some flavor of monitoring, but this is the rare dashboard that synthesizes every metric a PR agency needs. Just as important, the custom widgets also let you exclude the data you don’t need.

Prowly is teasing a forthcoming feature that lets you view stats on your campaigns through PR reports. As advertised, these reports go above and beyond, compiling data to show the complete picture of your PR work.

As it currently stands, the lack of specific stats on a campaign’s success is one area where Prowly could improve. For PR workers, the ability to compile deliverables makes a big difference, so I hope this feature gets rolled out sooner rather than later.

Is Prowly worth it?

For companies, agencies, and entrepreneurs working in PR, Prowly (wait a sec… PR owly!) promises an easier way. It highlights the ability to easily create, release, and track press releases online.

Prowly’s most impressive features are its media monitoring tools and contact database. I was somewhat less impressed with the press release tools themselves, but I acknowledge the utility of having a simple online dashboard to keep track of them.

Prowly is definitely a strong PR tool; the contacts and monitoring tools alone are enough to make it worthwhile. Still, it faces a common SaaS problem: how much ownership will you give up for convenience?

For that purpose, I like the fact that Prowly also lets you import releases, contact lists, and more. You can choose whether you want a convenient experience or a custom one, which is an attitude more SaaS programs should have.

Prowly is sort of the Canva of PR software. It’s shiny, accessible, and gets the job done, with a few impressive tools that put it over the top. But if you want something fully custom, you’ll still have to make it yourself.

Final rating: 7.9/10 ✅

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