Recently, we spoke to Anand Vaidya, Global Lead – PR & Corporate Communications at WebEngage talk about what challenges a global SaaS company faces for their PR and Media monitoring. And, how is WebEngage measuring all their and its competitors’ mentions on a single intuitive PR dashboard?
Watch the 7-minute video below, or, check out the full transcript below.
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Transcript
Tell us about WebEngage
WebEngage is a B2B SaaS company. We help brands with their customer retention. WebEngage as a tool is divided essentially into three major parts the customer data platform, the engagement tool and a very powerful personalization engine.
We worked with more than 600 brands globally in the Middle East, India, and the South East Asia region and we have clients across the new economy start-up folks as well as the old economy legacy enterprise businesses.
What is your role at WebEngage?
I lead global comms at WebEngage internally and externally and also look after the associations, the advocacy side of things and to a large extent the events and speaker relationship side of things. We do a whole bunch of events that involve community building for Retention Marketing.
Challenges before Wizikey
As a B2B SaaS company. You have plans across different verticals so to be able to keep a tab on what’s being spoken about, to be able to understand what’s being written about the ecosystem becomes very difficult.
At the same time from a geography perspective he challenges are natural from a college because as you progress from one country to another, the nuances of the media, how they, how the media is consumed and how the media rights for its audience become difficult becomes different.at the same time, there’s a whole bunch of language barrier that comes in.
How do you essentially put all of this on a single PR dashboard to actually make sense out of it has been, has been a challenge
when we started off, which I put it in as many words got solved when we got physically on board so that information for me to make decisions is now available on a single PR Dashboard
Try for yourself – Measure all of your and your competitor’s media mentions in one single intuitive PR dashboard – Register Now and increase your organic mentions.
Need for PR Software
When we started building the machinery for Pr we realized the most important element that was perhaps needed the most was a tool that can help us track the conversations in the system, what the competition is talking about and be able to measure the impact of PR on a periodic basis.
To be able to tell us whether or not we’re on the right track or what kind of course correction is required and things like that.
Choosing Wizikey over other Software
There’s a whole bunch of different players within the industry that do practically pretty much the same job that Wizikey does. The only difference being Wizikey turns out to be very intuitive and it gives me exactly what I’m looking for
to be able to, you know, measure the kind of work that we’re doing and I’ll give you an example.
I’m talking about early 2010 when I started off, I used to work for a B2C company which had a whole bunch of news which is not exactly relevant. This includes stock news, random mentions and other articles and things like that.
So there is this mechanism of qualifying all the articles that had been captured by the, by the tracking service, which required a whole bunch of manual intervention which required us to sit through and skim through all the articles who actually understand whether this is an absolutely relevant article, somewhat relevant article, not relevant at all and you know things like that and the whole different metrics to it as we go.
But the times have changed and, we were surprised, to see that most of the other players may not have actually reached that majority, but Wizikey had.
Now with a simple modification of a project that I see within the PR dashboard, I can make sure some of the articles that are not really relevant and may not really impact the share of voice can be excluded very easily or at the same time included if they are relevant from that perspective.
And this stands not just for the WebEngage as a company but also some of the others industry peers that we are tracking for. So that has kind of helped us, very, very dearly.
But has also helped us is the fact that the PR dashboard is so intuitive with, gives me all the graphs and all the information in a single dashboard and on a single screen which I can just explain to the management and in as simple words as it can get.
Try for yourself – Measure all of your and your competitor’s media mentions in one single intuitive PR dashboard – Register Now and increase your organic mentions.
Favourite feature on Wizikey
PR is still yet to evolve where we can come to a point where attribution can possibly become real.
Now I’ve seen, I’ve been following the developments of Wizikey purely because we use it day in and we have to understand how we are faring as compared to the peers in the industry and things like that.
But I did see a very huge step in the right direction when Wizikey started the google analytics feature.
Which helped me understand if I put out a particular announcement, how many people have actually come in and visited the website. Now this might not give me an absolute attribution from a viewpoint of knowing weather this is through a Press release or through an article also op-ed or various other media sources.
So while that is hard to identify at this point in time, but I can tell you for a fact. I don’t think many people have been thinking in this direction. How do you start attribution for all your new efforts that you’re going?
What sets Wizikey apart
What Wizikey has been able to do that sets it apart from its competition is the fact that it helps me gather a whole bunch of information about the journalists that are writing on the topic of my interests and the brand’s interest across different publications.
While Wizikey also helps us reach out to these journalists through the dashboard itself. We don’t necessarily use that service at this point in time, but it still gives us enough valuable information about:
Who this Journlist is?
What they’ve written in the past.
How many stories that written in the past?
What does the trend look like when this particular journalist is writing the stories?
It helps us devise the messaging and the story pitch and the concept note in a way that, you know, helps me increase that number of organic mentions that that will probably get in the next six months and that’s something that we’re consciously working towards.
This is where Wizkey has played a very important role in helping us not just map the stories and the conversations that are happening, but also the people who are writing about them.
Try for yourself – Measure all of your and your competitor’s media mentions in one single intuitive PR dashboard – Register Now and increase your organic mentions.