Indian Startup Wizikey Aims To Work On Targeted PR Campaigns

Gradually, the Communications industry is getting interrupted by technology. Tools that aid our writing and help in generating content are used by all of us; communicating that to the world has largely been manual, with public relations (PR) agencies and corporate communications teams doing the work. And, a large part of it is not metric-driven. In the corporate communications/PR space, substantial budgets are allocated for the same, and dependency is large on communication professionals.

Wizikey helps to make this work of communication more data and metric-driven, promising automation and conversion rates of workflow for those who want to run targeted PR campaigns.

It is founded by Anshul Sushil, formerly a corporate communication professional, the software as a service (SaaS) company aims to address some key tasks in the communication process. “It is widely believed that communications can’t be based on metrics but today technology helps us leverage data and make communications more predictable and metric-driven,” says Sushil.

Being a SaaS product, the startup charges its clients (corporations and other startups) for the services offered on the platform.

“The size of the PR industry globally is $93 billion and so the market is huge,” he adds. So far he has raised around Rs 2.5 crore from Indian Angel Network to get the product to market. Several leading Indian startups and a few corporations are using the product to automate their communications workflow today.

Currently, the product has a network of 25,000 journalists, whose contacts have been taken from multiple publicly available sources and media outreaches undertaken by the company directly with publications or journalists. “All conversations that happen through Wizikey do not reveal the journalist’s actual contact. We mask it with our domain ID and help contain the unnecessary burden of communication on them,” explains Sushil.

For the companies, a dashboard with various details related to a journalist, his/her articles, most discussed, and trending topics along with campaign analytics are given. However, at the moment, communication is just one way on Wizikey. Journalists cannot reach out to companies of their choice for their stories. “Our next step is to enable the other side of communication. We want to give journalists the provision to reach the executives and companies they want for their stories, in a secure way like how companies do today via our product,” says Sushil.

In addition to the product, the company offers PR/ brand management as a service like any other PR agency. “We are the first of our kind in this industry, in India and maybe globally. We are seeing interest in the Western markets as well. However, this is also the challenge as we need to figure out what is in demand, what works and what doesn’t, and include them in product development,” says Sushil. He aims to bring content creators, social media influencers, and other stakeholders in the media ecosystem gradually onto Wizikey. “This way, Wizikey can be a one-stop place for companies for reaching out to various channels within media,” says Sushil.