Episode 339: Are you ready for media?
In this episode, Fiona talks about the essential components of a media kit. Whether you're a small business owner looking to pitch yourself to the media or collaborate with a publication. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
The importance of having a well-prepared media kit
Why high-resolution images are crucial for media coverage
The challenges journalists face in obtaining high-quality images
The role of a media or press kit in simplifying media interactions
Creating consistent brand photos
Themes and boundaries for media discussions
The benefits of having a media kit
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 339 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a quick tip episode, and it's handy if you do not have a huge marketing budget or money to outsource at the moment in your business, or maybe you are reducing costs and bringing agency work back in-house, this is something that you absolutely must have. Stay tuned for that. Before we get stuck, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
As I have mentioned many times on this podcast, if you are new here, thank you for choosing this podcast to listen to. But as I've mentioned before, I have been a journalist for 20 years. I don't do so much of it anymore. Very occasionally I'll write for a publication, but for many years that was a big chunk of my money. Even when I was working for other people, quite often I would still be writing on the side, I'd be writing for all sorts of online publications from Broadsheet, Cool Hunting, The Design Files, Refinery29, like a whole bunch of places. I also wrote for a lot of print publications. Even when Marketing Magazine used to be a print magazine. Remember the days of Yen also overseas, Empty and Shift in Japan and Monocle in the UK and a whole bunch of places.
The point is, with that experience, you used to have to, which is old school, but you used to have to use a CD-ROM to burn high-resolution images. For print applications, you often need a 300 DPI image and 300 DPL, if it's like 10 centimetres or larger. The whole idea is that with print, you need larger, bigger, more dense images because they are printing them and pulling them up, whereas on digital, you don't need to be so big in the resolution. The reason I'm speaking about all of this is that even today, this is back in the day. I'm talking like 2003, 2004, we used to be burning discs all the time at the publications that I worked at because we were trying to get these images and people would be burning discs at their house and everyone would be buying these like big packs of CD ROMs and you'd be burning stuff and sending it through.
You're probably thinking, why? Why are you telling me this? Because even 20 years later, you'll still have issues as a journalist in trying to get high-resolution images from particularly small business owners. If you are a small business owner who wants to pitch themselves to the media, wants to collaborate, wants to get onto a publication or wants to do anything, you want to have a press kit or a media kit ready and available and using formats that are not, I'll attach it to this email and then suddenly you've got an email with like 25 attachments. What you want to have is a Dropbox or a Google Drive or somewhere else that has all the information that anyone writing about you would need to have, including high-resolution images, whether those images of a product or of the people behind the brand or whatever it is.
But in your media or press kit, there are some things that are absolutely essential. Today's tip is thinking about, do you have this ready to go and does it represents your brand or is something that needs a bit of an update. I know in my own business, we have been sending photos, my lovely assistant will be sending photos of me to different publications if I'd written for them or maybe a trade show or something else. We get asked every so often like, “Hey, I need a bio photo of Fiona and I need a written bio and I need a short bio and a long bio.” We have that all sitting in a Dropbox folder. The images that I'd been using for years were old, and I have to say I had three photo shoots booked in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and I just wasn't able to do them because of lockdowns.
In 2019 because of having a baby and just things that happened. But these are the sorts of things that you want to have ready because you don't feel like pitching yourself if you don't have good photos. I used Hilary Walker last year. She came into my house and did like an incredible photo shoot. I've also worked with Caitlin Mills in the past. She's been amazing. The point is, if somebody from the media contacted you for a feature tomorrow, would you have all your ducks in a row? Would you have good information about your brand fact sheets, about your brand new products, or both, and images about the people behind the brand, including especially the figurehead, which would be you? Things like a short bio, long bio, frequently asked questions, response registry, is all that ready to go? If it's not, I would urge you to look at these things and get them ready and to a point that you're happy with.
If that does happen, or if you want to start pitching yourself more, you have it ready to go. What does that look like? A media kit or a press kit, whatever you want to call it, is a folder that includes a lot of information so that the press can take the information in there and pull something together that they're not waiting for or contacting you at the 11th hour for a high res photo. Or as we used to way back in the day, asking you to courier a CD ROM over with the images. Today, we have so many tools out there, like I said, Dropbox or Google Drive, or other places that you can store this information and that you can then just quickly share a link with people and then they can download those photos and use them.
There are also tools and PR platforms that you can be on and have your information there to be shared. But if you're going to do it yourself, you want to think about, firstly, do we have up-to-date images of our staff? That is an important one, and they look consistent. They're not like, Jenny from accounts has sent some photos where her boyfriends cropped off and then Punum from the HR team has got this professional shot, but it's black and white and everyone else is in colour. We've got these photos, but somebody took them at a wedding because we look nice, we've got nice dresses on and it's all very inconsistent. You want to have brand photos that represent you and your brand, and if you need somebody to do your photos, if you are like, I don't know any good photographers, please contact us because we work with quite a few good photographers, but we're going to list a bunch of those in the show notes.
