If you want journalists and other influencers to feature your brand or products in their content, you should make it as easy as possible for them to get the information and materials they need. That’s what a media kit is for.
In this article we’ll explain exactly what a media kit is, how it works, and how you can build a great one for your business.
Table of Contents
What Is a Media Kit?
Why Every Brand Needs a Media Kit
What Are the Key Components of a Media Kit?
Designing an Effective Media Kit
Four World-Class Media Kit Examples
How to Create a Media Kit for Your Brand
Maximizing the Impact of Your Media Kit
How Meltwater’s PR Solution Helps Build Media Kits
What Is a Media Kit?
Simple, a media kit - also known as a press kit - is an online repository of resources that would be useful for anybody who wants to write about your business for the media. Before the internet era, a media kit would be a physical pack of imagery and documents that needed to be mailed out on request by the PR department, but these days it can all live on an easily accessible section of your company website. Sometimes a media kit can also be a downloadable bundle of assets, with some images and a PDF document containing all of the required information. Either way, the term essentially describes a package of content that is helpful to the media.
When journalists want to include an organization in a report, they don’t always need to organize an interview with an executive, or waste time waiting for a PR exec to respond to their request for information. They might just need some basic information, such as the size of the company, where it’s headquartered, or what products it sells. Maybe they need a suitable image to illustrate a story, such as a CEO headshot, product photo, or logo.
Information and resources like these can be made freely available in a media kit for journalists to access on demand.
Depending on the size of your organization, a media kit can contain assets that cover the whole business, or you might need individual media kits focused on specific sub-brands or products.
Why Every Brand Needs a Media Kit
There are a few reasons why your business should create a media kit. First of all, if you want journalists and influencers to talk about your brand and products, it just makes sense to help them in any way you can, and that means giving them easy, quick access to whatever information they might need.
We all know that journalists are often working to tight deadlines, so enabling them to get what they need as quickly as visiting your website could mean the difference between your brand being featured in a story and the journalist using a competitor instead because they couldn’t find a licensed photo of your CEO quickly enough.
The second main benefit of creating a media kit for your business is that it reduces the risk of outdated or inaccurate information being used in the media. A media kit can be your single-source-of-truth, with the latest version of your branding, up to date facts and figures, as well as the photography and other imagery that you want to represent your business.
If reporters or influencers have to go trawling around the web to find information and imagery about your business, there’s a strong chance they’ll get the wrong information and less than ideal pictures. It’s better to have all of the accurate and up to date information and assets in an official online media kit where everybody can find it.
Journalists remember which organizations are easier to work with, and that affects their decision making. When they’re under pressure to deliver a story quickly, and they’re thinking about possible brands to feature in that story, they’re going to choose the ones which they know will be able to provide resources as soon as they’re needed.
This also helps demonstrate to the media that yours is a serious, credible organization, which goes a long way toward establishing productive working relationships with them.
What Are the Key Components of a Media Kit?
Your media kit should include a mix of important information about your business, and useful resources that journalists or influencers will find helpful.
Media Kit Information
- Mission statement: a brief explanation of what your organization wants to achieve.
- Company facts: size (headcount and or turnover), which countries you operate in, location of headquarters and other major facilities.
- Products and services: what your company actually offers.
- Areas of expertise: any specialist knowledge and capabilities your company has.
- Brands: if your business owns multiple brands, list them all.
- Company history: a timeline of major milestones for your business, from when it was founded to the present day.
- Leadership team: names and roles of senior executives.
- Contact information: specifically, the contact details to be used for media enquiries about your organization.
- Social media: links to all of your organization’s social media channels.
- Legal & regulatory information: depending on your market and industry, there may be important legal and compliance information that you should make readily available.
- Press center: your press center (if you have one) is where press releases, news and updates are published, so it’s closely related to your media kit, and the two should feature clear navigation links to one another. Often a media kit and press center are bundled together, and the terms can be used interchangeably.
Media Kit Resources
- Photo library: high quality photographs of your senior executives, your offices and facilities, products, and anything else that would be of interest to people who want to know more about your business.
- Logos: copies of your logo in different sizes and formats for use online and in print.
- B-Roll video: generic video clips relating to your business, that could be used in broadcast media or online video.
- Case studies: you don’t need to include every case study, but if you have some particularly impressive ones, it’s a good idea to put them where journalists can find them.
- Testimonials: as well as full blown case studies, some positive quotes and recommendations from customers, partners, journalists and influencers will be helpful.
Designing an Effective Media Kit
A good media kit should contain all of the information and resources a journalist might need, but it’s equally important to make it easy to navigate and understand. An online media kit shouldn’t use an overly elaborate design which might look aesthetically impressive, but is unintuitive to navigate - function is more important than form in this case.
A clean, crisp design is ideal, with the most important information immediately visible on the main page (especially media contact details), and additional content no more than a click or two away, behind easy-to-understand navigation menus. And make sure that the design is mobile-friendly; even today it’s surprising how many websites do not work well on mobile devices.
