So What? Updating your Media Kit

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

You can watch on YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!

 

In this week’s episode of So What? Updating your media kit! We’ll discuss the basics of a media kit, why they’re important, the metrics, and how to keep it updated.  Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• The basics of a media kit
• Where to get the metrics for your media kit
• How often to keep your media kit updated

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

Note: the following transcription is AI-Generated and may not be entirely correct:

Katie Robbert 0:30
Well, hey, how are you, everyone? Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show happening every Thursday. Today is Thursday. So the only way I know that it’s Thursday, because this happens, thankfully. I’m Katie joined by Chris and John. How’s it going, guys? Hello, good. Excellent, love to hear it. Great enthusiasm. We’re off to a solid start. This week, rescheduled from a couple of weeks ago, we are talking about updating your media kit. Today we’ll be talking about the basics of a media kit, where to get the metrics for your media kit, which is probably the trickiest piece that people run into, and how often you should keep your media kit updated. Now, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I even had heard the term media kit. It’s not something that really existed in a more academic world. And so when I started working at the agency with Chris, I started hearing the term media kit. And I still, you know, because I was newer to PR, and you know, all of that, I still didn’t really know what it meant. And so when we started Trust Insights, the term media kit, because we had, we wanted to have one for the company and wanted to have one for Christmas speaking, I finally saw what a media kit was. And I was like, oh, okay, that makes a little more sense. But it was still a little bit overwhelming to me, because you’re really, if I understand correctly, a media kit basically says, here’s all the great things that somebody will get, if they partner with you, if they sponsor you like, here’s why I’m so amazing. Here’s all the things I do in the digital space online, which I’m guessing at some point was more offline event, things. But now it’s like, you know, I have this many followers, I’m this big of a deal. Here. I’m this much of a household name. People follow everything that I say. So therefore, if you pay me X number of dollars, your name will be associated with mine. Am I on the right track of what a media kit is?

Christopher Penn 2:34
You are I there’s a bunch of varieties of these things. So there’s an ad kit for like, you know, if you’re going to sell ads on your website, you have an advertiser kit, there’s like a podcast sponsorship, if you want to have someone sponsor your podcast, there’s, of course, you mentioned the public speaking kit. For people who are public speakers, they’re all media kits. So it’s sort of a broad, generic term. And it really does come down to two things is, here’s what I can do for you. And then here’s what you can do for me. So here’s what I can do for you is exactly what I said, here’s the audience reach I have because for an advertiser, they want to know can you put, can you put leads in the funnel? For a newsletter sponsor a podcast sponsor, Yo, can you reach the my, the influential artists that I care about? And get them to at least be aware that I exist? For a speaker? It’s Can you can you help me put butts in seats? That that really is the function, and then the other side of it is okay, here’s what I can do for you. And here’s what you can do for me, and which is fees, terms and conditions and all that stuff? John, what about you what’s in the marketing over coffee media get?

John Wall 3:36
The marketing of our coffee media kit is solely podcast advertising, you know, it’s really, it’s a three page package, it talks about the show itself, you know, there’s one page that’s actually and it’s great, the way I have it set up is that the second page talks about everything, as far as guests that we’ve had on in the history of the show, and all that stuff. And then the third page is actually rates and sponsor information, you know, what the pieces go like. So the cool thing that is, I can have two versions of it, I have one, that’s just the first few pages that can go to prospective guests, or people that just want to know about the show. And then for people that are actually thinking about advertising, they get the three pages that’s got the full rate. And yeah, so every year that gets updated with the annual rates and the numbers, the stats as far as what’s going on with the show. And yeah, that just gets floated out there. Anybody, you know, makes any kind of noise about buying. And, you know, it’s funny, it’s a lot like your website and a lot of ways in that, you know, you build this thing, and it means different things to different audiences, and you never really know how much a part of the purchase process it is or not, but you still have to go out and put your best foot forward and, and make a resource that’s going to reflect your brand. And the big thing is you’re going to compete against other groups, you know, there’s going to be agencies that are going to grab a stack of them and go to a client and show them all off and they’re going to make their shortlist and hopefully you make that cut.

Katie Robbert 4:58
Well It strikes me as an opportunity. Because you know, I love an opportunity to bust out the five p framework, because I’m hearing a lot of different use cases and user stories for why you would put together a media kit. And it sounds like the less effective media kits are the ones that are trying to reach a bunch of people in different places. Where I’m guessing, again, please correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sort of newer to these pieces and assets, is that your better bet is to have a few different versions of a media kit, depending on your purpose and your people, and the output that you want. And so like, if we are looking to get, you know, news, newsletter sponsorships, and speaking and you know, guests guesting on podcasts, putting that all into one place can be overwhelming, and perhaps people won’t know what data to look for or to get buried. So I would say, you know, first we want to know what the heck we’re doing.

