Weekly With The Consultant — Issue #2
Your media kit should also contain information about your company leadership, including a demonstration of your personal brand (especially if you’re the entrepreneur who created the business).
Create a Media Kit
Once you’ve started building a foundational reputation through media collaboration, and you’ve established a reputation for yourself online, you’ll start receiving press inquiries from journalists.
That’s when a media kit comes in handy. A media kit doesn’t have any formal requirements. Instead, it serves a simple purpose; giving potential journalists and publishers all the information and assets they need in order to represent your brand appropriately in their material.
Some brands have a .zip file of this information, while others simply consolidate it onto a single page of their website.
Your story
Your media kit needs to tell your “brand story,” which I touched on a bit earlier. Here, you’ll need to present this information with a bit more formality, so it’s clear to the average user where you stand.
Mission/vision. You’ve already got an idea of what your mission and vision are, but now you’ll need to boil them down to a pair of concise statements. Both cover your goals and describe your business, but try not to overlap them or confuse them with one another. These are distinct ideas and should be treated as such. Mission and vision statements are more important to your media kit than a tagline or a company description because they’re focused on how your business operates from a conceptual standpoint.
History. You don’t need to get into detail here, but there should be some kind of timeline for your business present in your media kit. Your date of founding is essential, as are any significant moments (such as going public or getting acquired).
Be sure to back these significant events up with links to relevant content, such as previously published press releases, or even blog entries if you have them.
Leadership. Your media kit should also contain information about your company leadership, including a demonstration of your personal brand (especially if you’re the entrepreneur who created the business). Any prominent partners, creative leads, or noteworthy personnel should also be listed — this will help broaden your perceived influence, and may provide more press opportunities based on connections of connections. Brief bios should also be included, along with information of your previous expertise.
Statistics and information
Journalists love to cite facts and figures, so the more objective data points you can include about your brand, the better. This also further incentivizes them to link back to your site, as they’ll need a citation for the statistical data meaning it can help your SEO campaign.
To give you some ideas for what types of data to post, here are some suggestions:
Date of founding. The date of founding is a given, and any other important dates should be prominent.
Customers and/or revenue. Listing your number of current customers (or clients, or subscribers) gives a sense of scale to your business, as does your operating revenue (though you may not wish to disclose this information for privacy reasons).
Growth. Even if you aren’t comfortable posting exact revenue information, you should still be able to post your growth rates as an expression of a percentage. How much has your business grown, year over year? How fast do you expect to grow in the near future?
Readership and following. Any information about your readership or following is helpful. Your number of email subscribers, followers on social channels, and blog visitors are all great stats to sample here.
Publisher relationships. You’ve been published before, both on news sources and niche sites, so show off that experience! Make a list of the publishers you’re affiliated with, showcasing logos whenever you can — it makes a big impact.
Brand/client relationships. You can also ask permission from any major clients you have to include their names in your media kit. The logos of Fortune 500 companies make a big impression.
SEE YOU NEXT TIME