Any photography should be professionally shot, and provided in formats that are suitable for print and web. It’s good to provide a choice of images for your executive team; photos of them in the workplace are fine, but be sure to include some simple head-shots on plain backgrounds, as these are often preferred in print media.
Four World-Class Media Kit Examples
All brands handle media kits slightly differently, depending on the unique demands of their business, but we can learn by looking at how some of the world’s biggest organizations do it.
Microsoft Media Kit
As you would expect from one of the biggest tech brands in the world, Microsoft has a truly excellent media kit in its online newsroom, with a comprehensive set of assets available. Everything is laid out cleanly, with a simple navigation system that makes getting to the content you need a piece of cake.
Toyota Prius Media Kit
This is a great example of a media kit for a single product, in this case the 2024 Toyota Prius. Toyota manufactures a lot of different vehicles, and the Prius is one of its flagship product brands, which is of interest to journalists and influencers all around the world. The Toyota Prius media kit contains images, video, technical details about the vehicle, and the latest relevant news about it, such as awards it has won.
Nike Media Kit
Nike’s media kit is a showcase of design simplicity, which makes sense for a sportswear brand where visuals are important. All of the critical information is easily available, but it’s primarily highlighted through the use of striking imagery.
PepsiCo Media Kit
PepsiCo’s media kit provides a wide range of assets, all accessibly organized, and quick links to global media contacts, all within one click of the main page. Despite being a massive company with lots of brands and markets, the media kit is straightforward and simple to use, making it easy for journalists to get what they need.
How to Create a Media Kit for Your Brand
Building a great media kit that works well for your business doesn’t need to be complicated.
The first step is to create a list of all the content your kit needs to include, like that listed above, although you may wish to add more elements that we haven’t covered. Think carefully about your target audience, which journalists, influencers, and other media might be interested in covering your business, and what information they are likely to need.
Next, create a plan of action for gathering all of that content into one place. A tracking spreadsheet or project management tool might be useful to keep track of which content has been obtained, and where it is stored.
Some of this will be very easy, as you’ll only need to collect existing information about your business and put it into a document. Some will be more complicated, such as finding (or creating) appropriate case studies, photography, and video content, so create a plan which assigns responsibilities and deadlines for producing everything that is required.
You’ll also need to get your web team involved in the project very early on, so they can understand your requirements and begin allocating resources to build the necessary web pages as the content becomes available. Ensure that the web developers understand the importance of making the media kit very accessible, so that people are able to find exactly what they need quickly and painlessly, whether they’re using a computer or a smartphone.
It should also be SEO-friendly because people won’t necessarily come to your website and try to find the media kit, they’re more likely to just search for it on Google, so you want to be sure that it will appear at the top of the search results.
Nevertheless, you should make an effort to let people know that your new media kit is now available. Making it easy to find from your company’s website is a good start. Companies often hide the link to their media kit in the small print along with their T&Cs and other boring but important information. This defeats the object of trying to make information easy to obtain for journalists, so be sure to put the link somewhere obvious.
If you have a media list of journalists and influencers who your business already targets or works with, then you could contact them to let them know about the new media kit, so in future they’ll know where to find information and resources in a hurry.
Maximizing the Impact of Your Media Kit
Getting your media kit built and online is a great start and hopefully you’ll soon start to see rewards from that work in the form of increased media coverage. But this isn’t a fire-and-forget project, because your media kit is a tool that needs to be regularly maintained and used properly if you want to see maximum benefit from it.
First of all, build your media kit into your ongoing PR and communications workflow. Add new information and resources as required, if you launch a new product, hire a new senior executive, or there are any other significant changes at your organization. If you’ve included company facts and stats, make sure they’re updated regularly.
It’s also important to ensure your media kit is visible and easy to find by all the people who might need it, so include links to it in any communications with journalists, influencers, and other marketing partners or collaborators. It’s a good idea to add a link to it into the email signature of everybody working in the PR and comms team.
Measuring the Performance of your Media Kit
Measuring the performance of your media kit is a great way to add some extra ammunition to your marketing communications reporting, showcasing success to senior stakeholders.
Because it’s essentially a website the easiest way to track performance is by using web metrics, which will show you how popular the different content and assets are, and how often they are used.
You can also use this insight to add more useful content to your media kit, as it will show you what kind of assets are most in demand.
Tip: Take a look at the top marketing metrics and learn how to track them.
How Meltwater’s PR Solution Helps Build Media Kits
Meltwater’s suite of solutions includes a range of PR and social media tools that can help create a successful media kit. Our Media Intelligence Suite and Social Listening tool will make sure you always know when your brand is featured in legacy or social media, so you can quickly add high profile coverage to the media kit. It also empowers you to identify coverage that includes inaccurate information or outdated assets, so you can direct the authors to your media kit.
Our Media Relations Suite and Influencer Marketing tool streamline the management of outreach campaigns, and you can include your media kit in these activities to be sure that your contacts always have access to the most up-to-date information about your brand.
To find out more about how Meltwater can help with your PR efforts, book a personalized demonstration today:
