Creating a Media Kit For Your Company

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Jeremy, I'm a designer, content creator, and YouTuber from Sydney, Australia. I've been in the creative industry for 10 years now, and I want to share with you today on how to create your own media kit for your company and your brand. Some of the things that you'll learn in this class is that I'll teach you how to structure and package up your media kit, the best practices, and do's and don'ts. I'm going to share some tips and tricks on sending your media kit out to influencers and content creators. I'm going to share some tips on how to design a nice media kit that flows and is easy to understand. For the class project, I'll be sharing a checklist with you which you could follow along as a guideline to make your media kit process very easy. At the end of the class, you should have a functioning media kit ready to send out to collaborators to grow your business. Enroll in the class today if you want to learn more about creating your own media kit for your company. 2. What is a Media Kit?: [MUSIC] What is a media kit? We've heard the terms press kit, media kit. There's probably other names for it, but typically it's a document sharing all the vital information about your brand or business, so when you send it to someone, they can get a birds-eye view and glimpse of all the data, the insights, and what your business does. The reason why you need a media kit is that it's easy to send a quick PDF to an influencer or a content creator that shares the gist of what you do and what you're offering in one specific document, and it allows them to spend some time looking over if they actually want to work with you because it's easier instead of going back and forth to the emails, you can just send them a media kit and it's really easy to work with. Now here are some examples of some media kits that I've seen. This one's from Laita.com. This one is a good example of how you can craft a media kit and you can see it looks very professional. You can look at the imageries, the topography, the structure, how they lay it out, and you can get some ideas on that one. I do also have my own personal media kit when I reach out to brands, or brands reach out to me. This is the one that I sent at the moment. I'm always constantly updating it with new insights and data and also updating my packages and pricing all the time as well. This is how I lay it out and design it and I create that within Illustrator. Now one of the things you want to do before actually moving forward with designing or creating a media kit is actually clarifying your goals. What is the objective you're trying to achieve? What are you trying to communicate with your brand? What type of collaborators you want to work with? What is the goal as a brand awareness, is that lots of traffic, is it to get sign-ups to a workshop or a webinar? You need to really define it clear on what you're trying to achieve when it comes to collaborating with content creators because each content creator is different. They have a different style, a different vibe and when you want to work in them, you need to make sure that you're clear on what you want to achieve when you're negotiating a campaign. The second thing that you want to do is actually identify your target audience. Once you've done that, then you can specifically nail down specific creators with that type of audience that you want to reach. Maybe your audience is more of a female audience that spends time in lifestyle brands, or maybe skincare or beauty, or maybe you're a more masculine brand and you'll want to focus more on men's grooming products maybe, and maybe they're older men from 35-45. Think about the demographics, think about the psychographics, what are the pains? What are the challenges? What are the future goals and dreams? Thinking like this will help you nail down what is the best creators and strategy for you before moving on into crafting a just generic media kit. Now one of the first things you can do is write down your goals and also create a user persona. Figure out what type of content creators you want to work with. Is it females? Is it a males? Is it young people? Is it older creators? Is it TikTok creators? Is it Instagram creators? Make a list of who you want to target, your main user collaborator, but then also thinking about your generic target audience that you're trying to reach for your product that will help you get started. 3. What's in a Media Kit?: [MUSIC] What should you actually include in your media kit? You got to remember that a lot of content creators and influencers are busy. They're doing a lot of brand deals. They're probably working with clients. They also creating content on a daily basis, most likely recording videos for YouTube or TikTok or whatever it is. They need to have a simple media kit that's not long, but it's actually easier to read. That's short, that's brief, that's clean and has the essential information that you have about your brand and business before working with them, I'm all about making things simple and keeping it really legible and just straightforward. I don't like fluffing about. I just want to get the data, get the numbers, get the benefits, get the offer, and see if I want to work with you. That's what you have to do when you're crafting your media kit. Now he is typically what you should include in a media kit from a company and brand point of view, not so much from a creative point of view. Typically you want to have about your brand. You also want to have any benefits that someone will get from working with you. Maybe you're giving away a free subscription or maybe you're giving a nice referral commission rate. It's also