Christopher Penn 6:08
You do and a big part of that no surprise is. So if we think about the five P’s, there’s purpose, and there’s the two purposes, right, there’s the purpose for us make some money, there’s the purpose for the person on the other end, which is get more leads or put butts in seats to show whatever that is. Second part is the people. And this is the part that almost every media kit, including mine, has been lacking. What you should be doing and what we we may actually do today on the show, is you need to build out who the people are that you’re trying to appeal to right, what is your ideal customer profile. If you watch the Trust Insights podcast this week, we looked at an example of doing a ideal customer profile there, I took some time before today’s show, because to do it properly is a lengthy process. So I put together an ideal customer profile for event planners for for my speaking kit. And this took me about 90 minutes of gathering data, cleaning it, preparing it and all that stuff, as well. But I have that handy because the second P is the people who are the people, what do they care about? What are their pain points? What are their objections that they’re going to have? If you say, hey, hire me to speak like, why are you like, Why

Katie Robbert 7:22
do I? Why do I care?

Christopher Penn 7:25
Exactly. And then yeah, the process of putting together the media kit, where to get the data from? What what does it look like? And then the platform, which in this case is a PowerPoint, but it is it involves other technologies.

Katie Robbert 7:39
Yeah, and I think that that’s where having, you know, multiple user stories. So you mentioned, you know, there’s two purposes, but really, it’s there’s one purpose, but there’s multiple personas that feed back into that purpose. So, you know, I want to create a media kit, so that I can, you know, get hired for things. And then I want to find a great media kit so that I can hire someone for things. It’s the same purpose. At the other day, everybody wants to get hired, everybody wants to get sponsorships. And so it’s a matter of creating those user stories, both from your perspective, but then also from the person who’s taking in all of these different media kids. Because, you know, John, you brought up a really good point is that, you know, agencies that represent multiple companies are just like, churning these out. And, you know, inundating event coordinators, and podcasters and other potential sponsors, we had to like, and here’s the 800 media kits that we have, just pick whichever one looks good to you.

John Wall 8:44
Yeah, and the thing I run into with that is, a lot of agencies will be like, Okay, this is nice, but go plug these numbers into our spreadsheet. So at least you’ll have them on a single page. So you can do that when that happens, because that will happen pretty frequently when you’re got people shopping like that.

Christopher Penn 8:59
Yeah, exactly. So do we want to start building or rebuilding one so we can see it in action?

Katie Robbert 9:07
Yeah, I think we absolutely do, because, unsurprisingly, a lot of the questions that I have for you guys who, you know, you seem to have a better handle on media kisses, what data do people care about? And I feel like there’s, you know, depending on who you ask, there’s going to be differing opinions. You know, some people may say, Oh, we care the most about impressions, or we want to know how well you convert. I mean, you know, pick a data point, we could throw it in there, but how do we know what data points are the most important?

Christopher Penn 9:41
Right? And again, it goes back goes right back to the user story, if it is butts in seats, and your event needs exposure, and it needs exposure through essentially large groups of relevant people to who are going to say yeah, I want to go to that event. So let’s take a quick look at my speaking ideal customer profile. So what I did was I took 30 LinkedIn profiles of event planners, I put took a sampling of corporate ones, agency ones, independent ones. And of course, some of the people that we work with at the events that we go to like marketing profs, B2B forum social media marketing. Well, I put them into Google Gemini. And I said, I want to build an ideal customer profile from these 30 LinkedIn profiles. So a whole bunch of questions. And here’s what I came up with. Here are your firma graphics based on the people that we that I selected. Here’s the company size in terms of employees and annual revenue, the location, it’s still whiffed on their little. Here’s the technologies. Those companies use this data that comes out of Hubspot. So Hubspot has in its CRM software has data available. If you give it someone’s email address, and it’s a company email address, like TrustInsights.ai AI, it will, it will extract what their marketing technology stack is, which is kind of handy. Then we have what are the job functions, the job titles of the people who would be making these decisions, senior event planner, event manager so on and so forth, what departments they work in, what their responsibilities are experience levels, challenges and pain points. I like this section a lot. This is what did what event planners care about. Limited time bound constraints, many profiles emphasize juggling multiple projects tight time was inefficient execution overwork event planners may struggle to deliver exceptional events while managing their day to day workload. Does that seem reasonable to you? Maybe

Katie Robbert 11:28
it does. And it strikes me so I was recently speaking at Social Media Marketing World with you, Chris in San Diego. And they had what they call basically row monitors or their concierge were basically they were the person who worked with the speaker. And that person kept saying to me, you’re one of the easiest speakers that I’ve had. And you can imagine that these people like they’re dealing with multiple speakers, multiple personalities, like all the different things and needs and wants. And, you know, I personally pride myself on being prepared for these types of things. So that I can just show up and do the thing. And I look at this, and I’m like, this speaks to why they were thanking me for being such an easy speaker to work with, because they’re getting pulled in multiple directions they have, whether they want it to or not given their cell phone to people who are going to use that phone number to for everything they need. And so yeah, I think overworked is 100% with

Christopher Penn 12:31
a bowl of m&ms with no green m&ms. For the past, yeah,

John Wall 12:36
no. Green only. That’s only.

