Whyte - How a corporate affairs agency embraced tech to boost its PR

Like most PR teams, we focus on strategy, stories, and relationships. To excel in those areas, technology is an increasingly important component. We need to manage contacts, track social media, publish content, share media files, send emails... there are a lot of moving parts.

Six years ago, we set out to simplify our processes by building our own contact database system and media gallery. It was an expensive project, in both budget and the time we spent building it.

"The more we use Prezly, the better it gets."

Soon after completion, we realized that our database would need constant improvement. It lacked email capabilities and wasn't optimized for social media. It also felt slow and became a hassle to use.

The worst part was that our consultants went back to their own Excel contact lists. It was a bad evolution, because we weren't sharing knowledge and people kept duplicating work. We needed a new solution.

I discovered Prezly three years ago when I saw a journalist tweeting a press release made with it. It immediately got my attention. The story spread on social media and journalists seemed to like it.

When I dug deeper, I discovered that Prezly wasn't just an online press room, but also a solution for our contact database, built specifically for comms teams and . I tried it immediately and haven’t looked back.

The relationships that we have with media and other stakeholders are core assets for us PR professionals.

Switching all our contacts to Prezly has made a big difference. My team now has a centralized contact database made for PR pros like us. It contains all of the relevant information about our contacts: how to contact them, their interests, social profiles, background notes, and more, turning email addresses in an Excel sheet into real people.

"Our stories resonate much better now that we use Prezly. Now we know how to send the right stories to the right people."

What’s more, the more we use Prezly, the better it gets. We’re learning so much from the ability to track our emails. We see who interacts with which stories and we can learn what our contacts are interested in.

It used to be painful to be at press conferences trying desperately to access the Wi-Fi to send a press release. Or worse, to have to send an important email at 6:00 am or midnight.

We sleep better now because we can prepare our emails beforehand and schedule them to be sent later. Solutions like this, built for PR pros like us, make a big difference at the end of the day.

Centralizing our contacts gave my team an even stronger ownership of media relations.

We took our time to structure, check, and complete all of our contacts information. In the process we got a much better grip on who our contacts are and what makes them tick.

There’s still value in sharing good stories with people, piquing their interest enough to make them want to retell these stories. , embracing the new social and visual world we live in.

With Prezly, we’re taking the press release out of the media’s inbox and sharing it online and on social media to further amplify the message.

"Managing influencer relations is more than ever a shared effort that’s making us better consultants and a better team."

The team at Prezly keeps innovating (see our changes) and helps us to offer these modern solutions to our clients. It’s become an integral part of our offering.