Your Press Kit will only be as on-target as your understanding of your best target audiences and the media that influences them. Before you can identify the right media to target, you must know who your prospective customer is. Identifying your prospective customer narrows down the media with which you want to create a relationship, because it will place priority on the media that effectively reaches your prospective customer.
Strategy Leads Development
Begin your Press Kit strategy by asking yourself these questions:
• Who is your customer?
• Who is your media audience?
• What events, products or services do you want to promote?
• What crises are recent or ongoing?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you build your Press Kit in the following ways:
• You will be able to prioritize the kinds of facts, historical items, milestones and executive experience that will be most relevant
• You will be able to prioritize which types of Press Kit sheets to create first
• You will be better able to anticipate the kinds of routine questions reporters for your best media outlets may ask and the kind of facts that will be most useful
A Word About Control
Some companies fear that if they create a Press Kit that they will lose control of the media cycle. This fear is compounded if they post the Press Kit online. The truth is, if you don’t have a Press Kit, you have already lost control of the story.
Without a Press Kit to use for fact-checking and details, a reporter on deadline defaults to using whatever information he can find. That information may not be correct. Or, a reporter may leave something out completely—something beneficial to you—if he can’t verify details at the last minute. By creating your Press Kit and making it easily available, you retain control over the accuracy of the information. If the information is factual, don’t worry about who is downloading it. Everything in your Press Kit should be a matter of public record.
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Tags: DreamSpinner, Gail Martin, marketing, PR, small business, social media, solopreneur, start-up companies