Christopher Penn 12:40
So yeah, we have the object we have the major pain points we have what their goals are, they need to deliver a successful event they need to demonstrate the event did its job, engage attendees streamline the planning process, stay ahead of the curve. The decision makers who influences the decisions, executives and sponsors procurement teams, important considerations for that? What are their buying triggers? Right? So when something changes, you know, we know this, just anecdotally, once generative AI exploded on the scene in late 2022. My Calendar got real full real fast, because it’s a major change. And so a lot of events are like, hey, we need more of this. And there are internal triggers, like what are the things that would compel a company to show an event of some kind? What are the objections? Hey, your speaking fees are really high or really out of whack or something like that. What is the timeline? Is the speaker we’ve ever heard of, and so on. So this is this is the ideal customer profile. Now, what do we do with this thing? The one of the best things to do with it is exactly what you were talking about Katie, which is, let’s talk to this thing and ask it. What things like what data they would want. So say let’s go in here. So let’s talk about building a media kit. Today. Specifically, we’re going to build a media kit for a keynote speaker. So a speaking kit to attract event planners and persuade them to hire a speaker to speak at their event. As always, the first thing you do if you’re going to be doing any kind of work in a language model, start by asking what it knows what do you know about best practices or this topic, because we want to validate that it knows what it’s talking about because it might not. Core Best Practices targeted content professional, polished, concise, and impactful digital easy access key ingredients intriguing introduction cover letters, Speaker biographies, short, long and industry specific. High resolution headshot speaking topics video real testimonials past engagement, social proof, contact Information. things. I think this is interesting says consider including speaking fees as a separate document or fees available will happen request. I think that’s kind of a that’s that’s one take on it. Call to Action tell a story. What do you think, John?

John Wall 15:13
Yeah, that’s pretty solid stuff, you have a good point about, you know, where the rates fit into this. But this is if you’re a speaker, this is a good deck.

Christopher Penn 15:21
Alright, so let’s say, this is a good start. Today, let’s start building a speaking kit. Using these guidelines. The person we want to appeal to is an event planner, please examine this ideal customer profile of an event planner. And we’re gonna take that big old document that we just made about a couple hours ago. And it goes, so now we have the concept. And we have the audience so we have purpose, we have a people. Now we’re into the process. Right? Proven ROI. expertise in the clients industry, timesaving, stress reduction, focus seems, execution. So this is really I think, useful. Thanks for the introduction letter and bios testimonials, etc. Now, let’s, let’s embarrass myself here.

Katie Robbert 16:26
Why? Because it says, let’s talk design.

Christopher Penn 16:28
No, no, no, no, because this is the existing data hasn’t been updated a little while.

Katie Robbert 16:35
Well, I mean, to be fair, you’ve been busy speaking. This is true.

Christopher Penn 16:41
This is this is okay, but not great. Great. Let me begin by providing you with some information about me, the speaker. Let’s go to the Trust Insights website and get my current bio, because I wish to get updated everywhere else.

Katie Robbert 17:03
I appreciate that you at least keep it updated on our website. That’s That’s nice. Have you got

Christopher Penn 17:08
to pick one spot to do it.

John Wall 17:09
That’s the real source of truth.

Christopher Penn 17:13
Yes, if you’re considering hiring me, this is the place to go. So here’s giving it some basic information about who I am. The other thing that I would suggest doing when you do stuff like this is to also have a writing sample of what you sound like. Alright, so there’s my bio. Right? Next, here is an example of my writing style and voice. Please analyze it. So this is from one of my newsletters. The reason for this and we want it to write like me and not like some generic drone. Make sense? Okay. It does, you would think so. But the this is the part people forget about generative AI. It is the world’s smartest, most forgetful engine. So if you assume that it knows how you speak, it doesn’t it has no idea. It knows how humanity speaks. And so the results you get will always be generic if you don’t provide exact examples. And the trick with writing style and tone of voice is you and I can’t describe it. Like we really struggle to say like what is my writing style I write even when the model is summarizing, and it’s still not exact, because there’s a lot of intangibles to writing style, but you can provide an example. And then you can say imitate the style, and it will replicate those statistical patterns in the language without needing to spell out here’s how I write do this, then this. Alright, so let’s take on this introductory letter. Great. We’re now ready to begin the introductory letter. In my speaker kit, here is the current version, which needs improvement, using our ICP, the best practices for Speaker kits and your knowledge of my writing style. draft a more compelling introductory letter based on this starting point. Let’s go ahead and take this super generic intro. Let’s see what comes up with.

