A media kit is a collection of press about yourself or your brand. This article will discuss how to write a successful press kit.
To create a press kit, you need to gather relevant information for all press outlets, put your content together in a standardized way, and send them out. It's not a manual; it's all about giving yourself the best chance to have your media contacts check out your work, provide content, and share it on social media.
How can it help you get your work in front of the press?
A press kit is the media outlet's PDF of all the marketing materials you've created so far. This includes your social media content, your website, press kits, media clips, and more.
How do you get media coverage? You could write a marketing strategy that is on the back of a napkin, right?
Wrong.
An effective press kit is about a lot more than writing a press release. It has to be organized, and it has to be personalized. It must tell a story about your product or service.
People buy things because they understand the benefits, how they will help them, or how they will solve their problems. It’s your job to tell that story.
It’s hard to get into the media, but it’s easy to lose your audience. A successful press kit that communicates your company’s message will bring you closer to your target audience.
One tip is to make sure your press kit is accessible to a wider audience. Relevant people won’t be able to find the press kit.
Remember, a press kit isn’t just about sharing good stories; it’s about sharing your work. You can use press kits to spread the word about your work.
You can use press kits to build relationships with journalists. You can use press kits to find new prospects.
You can even use press kits to communicate the value of your company to your audience.
Without a press kit, you have nothing to talk about. The press is the people who consume media.
Most people aren’t journalists, but some are. Maybe you can’t get a New York Times journalist to write about your company, but you can reach out to your local paper.
You can approach national media organizations. The media market isn’t limited to the elite.
Your job is to reach out to journalists and tell them about the work you do. You can visually present your case.
Graphic novels are one way to do this. Include pictures, images, videos, or whatever media is relevant to your business.
If you want to write a press kit, here's how to do it the right way
There are many ways to find journalists, but we're not going to go into that now.
There's a simple way to find journalists – contact their editors directly. That's all you need.
Or go to their websites, which will typically have contact information.
Or you can always create a spreadsheet and add the contact info to your database.
If you've been following our articles on media training, you'll know we've talked a lot about social media. Social media can be incredibly effective in promoting your brand, and in the right hands can go a long way.
But they are also incredibly easy to misuse, so you need to take responsibility for how they work for you.
The same goes for all of the other media you might have created. Make sure that they are up to date and as accurate as possible. (Don't lie to the media or send them "targeted" content.)
To get a media outlet's attention, you need to create a well-written press kit and quickly get it in front of them. So that's where your email comes in.
Create an email campaign that gives the media a preview of what you've created so far and includes all relevant content. An example of this would be an email campaign of, "here's some content we've created, here's where you can find us online, here's where we would like to be quoted, and here are our social media handles."
This kind of email campaign will not only generate more media attention but will help position you as a thought leader in your field.
With the media contacts, you've already got in your database, create an email campaign that sends out everything you've got to them.
This will require some good time investment, but it will pay off with exposure to your audience ready to hear your message.
Finally, once the media has been exposed to your content and several articles about your business have been written, you need to engage. Engagement is key because to engage with your audience; you need to provide value.
This means providing content that answers questions in several different ways.
That's the kind of engagement you need to be creating.
A few ideas for engagement might be:
Once you've done all of the above, you can sit back and relax. Or you could get busy answering questions.
Because that's the way to really get journalists' attention – by creating an article on their website and being interviewed for the story.