good to mention like who you've worked with, other influences or past work examples that you have or campaigns that you've worked on. You also want to have the best practices that do's and don'ts when working with the brands that might come after. It doesn't necessarily have to be in your media kit. You want to make sure that the content creator knows what not to say and you probably have brand guidelines. You want to make sure that those brand guidelines are clear sometimes you can also mention a road-map. Maybe you're still in the early stages of your startup or business and you want to mention a road-map of where you're going in the future. You can mention that in a slide if you'd like. You also want to have things like the payment details, how they'll get paid, the timely schedule. If you have a specific campaign or product launch that you're happening, you need to have timing set out as well. You also want to have the contact details and the next steps. Typically you might want to jump on a call and get into the details and ask questions and stuff like that. That's typically what you'll have in the media kit. You can also include things like insights and your social media stats as well. How your platform and you can talk about those things as well. That probably matters so degree. Obviously these are just the basic things that I would include, but you can obviously expand upon that. Just remember, keep things short and sweet and make sure the document is not too long. Now what you want to do is start to plan out the structure of your media kit. First you will have a cover and then you might have the about page and so on. Make sure you start to outline your structure and what you're going to include in your media kit. After that, what I want you to do is actually gathered the content from your brand guidelines, from your team, from your brand assets, whatever you have, and start to get those insights and data or the content for the media kit. 4. How to Design a Media Kit: How should you design your media kit to make it stand out? Now, obviously, you have a generic template media kit that you can send out to many creators, but sometimes you want to tailor it to a specific creator. They might have a bigger following, they might have a smaller following. It just depends on who you're working with, so you have to change the name, change the text, make it personalized. Because when personalizing things for the creator, it just feels like it's not spam. It feels like there's a connection there. It feels like you're trying to build a partnership, not just a collaboration, so try to build strategic partnerships when you're communicating with influencers or collaborators. Remember, this is all about your brand perception. If you design a nice media kit, then someone's going to perceive you as professional. They're going to perceive you as an authority and they want to work with you because they know that you're actually invested into your design, into the content, and into everything like that. Because sometimes when brands reach out to me, I know that they don't attach a media kit sometimes, or the email looks dodgy or they don't have a profile picture on Gmail, or they didn't have an e-mail signature, and so that puts me off and makes me question, is this a real brand that I want to work with? Because then I start getting a bit sauce, so make sure that you project that professionalism, and that you are someone that's easy-going and easier to communicate with. I want to share with you five design tips that you can implement in designing your media kit. Number 1 is you want to follow your visual brand guidelines and most likely you're working with a company and they have a brand guideline from your design team, or maybe you have to design your own. Typically you want to think about the brand colors, the topography, and fonts that you're using. Any image, style, or photography that you're using. You might be using stock images or whatever it is, so get clear on what your brand vibe is and personality and inject that into the media kit and make sure that it just speaks your brand and also keeps things consistent and own brand so people know, I remember this. They can tell straight away, they can recognize you from a mile away or when they're looking in their computer, they can see like, I know that logo or that color, etc. Number 2 is use compelling imagery. You can get images of sites like Unsplash or Shutterstock or Depositphotos, depending on what subscription or what you have. But they is free sites out there, but use imagery, use illustrations if you want, or even icons. That's going to lift up the overall design and it's going to feel really cool and it's going to make it fun. Number 3 is, have the most essential information. Don't just add filler words in there or texts that people don't really care about. Make sure that it's easy to understand what your brand's about, what you're offering and the goals that you're trying to achieve. Next, you also want to choose the right file type, so make sure that you're exporting your files as a PDF and that's easy to open on most computers and Mac and PC. Generally, I'll design something in Illustrator or InDesign and actually export it as a PDF instead of just an image. You can do that in Canva as well. That's going to allow you to just edit it. If you have Adobe Acrobat, which is super cool, maybe you want to change some text up, makes it super easy and flexible and compatible with any programs and apps. Then lastly is the format. What format should you design? I typically go for 1080 by 1920, or you can get something that is a little bit less. It's more shoulder and compact. You can get 1080 by 1350. I'm more of a portrait mode