Katie Robbert 19:43
Well, and I think that that’s, you know, I love that we’re starting there. And not just here’s all the data because, you know, when we say this about ourselves, when we write BIOS like it we struggle to write bios for ourselves. So it’s always usually helpful to have someone else write it for you And it’s true. Like, even in this introductory letter like, Hi, I’m Chris hire me, because I’m really good at the speaking thing. Like, you know, that’s what most of us are gonna write like. Hi, I’m Katie, I’ve been told that I’m really easy to work with. So you should hire me. That’s not really compelling enough.

Christopher Penn 20:18
Exactly. So it gave, it starts with a nice book. Are you facing overwhelmed attendees and the constant battle for attention in today’s information saturated world work world, let’s partner to make your event a true stand up. Here’s me, I help businesses like yours cut the noise. Adrian says, blah, blah, blah. In this case, we’ll discover how my talks and workshops can become your event, secret weapon, we’ll explore topics like generative AI, analytics, data science, and data driven strategy. And together tailor a message that resonates with your specific audience. Are you ready to create none forgive an unforgettable expense experience? Here you go.

Katie Robbert 21:02
I felt like that was very Freudian.

Christopher Penn 21:07
That’s a better that’s an improvement already. I already feel better about this, this speaker kit because it got rid of the generic and there’s some there’s a reason for people to read this that resonates with what we know to be true about our ideal customer profile. Well,

Katie Robbert 21:22
it starts with a pain point. And that’s something like, you know, we know, humans in general, are so inundated with content and offers and pitches, that if we don’t help them see themselves in the thing, instantly, they’re going to move on. So starting with a pain point, in general is always a really good idea. So then go Oh, yeah, that’s me.

Christopher Penn 21:48
Exactly. We have the headshot and approved biography. This is good. But one of the things that pointed out early on was that you want a short version your bio to Next, let’s take our existing bio, and make a short version that is one paragraph long, but does not lose key details that would appeal to our ICP and their audience. That is a critical sentence right there. You want to tell the model, this is what’s going to be a port, because otherwise they’ll just do a general summarization, which is fine. But because you’ve got the ICP in there, now it goes, Okay, well, what’s gonna matter to this audience goes back to those pain points. And we’ll help you revise a biography to focus on those those pain points. One of the things you can do if you were doing media kits, flex specific industries, you’d have a different ICP for that industry. And then you say rewrite the bio, for this industry to emphasize things in your experience that matter to that industry.

Katie Robbert 22:52
Let me ask you this question, because we did this exercise for ourselves the other day, in terms of the ICP, and then using that data to build things. How often in generative AI, do you have to check the context window? Or if I’m using that term correctly? So basically, you know, how often do you have to ask the system? Do you remember what we’re talking about? Do you remember the data that I gave you 90 minutes ago? Or do we do I need to give it to you again?

Christopher Penn 23:25
It depends. It depends what’s, what’s

Katie Robbert 23:28
the general like, best practice, like, check in every 20 minutes or every five minutes or? It

Christopher Penn 23:35
depends. So context, windows, essentially, are the short term working memory of a model. And they vary wildly. So the free version of ChatGPT, for example, has a context window of 8000 tokens give or take, which was about 5000 words. So every 5000 words, effectively, you have to tell it what’s doing it because and you will notice this when you use the free version, it’s just starts to go off the rails you’re like, huh, yeah. Have you forgotten? We’re talking about in the in the paid or it’s like talking to me?

Unknown Speaker 24:05
What are we talking about?

Katie Robbert 24:08
Sorry, it was right, he was right there. Okay came up. That’s how most of us feel when using generative AI. So I’m just trying to give you a little bit more of that experience. In

