Meet Wizikey: A Modern Tool to Mutually Connect PR and Content Marketing

In a bolstering attempt to create mutually exclusive story of PR and content marketing of brands, Anshul Sushil and Aakriti Bhargava, founders of Wizikey launched the software Wizikey with a vision to help 20,000 businesses in the next 5 years.

Traditional media gatekeepers such as editors or journalists are bombarded by story pitches, interview requests, and media releases so frequently that the information is piled up at first and then gets overshadowed by the compression of innumerable vital/non vital mailers. These media gatekeepers, even if accessible, couldn’t be sought after correctly as per the requirement of a marketer. Also, despite the accurate selection, you can be called lucky when the journalists actually pick your phone, preferring to use the protective shield of email as the favored business conduit. However, the practice of cold calling has become outdated and brusque. In the vicious circle of these challenges, there arrives more technology and media avenues of expression at disposal than ever before for the marketers or brands. One such forthcoming and emerging story is of Wizikey – a tool that helps a businesses to start the PR journey, write story, and send to the relevant journalists, all by yourself. It is one place for businesses to see what the PR and communications teams are doing from Birdseye view. There has been a pre-release of the software given out to a large group of users to try under real conditions.

The Tale and its Genesis

Back in 2004, Wizikey founders – Anshul Sushil and Aakriti Bhargava, often used to speak about how Techno-Branding was an alien subject to speak in the industry ruled by FMCG brands. The only Tech brands that existed were highly niche it IT sector like Finnacle, or FlexCube. And by 2009, Aakriti had ventured out to start BoringBrands – a branding and PR company to help tech businesses. Aakriti shares, “BoringBrands has well-established as an agency for new age businesses and practically gets 4 to 5 businesses every week to work with us. This made Anshul and I realize the potential that was missing out. After speaking with mentors and guides like Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Ambarish Raghuvanshi – we decided to launch a product which could help new age businesses and communications professionals manage their campaigns on public relations effectively. This resulted in the launching of Wizikey with a vision to help 20,000 businesses in the next 5 years.”

Having run a successful new-age communications company in the form of BoringBrands, the two realized that the PR industry was barely scratching the surface of its true potential. With social media and digital marketing seamlessly integrating tools for measurability, analytics and ML, young PR professionals in India were still struggling with outdated media lists, manually created reports and unreachable journalists. The genesis of Wizikey was not just to solve these problems for PR people but also enable smaller brands to independently create media mileage for themselves.

“The timing is just right as we have a digital industry – which has scaled to thousands of crores and helping in behavioral change of Indian businesses in running campaigns on their own. The first hire a company in the growth phase today does is look for the maverick guy who could scale digital campaigns on Facebook and Adwords. We believe, if Wizikey is built on similar premise, it could be used to run parallel campaigns on Public relations as well,” Anshul further adds to the conversation.

“Second, Indian businesses are willing to write now. Thanks to LinkedIn and Quora, businesses now are writing quite well. They just need a good distribution tool to take their stories to right audience – and this is where we are noticing Wizikey scoring very big. We have an early stage entrepreneur using Wizikey to send his opinion pieces to the HR beat and he has now got more than 7 articles published. This with no human intervention at all!” says Anshul.

A Perspicuous User Interface

Wizikey is Slack meets Mailchimp for communications professionals and business owners. It is working on Slack like ability to allow teams work collaboratively on a PR campaign (agency, founder, communication professionals, etc.) and Mailchimp to help the team to know how their campaigns are doing, let them do A/B testing on various media and journalists, on the messaging etc.

Communication professional just needs to start a “New Pitch” – and can add journalists via 3 methods-

1. Their own journalist connects.

2. Pre-filled and real time media list – being customized regularly by Human + Data Analytics methodology and

3. Searching from Wizikey database of journalists – we currently have close to 7,500 media available

Wizikey Media database:

Pitch section:

Wizikey coverage report: For every pitch – coverage report/dossier can be generated in a click of a button – saving hours of time.

Contriving Database; Combating Spamming

To create a strong and extensive structured set of data for the platform, Wizikey have pitched in lots of contacts from the industry. Moreover, to ensure the tool functions without the spamming issue mostly faced by everyone in the industry. “We have great media friends that we have worked with in the past and we really understand their problem as well. Whether it is a national editor or a freelance journalist – they are all fighting SPAM. In fact this takes away 1 to 3 hours every day of a journalist working day. This is HUGE! With Wizikey, we are working with media houses and journalists to ensure they are getting relevant and specific information only. We will be deploying rating systems which will ensure a business with rating below than specific will not be able to reach out to the media house/journalist inbox,” avers Anshul.

The Working Model

Wizikey is working for the businesses which want to do things in data driven manner. Those, who want their teams to work on productive activities and not wasting time making dossiers or just finding out what journalists are interested or not.

Hence the development of product is also happening in 2 parts:

Managing all the team’s work: (subscription is currently free)

Brand box – Where all the documents: leadership pictures, profiles, boiler plates can be saved and used. This will help businesses to send a press release under 5 minutes from mobile itself.
Campaign report – All the repost like which journalist was reached, who opened their email and what conversations are ongoing with media will be available real time for everyone. This will ensure quick action and message control and not wasting time in creating reports for team members.

CRM for Journalists (Subscription is starting at Rs. 7500 per 25 reach-outs)

Essence of public relations is in managing relations with media. A major emphasis is being played to provide a dashboard to businesses so that they know how to do that.

Wizikey database: A business will be able to discover the right media for their pitch. Premium customers can also request for the right lists and our success team can generate with a week.
Wizikey CRM – Businesses will get the analytics on who are top journalists who open their pitches (hence they are keen to hear more); writing on keywords/industry – hence they are must reachouts.

“We are proud team which learnt in India, made in India, and now deploying in India. We are going to conduct Webinars, PR courses and even offline teaching sessions as part of Wizikey to help businesses learn the nuances of storytelling and be ready to take on the world,” the founders conclude.