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A press kit, sometimes called a media kit, is a collection of information about a person, product, company or event sent to the media as a promotional tool. It’s all the information a journalist needs to write about the glories of you in one convenient place.
Your press kit can be created one of two ways – hire a p.r. firm or freelance writer / indie public relations pro, or you can do it yourself. Although I do these as one of the ways I make some dough, I’m going to shoot myself in the foot and recommend you do it yourself. You know … ‘cuz this blog is all about low and no cost marketing and promotion stuff.
Developing your very own press kit may seem a daunting task at first, but it’s really not all that tough. You just need to get a bit organized, make a list of tasks and dig in.
Let’s take a peek at the ingredients of a typical press kit.
The Backgrounder
This part carries historical information about the company, individual, product, event, band or whom or whatever the kit is about. You’ll highlight your product or service offerings and why the entity exists. Add in your value proposition and maybe a mission statement and you’re good to go.
Oh … and a quick word about mission statements. Make it authentic and relevant … please. I read so many that try to sound overly intelligent or are so abstract they make little sense. Let me add in a bit of advice from brilliant adman, David Ogilvy in The Unpublished Ogilvy (Crown Publishers):
“Never use jargon words like reconceptialize, demassification, attitudinally. They are the hallmarks of a pretentious ass.”
The Fact Sheet
The Fact Sheet is pretty much what the title says – A listing specific features and benefits, statistics, research highlights and such. Reporters love facts, so make it easy for them. It may contain office locations, number of employees, key clients, number of awards won, etc. It all that quantifiable data.
Biographies
In some instances, you can cover key bio in the backgrounder. For example, if the kit is about an individual. In other cases, it makes more sense to create a “Bios” page. This is a couple of paragraphs about each key player in the business. The bio should list the person’s title, key responsibilities, relevant education and experience.
Products / Services
This is a page or pages that outline your key services and/or products. Some companies will substitute this with a brochure. The main thing to remember here is focusing on benefits, not features. Lots of people get hung up with their offering’s swell bells and whistles, but that’s not usually what’s important to clients, prospects and readers-in-general. They want to know how what you offer will solve their problem, make their life easier, make them look good and such. In essence, what’s in it for them and why should they care.
Past Press Coverage
Got press? Include it. Journalists are usually more comfortable printing something about you when they know somebody else took the risk before them. Reprints from magazines are handy for this and they look better than copies with shadowy spine folds or crooked placement.
Press Releases
Toss in your most recent press releases to fill things out and bring the recipient up to speed with current news.
Photos & Graphics
These can be key personnel photos, product photos, portfolio images, band images, and such. Whatever you have or can get to add visuals to a story. The media likes to punctuate stories with images, so help them out.
Images can be hard copies or digital, but the latter is preferred since most (if not all) publications are produced electronically now days. Make sure your images have enough resolution for print reproduction. The rule of thumb is 2x the line screen of the publication. For most magazines that means at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch). Newspapers use a coarser screen so they can be 120 – 200 ppi. When in doubt, go higher. Images can go down in resolution, but not up without a loss in quality.
Logos should be in vector format such as an eps. Vectors are resolution independent and can be scaled up or down without any loss in quality. It’s a good idea to provide both CMYK and spot color versions.
Collateral Advertising Materials
These might be a postcard, flyer, brochure, print ad, etc. A printed newsletter would come under this heading, too.
Media contact information
The big boys and girls have public relations firms and/or a p.r. department to use as their media contacts. But, if you’re an independent professional or small business this is likely going to be you. Give the recipient several ways to contact you – phone, email, fax, of course, but perhaps also Skype and instant messaging services too. I’d shy away from carrier pigeons. The tend to be a bit messy.
After you’ve collected and written all your kit’s content, it’s time to think about what it will look like. You have a couple of options here – hard copies or digital.
Hard Copies
If you opt for a hard copy, you can go all out and have the thing commercially printed. You could also go broke. These suckers get expensive. To do it on the relative cheap, swing over to the office supply and scope out some nice pocket folders. See if you can find something unique with some character to it. First impressions count for a lot. The interior pages can be copied (clean copies, please) or printed on-demand off your inkjet or laser printer. Design a compelling label for the cover. Crack ‘N Peel label stock is good for this. You can find some nice labeling stock at an office supply store. Just be sure it’s applied straight on the cover unless it’s supposed to be on an angle. Toss in your photos, brochures and other materials and voila! You’ve got yourself a press kit.
To be frank … oh, wait, Frank’s my father. To be honest, I don’t like this method for a few of reasons. First, it’s time consuming. Second, stuff tends to fall out of pocket folders. Third, you’re asking the journal to re-key all your copious copy. In the previous post, I mentioned about doing what you can to make things easier for them. So, I see hard copies as somewhat counter-productive.
Digital Form
Perhaps it’s because I’m a certifiable geek who sits in front of a computer for 16 or so hours each day, but I like digital. It’s just plain ‘ole easier and usually less costly.
Create a folder and call it “Press Kit,” mostly because that’s what it’s for, and put it on your desktop. Depending on how much content you have, you may want to create sub folders for your images, graphics, pdfs of brochures and ads, along with various content sections.
Take all your content, that you created digitally in the first place, and save it to the proper spot in your press kit folder. Although Word is the standard, you might consider something more generic like RTF format, just in case. You don’t want to lose a press opportunity because a writer is on some whiz bang proprietary publishing software and couldn’t open your files.
You’re going to burn the folder contents to a disk, so you want to give some quality thought to a disk label and a jewel case cover. If you have stellar graphic design skills, that others will agree with, do it yourself. If not, you really should hire a designer. Sure, it’s cost you some clams, but hey, we’re talking image here. This isn’t a place to skimp. You want to put your best foot forward.
Don’t just copy the “Press Kit” folder to the disk and burn it. That’s an extra step for the recipient. Remember what I wrote about making things easy? If you dump the folder on the drive, Joe Journalist has to open the disk, open the “Press Kit” folder to start to get to your content. Just select the files and folders and drag them to the disk to burn. This way your files and content folders will be at the root of the drive.
The nice thing about a digital press kit is:
- They’re cheap to produce on CD or DVD
If you want to get really fancy, put them on a jump drive (a.k.a. flash drive, key drive, thumb drive) that has your logo and some other info like a tagline, contact info, etc. Pretty snazzy, eh? - The journalist can copy and paste the content
- They’re usually less expensive to mail or ship
- You can put the content on your site for download
And there you have it. Press kits on the cheap with a minimum of headaches.
Next up … How to find newsy bits for press releases