Christopher Penn 24:22
the paid versions, you have the 16,000 or 32,000 tokens, which is about 10,000 to 22,000 words, Gemini, the paid version, the workspace version, I believe is 20 ish, 1000 words. And so one of the things that you can do and you probably should do as a matter of just as a matter of course, is when you’re using these things, particularly they’re doing anything valuable, is habit. You have it the sponsors a sort of copy, paste them into a document in any text editor that has a word count. And as you start to get to that 20,000 word Mark, you’re like, okay, yeah, I need to just have you read restate. You know, summarize or explain what we’re doing that refreshes that puts those important words back at the front of the treadmill of its of its short term memory. Now, other models like Claude Claude three has a context window, I believe it’s a quarter million tokens. I didn’t I don’t remember what’s on the precipice. But no, it’s more than clear to. That’s about 200,000 words. 190,000 words. Right. So now you’re talking like, this is basically 60,000 words. Right? This this book here by Ann Handley, everybody writes. So Claude is saying, I can’t remember three of these. Without you need to tell me again. However, some academic studies have been done that says like clods ability to retrieve specific facts out of its context window degrades rapidly after about 20,000 words. So it says, In theory, it can hold a quarter million, but it’s recall ability is kind of shot. The most advanced version of ChatGPT holds 128,000 tokens, which is about 90,000 words. So ChatGPT doesn’t have as big a short term memory, but it remembers better. And supposedly, it’s coming soon. Google’s Gemini 1.5 model will have 1 million, 1 million tokens, so about 700,000 words, so 10, about 10 business books.

Katie Robbert 26:16
So I think that that I know that it’s not exactly what we’re talking about today. But as we’re using generative AI to assist with these kinds of activities, which will be doing more live streams about where generative AI fits into your day to day, I think it’s just important to touch upon the fact that generative AI is, you know, easily distractible, and it was like, wait, what were you talking about, and you, the human have to remember that you’re in control of the conversation, not the other way around.

Christopher Penn 26:50
And you want to be saving your documents. So one of the things I can’t say the strong enough, you need to have a prompt library. It can just be any text tool, Evernote, OneNote. SharePoint, if you if you enjoy pain, Joplin, you name it, but you want to store these things. Because once you build an ICP, for example, you want to be able to reuse it over and over and over again without having to redo that process every time. So if you build this kind of like a recipe card, then you’re ready to go. The next time like I want to ask is my ICP. My thing and ICP question? So let’s take let’s go back now. So we got the short bio, this is great. Now, keeping in mind our ICP, how would you revise my biography? And I’m just going to give it the bio again, just to be on the safe side.

Let’s see. Well keep your core credentials emphasizing value deliver results in the industries you understand. helps businesses of all sizes sometime I’ve been champion. Okay, yeah, this is good. So this, I might use this version or expand on this version, because it is a bit more tuned for the needs of an event plan. Talking about things like bridging the gap between technical expertise and business outcomes. So that’s, that’s a nice bit of word wordsmithing. There. Okay. So that’s the, I guess, the dressing, if you will, in the speaking kept the next day, of course, you have your usual logo slide, everyone’s got this, it’s not a bad thing to have testimonials, you do want to communicate? Well

Katie Robbert 28:38
go back to the logo slide. So I’m guessing that there’s more than one way to present past speaking engagements. And this is the way that you’re choosing to do it. You know, John, I know, you’ve done media kits, like, how do you represent past engagements or past sponsors? Do you just have a logo slide? Or do you have like, links or a list or because my brain instantly goes to Okay, let me just get a bullet list of things. But is this more compelling?

John Wall 29:11
Yeah, and that front, you know, you want to use full educational attack, right? You’ve got people that are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. So if you can have some video if you can have some audio, and then bulleted lists. I mean, you can’t go full tactile, but at least like you said something that can easily be scanned and picked up or a logo board. That’s, you kind of have to you have to hit on every front to try and get you know what, give them an opportunity to pick what they like best and have it covered on all boards.

Christopher Penn 29:41
Gotcha. Yeah. I like to go with the logo one only because it’s very visual. And I try to aim for the events that you’ve probably heard of.

Katie Robbert 29:53
Gotcha. And this is where you know, I bring it up because I look at that And I’m instantly overwhelmed and I have, I’m having a hard time taking in the information, whereas for me, just a list would be easier for my brain to process. But again, I think John, you bring up a really good point of, you know, we can’t make the assumption about how they’re going to take it the information. So our best bet is to provide it a couple of different ways.

Christopher Penn 30:21
Yep. And you’ll probably have different versions of this too. So if I was doing something was healthcare might have some of the healthcare events, we were at, oh, gosh, remember the name of the, so we’re just gonna skip past it. But I’ve done some healthcare conferences in the past. And I would, I would rearrange these logos and add new logos for healthcare events, or for travel and tourism. I was just the tourism industry of Alberta, their association thing so if we were doing that I would have that here have, etc. The educational travel conference have spoken at that in the past. So you’ll have variations based on on which persona you’re going after. Other things testimonials, this got harder after Twitter became x, but you can still collect testimonials, particularly on LinkedIn is a good place to look for snippets to grab and just you just want to have people saying nice things. That’s that’s what it boils down to.

Katie Robbert 31:14
Could you use so as a speaker you often get speaker feedback? Could you use this event rated me? You know, 4.9 out of five stars. And this was what some of the people said, If you don’t have people who are actively talking about you on social.

