Does your organization maintain a media kit? If not, you may be losing out on an opportunity to boost brand awareness — and perhaps even your bottom line.
A media kit should provide everything a news organization or advertiser needs to jumpstart a conversation with you. It’s an important first impression that should outline the key facts, figures, and background information. Your media kit should be available somewhere on your website, and you should also have it in compressed folder form to email out with press releases. The trick is to balance having enough information to generate interest without overwhelming your audience with extraneous information.
A media kit should also reflect the identity of the brand. For example, a craft or cooking magazine should employ more creative fonts and designs for their media kit. On the other hand, a medical association should be more straightforward, though that doesn’t mean there’s no room for creativity. While all media kits are unique, they should all have the same basic information.
Going through the time and effort to put together a professional media kit is well worth the effort. And chances are it’s less about creating elements from scratch than it is about organizing the information you already have.
What should a media kit include?
While some organizations have a need for printed media kits, these days media kits are mostly groups of digital files — images, video and text. Every media kit must have an introduction to your organization, its key values and a pre-approved boilerplate bio for organizations to use. Your “About Us” page can be a good starting point for building this boilerplate information if you don’t already have it. It may also be beneficial to have a fact sheet outlining common questions, bios of executives and even testimonials.
No matter what information you choose to include, your media kit should portray the brand in the best possible way. Do you have the largest circulation magazine in your niche? Have you been ranked highly among competitors by an industry group? Include the verifiable statistics that set your organization apart.
Lastly, contact information is crucial. Remember, the goal of the media kit is to start a conversation. Make sure they know who to reach out to for more information.
For Press
The better your media kit, the easier it is for news organizations to report on your organization — and the less likely you are to receive a barrage of last-minute information request emails.
To help tell your story, your media kit can also include links to previous media coverage and press releases your organization has released.
While the media kit page on your website can include a lot more information, you should also have a one-sheet or backgrounder that you can attach to emails, especially for news organizations. This should include boilerplate information as well as addresses, media contacts and any other information needed to report on your organization.
Beyond written content, it’s also important to have professional high-resolution images — from your brand logo and products to executive headshots and more. Quality is the key. A news report framing your company as innovative becomes ironic if the images they use from your media kit are grainy and low-quality. Slick media kits will even include photos pre-sized for major social media platforms.
For Advertisers
For media organizations and publishers, the primary media kit audience is often advertisers. In these instances, promotion is even more important.
The goal is still similar for advertisers: to jumpstart a conversation. But if your media kit is primarily there to lure advertisers, its content should be tailored accordingly.
Audience information is essential. Provide the key audience information for all platforms that might attract advertisers, from your website and print publication to your social media pages. If possible, go beyond numbers to include demographic information as well.
The more focused audience information you have, the better you can attract advertisers. You could even outline what you can and can’t accommodate from an advertising perspective. At the same time, it’s important to not get too deep into the weeds here or give away too much information; a media kit is more for public relations than journalistic transparency.
No matter what you ultimately include in your media kit, all of the information should be easily accessible on your website and updated often. A media kit with inaccurate or outdated information can do more harm than good.