instead of landscape. Make it for digital use. Say, you're not going to most likely be printing it because you'll be sending it out. People want it to computer, they working from home. There are a few ways you can actually design your media kit. There's a few cool ones that I like getting on sites like Creative Market Design Cuts, which already have pre-made templates for you that you can grab and use and start to build from, and then check your content and then add your brand style to it. You can also design your own from scratch using things like Canva, Crello, Adobe Experience, or if you do have design experience, then I suggest you're using Illustrator or InDesign because that's really great for long-form content and you can have pages and easy to edit later on. I'm actually in Adobe Illustrator and I'll show you how my file looks like. This is my file, you can see all the artboard has got the cover and other details here. As you can see, we've got the stats, so I can easily move into here and start to move things around, drag and drop images if I want to pay stuff as well, I can edit the text really easily, so it makes it super easy to edit things. I love being able to look at my iPods and change colors around, so maybe I want to change the background or whatever it is. I love having that ability just to do that really quickly. This is my template that I'll use. What I want you to do is make a template. If you're going to use Canva, there's plenty of templates that you can use there and save it. What you want to do is just work with that template. Then you want to do is start to design the pages out, define the cover, the style, the colors, add all those things in and then start to put the images, icons, and anything else that you want to add in there. That's what you need to do to start designing a media kit. 5. 5 Common Mistakes: [MUSIC] Here are five common mistakes to avoid when creating your media kit for your company. Number one is that your media kit is too long. Remember, people are busy, they don't want to sit there reading through their PDFs and emails all day. Make sure that it's short that it's succinct, that it's clear and easy to read through. Number two is a missing vital information. Make sure you don't hold back and make sure that you put all the information that you need to work with that person. Whether it's the pricing or the rates or the commission rate or the benefits. Also another thing that sometimes most brands don't include a link to their logos and brand guidelines and that makes it annoying because they now have to go back and forth and have to get a link from Google Docs or they might send me an email later on with all the details and it just gets messy. I like to have everything in one place. You can interject links to Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever when you're sending that and makes it really easy to work with them later on down the track once you're moving forward. Number three is actually transparency. Some business want to hide their key statistics or key data points and the numbers, but just be transparent and open. I think that's the best policy to have because I'm a businessman, I'm not just the creative, so I'm always getting down to the numbers. How many subscribers do you have, what's the pricing points? All these details it's going to help me understand what would be the best strategy moving forward. Number four is listening competitors and talking about competitors. Obviously, that doesn't really matter because I'm working with you. I'm working with your company. Wasting time talking about other competitors or stuff like that, It's not really going to help but what you could do is mention work examples that you have when working with previous collaborators or content creators and nothing, as well as when you're working with a content creator, it's actually okay to mention links from other Instagram or TikTokers with video ideas, that always helps as well get some ideas just as a starting point when we were working on the content. Number five is not being relevant. You want to make sure that you understand the key platforms that people are using. Twitter, Discord, Instagram, TikTok. You want to make sure that you are relevant and that your language is relevant. Use the right language, the right words, the right imagery that is going to connect with that content creator a lot better. We live in a technological world. Everything is fast paced and moving. We have AI now. Youtube is growing. All these platforms are growing with video, short-form video. Make sure that we are relevant when you're talking to influencers. One of the questions that you might have is should you include your prices? Obviously, there will be price brackets and pricing can vary depending on how many followers or subscribers someone has and also the value of the package. You will have to crop specific packages for those people who have brackets on your pricing, but I think it's good to name how much percentage, for example, if it's affiliate program or referral program, maybe you're offering them 30 percent, say that. Or maybe if you're looking at someone with like 50,000 followers that you have a set minimum rate that you start off with. Maybe it's a $1,000 or whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're clear on that but at the end of the day, you can always get on a call with them, talk pricing instead of having it in the media kit, that's fine as well. I think it's really key to always have the ability to negotiate, be open to discussing custom campaigns or custom content and strategies and each country creator is going to be different based on the quality, based on the impressions and reach they can get you. Obviously their experience as well matters and also the connection to their audience, I think that's a big deal, for them to mention your brand or mention your product or service, it's actually a big deal because the audience trust that person to deliver the best quality and to deliver what they trust in. They're putting their trust in you. That's a big deal as well. Then what you want to do is actually review your media kit with your team and make sure that it flows nicely. 