Christopher Penn 31:31
Absolutely. And in fact, that’s that’s sometimes might be better. If you get feedback from the event you can cut, you can copy and paste the verbatims because they’re all anonymized. So you can say, oh, attendees of MarketingProfs B2B forum had this to say about my my talk, and you have a couple of paragraphs, really nice text on there. You’d want to design it up and dress it up a little bit. But you absolutely would want to do that. The same thing is true for if you’re doing a sponsor kit for a podcast, right? You want to have people’s ratings and reviews from like Apple podcasts or Google podcasts. You’ve got a newsletter. You know, when we send out the Trust Insights newsletter, it never fails, we get at least a couple of people every week, emailing back and saying, Hey, I really enjoyed this issue. Yeah, anonymize them, put that in there. But whatever you, you always want to have some kind of social proof in a media kit.

Katie Robbert 32:19
That makes sense.

Christopher Penn 32:21
Okay, next, your current topics and talks. And then you have your your essential numbers where and these are all going to be based on where you’re active. And what looks good, I need to change some of these because some of this is out of date. The other thing for newsletters, you want to have a breakdown of who is on the list. So let me show you what that looks like. Because that’s that is slightly different. So for my newsletter, one of the things you can do is you can take your entire mailing list, you may want to hash it for security purposes. And then there’s a company that Hubspot just bought called Clearbit. If you go to clearbit.com. And you would create a free account there. You don’t need to pay money for this if it decides to work. And you upload the secured version of your mailing list into and what it spits out is exactly this. It’s just like, it tells you who’s on your list. So what size of company B2B or B2C? So my list predominantly is B2B, it’s like two thirds B2B 1/3, B2C, how large the companies are on that list for decision making roles. So my list is 10.4%. Yeah, exactly. 8%, directors, 11%. Managers, if you care about reaching those decision makers, that’s a nice stat to have to say, like out of this 280,000 person mailing list, you know, 28,000 of them are senior execs, companies. That’s, that’s nice to be able to say that. And then what industry is there in?

Katie Robbert 33:58
That makes sense if you want other?

Christopher Penn 34:01
Oh, no, go ahead. That’s it. If you want other information, one of the things you can do is if you’re as long as you did your homework in advance, and your newsletter or your podcast website has Google Analytics on it, you can fish your demographic data out of Google Analytics, what are the rough, rough age ranges, the locations where is your audience located? So like for me 72% of my list is in the USA, 4% is Canadian. You can get the ages the rough age bracket. So most of my list is above the age of 35. And you can get broad interests so you can get a list if I have that handy. The broad interests is tell you what kind of things or other things your audience is interested in. And that in turn helps you be able to say like here’s here’s kind of what I know our our audience also likes so here I found it so far. on my mailing list, a good chunk of people are into media and entertainment news and politics, lifestyles. And hobbies. If I drill down into this, it’s technophiles. Me movie lovers, entertainment, news duty, just tz TV lovers Shutterbugs avid investors, if you’re doing the sponsor kit, a media kit of some kind, and you have this information, this can start to give you some sense of which sponsors, you know what, what sectors you might want to go after, if I see Shutterbugs is number five on my list. Maybe Nikon might be a sponsor, right. Maybe canon may be a Stapp they call themselves a camera company. But things like soccer fans, probably not as much, right, so Manchester United will not be sponsoring the almost time we lose that it’s just not a good fit.

Katie Robbert 35:49
I feel like you wouldn’t turn them down. If they approached you though.

Christopher Penn 35:52
I wouldn’t know what to do with them. They’d be like, well, and that’s,

Katie Robbert 35:56
that’s why we have John, who wouldn’t know. John, do you? So obviously, marketing over coffee is a big podcast, it’s been around for a very long time, it’s very established. If you’re not familiar, go to Marketing over coffee.com. Hosted by John and Chris. And do you have those kinds of stats for marketing over coffee? Because I know that, you know, you know, every once in a while you’ll throw me a random? How does what is this product look like for a sponsor? Like, is it even a legit thing? Like, do you do you have these kinds of sub interests for marketing over coffee audience? Yeah,