We work with people who are used to going in and taking photos of staff. Quite often staff, unless you are working at a model agency where half the people are models, most people feel awkward getting their photo taken. It is best to give this to a professional to get everyone's photo taken and feel good and feeling fun. They have ways to make people look and feel like they are amazing, even if they're having a crappy day. It's best to just outlay the cost for that and get great professional shots that you then feel comfortable sharing with media or with anyone else that you're sending them out to. In addition to the staff photos, you want to have a single photo of everyone, not just group shots. In particular, if there are joint CEOs or co-founders, you want to have photos together, and photos separate as well.
In addition to that, you want to have a bit of a backstory, like a quick one-pager that tells whoever's reading it, the context of how your business came to be, and the facts. When did it start? Where did it start? Why did it start? What were the products or services you started with? What's the URL? What are your social media handles? What are the contact email addresses that are able to be public? If you had a feature article and then at the bottom they had, which they don't always do, but if they did, to get in contact to discuss your next interior design project, email us, or go to this part of the website, you want to have all that information very easy to find and making sure that it all links correctly. Nothing's broken, nothing's going to an old handle on Instagram that you used to have, but hasn't been updated.
Make sure you have that one-pager that gives people a complete overview. The other things you want to have in there are biographies of people at the top. If it's you, and you want to have a short and long biography about yourself. You want to have it in a tone that you're happy with. This may be something that you outsource to a copywriter or work with a friend to get that tone to a point that you're happy with. A lot of these places will cut and paste your bio for anything that they're doing. You want to make sure that it sounds like you and that you are also happy to read it out if you had to because sometimes you'll go on a podcast or you'll go onto a trade show and you won't always have somebody introducing you and they'll say, “Are you able to just do a quick intro?”
Or they'll put your information up on the slide behind you and you want to make sure that it's all spelled correctly, that it all represents you and your brand. In addition to the bios and the one-pager, you want to also have frequently asked questions. Particularly if you are a product-based business, you may have a whole bunch of frequently asked questions like, where is it made? Who makes it? How did you find your factory? Especially if you are in the sustainability world or anything else like that, you want to have this stuff listed out. It doesn't always happen, but there's less chance of something being misinformation, basically being out there. Lastly, if you are doing anything that is in any way controversial, let's use sustainability as an idea you want to have a response registry.
A response registry is an agreed-upon response. This can happen whether you have somebody outsourcing, like looking after your social media, or you want a response registry that has key questions that might come up, such as, where is this leather from? Is this calf leather or kangaroo skin? How often do these get made? Or how much do you pay? Not that you're necessarily going to say exactly what you pay people, but questions like this can come up when you are saying, we have an ethical supply chain, or we have great working conditions. You want to have the questions that potentially like the curly questions could come up having a response to those. It depends on what your business is and you may not need a response registry, but it's also a good idea just to have that there.
Even if you're working with a PR agency, they will often ask you these questions anyway so that they can prepare answers so that if this comes up in an interview or in any media conversation they're having with a journalist, they know how to answer that and they've got approved language from you. There are lots of other things that you can be putting in your media kit. You may also put in things about your social media statistics, particularly if you're going for a collaboration or influencer job. You'll want to have the breakdown of your social media breakdown of any emails, email information like how many people are on your subscriber base if you have a podcast and you're trying to get media about that, you may have how many downloads, where in the world it's downloaded when you started, what's been your most favourite episode, those sorts of things can help.
Lastly, you want to have themes that you're happy to talk about. These can be just a synopsis of different themes or even just a bullet list of stuff that you'd be happy to talk about. Let's say you're in the pregnancy space. You may have a list of things that you're happy to talk about, including money, finances that you need to sort out before you get pregnant, how to save for IVF, and all the things that you're happy to talk about. You can just have a blanket like, I'm happy to talk about money, which includes finance, budget, savings, working on one income, or being a single parent by choice. You can have things in there that you are happy to talk about and then you can have things you are not happy to talk about.
That last one may not be applicable to you. If you're working with a PR agency, they may say, “Don't talk about that.” All media is good media, or not always, but you want to also have like, where are my boundaries? What will I not talk about if I'm going onto the media or I'm going onto some podcast? This is important stuff to have, even if you are not pitching yourself right now, pulling this stuff together makes it much easier if you do go down the road of pitching yourself, whether it's to get on a panel, whether it's to get on podcast media, or just in your local paper to have that stuff ready to go. You may not share every single file in that folder with the media, but the big ones are to make sure that you've got your fact sheet, your bios and your photos ready to go.
I hope that helps, particularly if you want to get yourself out there more. If you do, make sure that you are checking out Marketing for Your Small Business, because that is all about marketing brand and getting yourself out there and your business growing through marketing. You can find all the information on that course over at marketingforyoursmalbusiness.com. If you want to read this in text format, you can go over to mydailybusiness.com/podcast/339 and see all of the links that we've mentioned there. Thank you so much for reading. I'll see you next time. Bye.