6. How to Package Your Kit: [MUSIC] How do you package up and send your media kit? So what you want to do is actually export it as a PDF. This is going to make it easy to send it out in an email or attach it as a file. Once you've done that, you want to have a clear subject line. You can have something like, let's collab, love your content or you can have the name of your brand times their name or their brand, or you can have something like collaboration offer would love to work with you. Be genuine, be friendly, be fun, and try not to be spammy because we always get spam emails and I'm very particular on how things are worded. I make sure that I discretely check it before I put it in the spam. Make sure that it seems legitimate. You want to write a short description of who you are and your brand and then get straight into the point. Maybe you want to connect with them a call or maybe you already attached your media kit in the first email, that's up to you, but it's probably best to get on a call with them if you can or if you know that there are a big trader, they don't have much time, they're busy, then you can send your media kit in the first email that you send them. Here's a quick example of a brand that reached out to me. It was for a freelance platform. It was a simple email that aligned to just say collaboration offer. They said, "Hello, Jeremy". Always mention the creator's name. Make it personable. Then she said, ''Hey, this is the website,'' this is what they're about. Then they would love to connect on a collab if you're interested. They said let's discuss it. It's an open-ended question that I've been discussing. I could jump on a call or maybe just even email. But it's just a quick email introduction. It looks legit. The email is good. For me that was great. That's typically how you can structure out your emails. Now I've got email templates in my notion board, where I send out to brands, you can do that too for your business. Make sure that you have templates that you can use as a basic one when you're working, website link, or your link to your social so they can quickly browse your brand. Typically when I work with a brand, I want to see what they're about. I look at their website, I look at the design, I look at the product, see if it's the right fit for my audience because I know straight away if it's a right fit or not. Make sure that you have your links in the email. You want to format it very clearly. You can bold things or use dot point list, that's fine as well. Just make sure it's easy to scan through because remember, people scan emails, they're not going to sit there and read a whole long offer. You can do the offer in the media kit or on the core. What I want you to do is create a basic email template that you can change the names and swap out certain information and make it easy just to send out when you're sending out to all these different creators. 7. How to track responses: Now you can use any app that you like. It could be Asana, it could be Airtable, it could be Google Sheets if you want to be simple. It doesn't matter, as long as you have a simple and clear database that has all the relevant information of the creators and influences that you're working with me. For me, Notion is great because I can be really organized and I can see everything at a glance, I can customize our properties, the database on the fly, and I can actually add custom filters that allows me to filter out any unnecessary information and only see which brands I'm currently working with. Now, the key things that I do input into this database is the contact details like the email and name, sometimes I add their website and I also add the platform because sometimes when I reach out to a brand, you reach out via Twitter, or Instagram, or email, and so you want to remember which platform you reached out to them. Sometimes you might reach out on all platforms just to get their attention because they might be super busy and bombarded with work, and so you want to make sure that you can identify quickly where was the previous message so you can follow up with that content creator. Now for me, this is what my Notion Brand Outreach board looks like. I've just called it Brand Outreach, but you can call it Influencer List, or Collaboration List, or whatever you want. Here's what it looks like, I have a column for relationships, so is it a returning customer or client? Is it a returning brand or is it a new one? I've put the company names here, so you can see I've got a whole list of different ones, which is super cool. I've got their links to their website so I can remember what type of Apple products they have. I've got the names and emails and sometimes I don't even have that because I don't need it. I've got the channel, so you can see with Notion, you can add simple tags. I can always go in here and I can go to email or website, or maybe I reached out on Twitter, or whatever it is, and so I can easily do that, and I can just click the X to turn the tags off as well, super quick and easy. I've got a contacted and responded list, so I can see if I've actually sent out an email and if I've got a response back, and this is a really good way to make sure that I can see who's on board and who isn't yet. Then I'd