John Wall 36:35
although I need to do the clear bit one. But we’ve done a bunch of GA stuff and used to be able to get better data out of LinkedIn to back in the day, we had a bunch of stuff. So yeah, I have a stack of stats. But it’s interesting for marketing over coffee, there’s kind of two camps, there’s, there’s the folks that want this, they’re looking for tonnage, you know, they just want 1000s of listeners, a lot of marketing over coffee sponsors are hardcore martech people, and they just want leads, like they could care less about their demographic, as long as you’re serving up 10 to 20 clicks from people that ended up becoming sales qualified leads, than they really could care less about the rest of the other stats. So it’s, yeah, you know, again, it goes back to reasons why people buy, but this is, you know, a kit like this, and these kinds of stats, that’s hitting the, you know, that’s the 8020 rule, the majority of buyers are looking for this kind of stuff. And so you want to start with that. And, yeah, we have a full decade, you know, it’s interestingly, our audiences 50% us and then another 30% come from about 10 different countries. But I was really surprised to find that, like, we’re, you know, more than half is outside the US for marketing over coffee, which is the stuff that’s in there. And then, you know, having a ton of execs and decision makers is killer. You know, that’s really our value add from our community coffee as its martech decision makers, people that are, you know, we even had some crazy stats about companies that have 100 plus SaaS tools in their inventory. You know, like, that’s a big chunk of our audience, people that are just trying to manage this whole cloud of stuff and how its integrated. So yeah, if you’re looking for a special audience like that, that that’s our unique proposition.

Katie Robbert 38:13
Marketing over coffee, check

John Wall 38:15
it out. Yeah. And another easy sell point to that I use all the time, we just have the most popular interviews. So if people don’t know Chris, and I, there’s a page, I just send them a link and it’s like, Hey, here’s Seth Godin. Here’s Ty Pennington. Here’s Debbie Millman. You know, Simon Sinek people can see those people and get a quick idea as far as like, okay, yeah, we’re not, this is not just the podcasts I started on my garage last week.

Katie Robbert 38:39
No, and I think that that’s, you know, I, I’m always impressed with the, you know, amount of celebrity status of people that you’ve interviewed over the years. And I think that that is such a good selling point. Because, again, your particular sponsors are looking for how many people can I reach in this particular industry? And that is such a huge differentiator for you.

John Wall 39:02
Yeah, and like I said, being the most ancient and decrepit podcast where we have now like 17 years of Google’s reputation behind the URL, which isn’t that in itself was another whole selling point, you know, just the SEO value of getting on the site is worth something compared to everything else out there.

Katie Robbert 39:19
Well, and I think that that’s such an that’s a unique selling point for marketing over coffee is that you are so well established, you have staying power beyond the ebbs and flows of the podcast trend. And so like, you’ve been consistently, you know, every week a new episode comes out for what 1517 years like you have that demonstrated if they invest with you if they sponsor your podcast, you’re not just gonna fold up tomorrow.

John Wall 39:50
This is true. Yeah, we got in way too early. There’s no doubt about that.

Katie Robbert 39:58
All right. You’ve been playing around with you Your Data What did John and I miss?

Christopher Penn 40:02
Oh, no, I was just I was just adding in those demographics things into the newsletter kit. And then the next section is what is there, right? So inventory at a glance, you’d have the main newsletter, and there’s three diagnose this headline, AD, there’s, you know, first interstitial, there’s the different slots, there’s dedicated send, or if you wanted to buy a dedicated center, the entire list, you know, there’s, here’s an example what one would look like. And there’s market research, if you want a custom piece of content done, that’s, that’s branded on that. And if you look at, you know, the major publications, like a Digiday, for example, or the verge, etc, they’re going to have like 20 different pages of all the different types of inventory that’s available for those purchases, and stuff. So from a media perspective, you know, I think you’d have a healthy discussion about whether or not you put prices in, but at the very least, you definitely want to show examples of what inventory is available. And on speaking site, you want to have your your current topics and talks, and then what’s included in the fee, right. So for example, in my thing, if you pay full fare for a full fee keynote, you get, you get me to hang out for the entire day that I’m speaking, you have social media promotion, get included in the newsletter, get a promotional video clip, you get travelled the day before, and the talk is going to be customized to your event. So I will spend some time you will spend 45 minutes at an input call with you to say, okay, who’s your customer, who’s your audience, etc, etc. And this goes in the speaking kit to say like, you’re not just getting a random talking head, it’s going to use the exact same deck, but you know, the next 23 events, it’s going to be something that’s custom to your event. So I’ve got an event coming up in Australia, in Australia, in a couple months, the Australian food and grocery Council, I am digging into Australian food data, I looking at consumer price indexes, and we’re getting data from the government of Australia for its citizens. And all that’s going to find its way into the talk in the examples of how you would use generative AI as a food company there. So from a media kit perspective, you would want to use your ICP, to say what are the kinds of questions I should ask a sponsor, hey, I know that this is probably important to you, what data would you like to see in the presentation. So that’s, you know, we’re almost 45 minutes here, that’s what goes into making a media kit these days is you’re going to use data sources that are very common. For some top line stuff, you’re going to have Google Analytics data, to show that you can actually measure things, you’re going to have generative AI and the qualitative data you’ve pulled together to assemble the language, the approach, maybe even the strategy, and you’re going to sew it up all together like this. And this is what you get to hand out to people when they’re interested in purchasing from your your media property or your your speaking career.

