The press kit for start-ups
Good photography of an organisation’s key players is a must – as is a well written brief for the photographer. Photo Hawk Photography
So you’ve launched your new business. Hopefully, you’ve gained some good media coverage and secured quality exposure for your company, brand or service in your target media. Now the challenge is to maintain that exposure at a rate that is affordable and a pace that is manageable given your primary business commitments.
How do you do that?
As a start-up business, it’s likely you’ll be managing your own PR so you’ll need to develop a press pack. Investing time early on to develop this piece of kit will reap rewards in the long run. It will save you time by not having to reinvent the wheel with each media enquiry you prompt or receive.
A good press pack, or press kit as some call it, will likely include the following:
- A press release giving a potted history of your company
- Fast facts sheet – 1 page of additional background as bullet points
- Key player biogs – short pen portraits of key people in the company
- Images – quality photography of you, your key people, product range, premises
- Market intelligence notes – reliably sourced information relating to your market
- Quotable quotes – a few key messages you are happy to have attributed
- Useful URLs – your Twitter handle, Facebook page, You Tube Channel LinkedIn profile etc.
This is the ammunition you need to have at your fingertips when you approach the press to sell in your story. Modern journalism is fast-paced and newsdesks are running increasingly lean and mean. In short, reporters are time-starved and thin on the ground. You need to be in a position to make their life easier and get them the information they need quickly and accurately. That is what will help you steal a march on your competitors.