like to see where I'm at in the next step phase, so I have a column for that, so I know I have to book a call with them, or maybe you want to just get on a chat or meet up for coffee, whatever it is you can customize that. You can see here I've got responses here like a follow up, or maybe they're not interested, I just want to make sure that I'm informed. Then you might have a CRM, so sometimes if it's a project we're going to work on straight away, then I'll import all their details into another board which is like a CRM, and this just keeps the project collaboration moving forward. Now, what I want you to do is create a list of 20-30 influences and collaborators that you want to work with, and obviously, just start off with that, but build it over time and use Google Sheets or create a Notion Board if your company uses Notion, create that list and make sure there's a template that you can use, so you can use it in the future and make it really easy to input data. Make sure you do that, so you could start working with Content Creators. 8. Set Up Your Resource Links: One thing you need to do is setup a place for your resources, your media kit annual files that can be accessed very easily, you don't want to have to go back and forth in emails, not knowing what file to send. Now, when it comes to providing the resources and the Medicare files, you need to have a clear space where you provide these files, typically on your website would be really great. You want to give easy access to your influences, creators, and also any PR agency. Some things that you can include is actually having your most recent logos, so a high-quality, transparent PNG would do. Usually we include a white version, a black version, and then the full-colored version of the logo. This allows the content creator to actually use that in a video, in a design, in whatever they're creating. You can also supply things like team head shots so you can have high resolution JPEG of your team, some nice portraits really do well in case like a PI, I just needs to use that. Showing the company overview and brief history, this just allows people to see where the company has come from and how it's grown over the years. Just keeping it simple, short, and brief in this section is fine. Also, a fact sheet really does help, having a glance at all the numbers and statistics of the company, maybe it could be the growth rate or how many users you have, or the investment you've got and the impact you've made in a certain area, this is going to help add to the overall perception of the company and brand. Then lastly, any current news of the company, maybe there's a new feature update, maybe you've got some new venture capital investment into the business, these things does help. Here are a few examples of some great companies that display their present media kit really well. Now, Atlassian is one of them. You can see I'm on the website, you can see the website, a company news press kit. Here I can access their logo so you can see it takes me to a file library and I can just quickly go download it and it displays it nicely on their website. I think this is a great way because I can see what's the best logo for my Collab that I'm working on, or video or design, etc. This is really cool and we can see the design system, they've got the fonts, they've got design principles, presentation kit, a whole bunch of different stuff there, which is really cool. If I go back, you can see they've got offers, photos, headshots, company overview. I think they do really nicely with some icons and sharing the stats. This is a really great example. Another one is from Asana. You can see here in their Dropbox they've got something like a fact sheet here, as you can see that. If I go back as well, they've got their folders and files, so they serve some B-Roll footage that can be used, they've got the leadership photos, if you go into that, it's going to be photoshop, headshots of their team, which is really cool. Then lastly, another website called Creative Market that I've used in the past. They have downloadable logo files in their brand guidelines, so you can see the colors are displayed. They've got the download to their logo kit, so I can download the SVG and PNG files and they've also got their fonts clearly named and just some basic guidelines here in a table format. I think these examples are really great because it gives easy access, shows at a glance of the main overview and the files that can be used in the Collab and just saves time going back and forth in emails. I think it's crucial that you have something, whether it's in an ocean board, whether it's in a Google Drive or Dropbox or on your website, have a place where it's easy to access or the media kit files and brand guidelines stuff. 9. Final Thoughts: Thanks so much for taking this class. I'm sure you've gained some insights and some ideas to inspire you to create your own media kit for your company. I do want to remind you that you can download the checklist to keep you on track to creating your media kit with your team. Now here's just a quick recap on what we learned. Number one, we learned the importance of having a media kit and why we should use it. We talked about what should actually be included inside your media kit, design, and structure. I gave you some tips on how to actually design your media kit. We also talked about five mistakes that you should avoid when making it. Lastly, we talked about how to package your media kit and send and track responses to actually get those collaborations moving forward. I want to say thank you so much for enrolling in this class, and I'm excited to see what type of content you create and collaborate with out there in the real-world.