John Wall 42:51
You know, what they throw out there too, is that so this is the rack rate, you know, this is the published numbers that you put out there. So as a buyer, keep in mind that it’s subject to the market, you know, if, if, if you want, Chris, third weekend, September, those rates don’t apply. Nothing applies in there. And in fact, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford him that week. But, and just the opposite to if you know, something goes wrong, you can always cut a deal or ask for more items out of that list at a single price. All sellers are usually willing to do packaging of stuff, if you’re willing to buy multiple months or, you know, kind of go further than the average package, you can leverage that for price. So, you know, take that as the starting point of the discussion.

Christopher Penn 43:37
Exam Exactly. And use your own data. I can’t emphasize that enough. Use your own data in your Google Analytics account or your matomo analytics account or whatever. And your CRM, if you’re particularly you’re looking at media buys by purchasing media, do a predictive forecast on your, you know, estimated leads for the next 12 months, what week in the next 12 months is going to be the weakest for you for lead generation. That’s the week to then say okay, well, maybe we should buy some media from somebody else to get some top of funnel activity the week before or the however long your sales cycle is, so that you can mitigate that that impact.

Katie Robbert 44:19
Make sense? You know, I think the thing that always strikes me when we do these kinds of activities is you use generative AI to assist with put I put it pulling things together a little bit quicker. And you know, the industry the world as a whole is buzzing about generative AI and it’s going to do the things but there was so much work that went into putting together the ideal customer profile. There was so like, and you as the speaker do the work of speaking and researching. You know, we as the company do the work of putting together the newsletter that goes out that people subscribe to generative AI isn’t doing those things. Those are still The human things that we’re doing, we’re just using generative AI to help us put it together faster. And so, you know, when you’re putting together the speaking kids immediate kids, like we skipped over a lot of steps. And so no, and I meet, because you and I, Chris went through it the other day, and it was at least two hours if I was sitting there going, Oh, I don’t know if this is right. And then we eventually got to a good result.

Christopher Penn 45:26
Well, yeah, I mean, we were pulling data out of our CRM, we were pulling data out of, you know, previous pitches that we’ve submitted, we were pulling data from all over the place. And the gender of AI is a tool, right is a very powerful tool for dealing particularly in this case, with language, it is not going to do all the work for you it it will not be able to for a considerable amount of time, it will eventually you know, as AI agents accelerate, but right now and Elon, early 2020, for you, the human beings still have to provide the data, you have to provide the ideas, you have to provide the feedback. And you have to provide the framework for the tool to operate in. And in the same way that in your kitchen, the appliances, don’t do the cooking for you, they do part of it. But you still have to buy the ingredients, you still got to buy the appliances, you’ve got to know how to safely use the appliances, you’ve got to do the menu, you’ve got to do the recipes and stuff and you’ve got to you’ve got to serve and eat the dinner. And the appliances are good. I wouldn’t want to try making you know, any number of dishes without them like cooking a beef wellington without a stove is a pain. But it’s not magic.

Katie Robbert 46:33
Well, in all of that to say, we’re here to help. So if you’re trying to put together media kits, or if you’re trying to figure out how to use generative AI to do some of the things that we did, like put together an ideal customer profile, or use it to revise your existing media kits or sponsorship kits, or other things, give us a shout TrustInsights.ai AI slash contact, you can talk with the one and only John Wall. He’s happy to take your call Operators are standing by you know

Christopher Penn 47:05
no fears to back.

Katie Robbert 47:08
Yes. So, you know, I think I mean, I always love these refreshers on things like media kits, because they’re still relevant. Despite what’s going on in the industry, they’re still the best way and most well understood. Asset to communicate, here’s why you should work with me.

Christopher Penn 47:31
Yep. And, like you said, generative AI is now part of your toolkit. And so you watch, you should be as a marketer, looking at all of the anything that is language based, your sell sheets, your website, your emails, your sales pitches, using the tools like we did today, to refine them, right, it builds your ideal customer profile, and then take the top five emails that email templates that your salespeople are sending out, and ask it how well would this email resonate with our ideal customer profile? You’re gonna be real surprised. The feedback you get, because it’s probably gonna say, well, you’re kind of pushy. Or it’s gonna say this is a really solid pitch to it, but you won’t know until you do that work. So as Katie said, if you want to talk with us about that, you can just do the contact form, we can do the AI services form, but either way, use these tools to improve everything that you’re doing because they are capable of doing that with your guidance. Any final parting words?

John Wall 48:32
nice working with you, Dr. Venkman.

Christopher Penn 48:38
Right, the next time someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes. We’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai