Now that we’ve established why you need a press kit on your company’s website, we want to share HOW you can build it.
The integral part of a traditional public relations campaign is the media. Yes, you can utilize social and digital aspects in a PR campaign. However, if your goal is to garner earned media you’ll need to make sure media professionals are the target persona in the campaign’s plan. But how do you make your company attractive to those media professionals?
Well high level PR agencies can tell you about the many ways to achieve this. Some of them are very labor intensive. We are not one of those PR agencies. Instead we will discuss how to utilize your website to help media professionals do their jobs more efficiently and effectively (while also supporting your own content and SEO strategies). You can quickly make a journalist's job easier by providing tools and information on your website for them to quickly create an in-depth and newsworthy piece of content for their audience. This, my friends, is done with a press kit and we'll share in this post ideas on how and where to add a press kit to your company’s website as well as what elements should be included.
A media kit, or digital press kit, is a body of information about a business, product, or team and typically lives in digital format on your website. This allows media professionals to easily access information and images while creating a news story, segment, or article.
A press kit should include:
You'll of course need to determine which pieces are relevant, and others that you need to add, based through the lens of your own company and brand goals. For example, you may not have 'product' images or info but may need to include events or services to your images or fact info.
As we mentioned in the previous post about why you need a press kit, in the last decade we’ve witnessed the dwindling of media outlets and media professionals. However, they are still increasing their digital offerings for consumers. From a digital marketing perspective, this is more beneficial and increases the incentive for companies to garner earned media (positive coverage of your company via a media outlet). Not only is it brand awareness, now there are SEO building aspects when a journalist connects their story to your website or social media channels. They are literally leaving road signs for consumers on how to visit your website – right where you want them to be!
There are a few ways you can add a press kit (sometimes called a digital press kit or media kit) to your company's website. We prefer the webpage option. However, we realize that not every marketing professional has the option of creating a new page to their website. So we will walk you through and give you examples of both options and make sure you know the most important aspect to focus on, in case this needs to be a phased project for you.
Two key things to keep in mind:
It typically takes two to three months for search engines to catch up and take notice of your new content pieces, but it will be well worth it in the end. Keeping these points in mind will also help you build an asset that could potentially be a little out of scope for the rest of your website, but will garner a new audience and long term benefits.
This is the cleanest option from a user experience (UX) perspective, but also could mean you'll need to recruit help outside of your department, access to areas where you do not currently have permission/knowledge, or an increase in budget. Please keep these in mind before determining which press kit type is the best fit for your company.
This option is really about gathering assets and information in one single location. You can use buttons or hyperlinks to get them to additional resources on or off the page. For HIVE's press kit, we put most information on the page in tabbed sections in the body of the page. However, we opted to create Google Drive folders and link to them via a CTA (call-to-action) button at the top. This allows ungated access to images and logos without a complicated security scenario in our main asset library.
Fast Company on the other hand, implemented a page with all assets embedded or downloadable from the page. They also have a traditional media kit pdf on the page.
Determining how your press kit or press page is developed will need to be a mix of the capabilities of the CMS you utilize and your brand's look and feel.
Key pieces to include:
Past press and media coverage is important to include. It offers credibility (we share this in digital marketing for social credibility with prospects as well) and also ensures that what the interested journalist writes is new and unique.
This option takes a little more creativity to implement in a seamless and intentional way. Don't be scared off by the articles that tell you NOT to add this info to your blog. SEO Inc says you don't want too much "patting yourself on the back" and Prezly almost shames you for even thinking about it. The reasons we disagree with them is:
The main caution here is to ensure that your press kit-relevant posts do not get shared in the RSS feed emails or straight to social. It is also a good idea when sharing earned media via your blog to create an intro paragraph that frames the scenario to make it less 'look how cool we are" and more "wow what an honor". Maybe something like this, "We are so honored to join other amazing technology experts in this article from the Washington Post. If you have a question, we'd love to chat and help you out as well."
Of course each blog platform and each website CMS have their own unique environments. Hopefully you get the gist enough to figure out any obstacle that yours throws at you. If not, we are happy to help you out.
Whether you create your press kit on a webpage or via a blog, please just keep in mind, it is all about that SEO!