So What? Updating your media kit

Well, hey, howdy everyone. Welcome to So What The Marketing Analytics and Insights live show happening every Thursday. Today is Thursday. It's the only way I know that it's Thursday. Um, because this happens, thankfully.

Uh I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. How's it going, guys? Hello. Excellent. Love to hear it.

Great enthusiasm. We're off to a solid start. Uh this week, um, rescheduled from a couple of weeks ago, we are talking about updating your media kit. Uh today we'll be talking about the basics of a media kit, uh, 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.

Um, it's not something that really existed in a more academic world. Um, 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, uh, the term media kit, because we had we wanted to have one for the company and wanted to have one for Chris the 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 uh 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?

You are. I there and there's a bunch of varieties of these things. So there's an ad kit for like, you know, if you're gonna sell ads on your website, you know, 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 uh for people who are public speakers.

Uh, they're all media kits, so it's sort of a broad generic term. And it really does come down to two things is uh 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 you said. Here's the audience reach I have. Because for an advertiser, they want to know can you put you know, can you put leads in the funnel?

Uh for a newsletter sponsor, a podcast sponsor, you know, can you reach the my the influential audience 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? Yeah, that that really is the function. And then the other side of it is okay. Well, here's what I can do for you.

Now here's what you can do for me, and which is fees, terms and conditions, and all that stuff. John, what about you? What is what's in the marketing over coffee media kit? The marketing over coffee media kit uh 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 and the history of the show and all that stuff. And then the third page is actually rates and sponsor information, you know, what the uh pieces go like. So the cool thing with that is I can have two versions of it.

I have one that's just the first two 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 the three pages that's got the full rate. Um 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. Um, 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 in 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 gonna reflect your brand. And the big thing is you're gonna compete against other groups. You know, there's gonna be agencies that are gonna grab a stack of them and go to a client and show them all off, and they're gonna make their short list and hopefully you make that cut. Well, it it strikes me as an opportunity, because you know I love an opportunity, uh, to bust out the 5P framework because I'm hearing a lot of different use cases and user stories for why you would put together uh 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. You do, and a big part of that, no surprise, is so if we think about the the five P's, there's the purpose, and 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 uh you know, put butts and seats at a show, whatever that is. Second part is the people, and this is the part that almost every media kit, including mine, uh, has been lacking.

Uh what you should be doing, and what we well, 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 watched the Trust Insights podcast this week, we looked at an example of doing uh a ideal customer profile there. Um, I took some time before today's show because to do it properly is a lengthy process. Um, 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?

Uh if you say, hey, hire me to speak, like who are you? Like, why why do I why do I care? Exactly. And then yeah, the process of putting together the media kit, where do you get the data from? Uh, what it what does it look like?

And then the the platform, which, you know, in this case is a PowerPoint, but it it is it involves other technologies. Yeah. And I think that that's where having, you know, multiple user stories. So you mentioned um, 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 end of the day, everybody wants to get hired, everybody wants to get sponsorships. And so it's a matter of creating those user stories, uh, both from your perspective, but then also from the person who's taking in all of these different media kits. 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 with like, and here's the 800 media kits that we have, just pick whichever one looks good to you.

Yeah, and the third thing you run into with that is a lot of agencies will be like, Oh, 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. Yeah, exactly. So do we want to start building or rebuilding one so we can see it in action? 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 kits is what data do people care about?

Um, and I feel like there's you know, depending on who you ask, there's going to be differing opinions. Um, 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? Right. And it again, it goes that goes right back to the user story.

If it is butts in seats, and your event needs exposure, uh, and it needs exposure through essentially large groups of relevant people who 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 um LinkedIn profiles of event planners. I put took a sampling of corporate ones, agency ones, independent ones, and of course, and uh some of the people that we work with at the events that we go to, like marketing props, B2B Forum, social media marketing world. I put them into uh Google's Gemini and I said, I want to build an ideal customer profile from these 30 LinkedIn profiles.

I asked a whole bunch of questions, and here's what it came up with. Here are your firmographics based on the people that we that I selected. Here's the company size in terms of employees and annual revenue. Uh it the location thing it's still whiffed on there a little uh here's the technology that those companies use. This is data that comes out of HubSpot.

So HubSpot has in its CRM software has data available. And if you give it someone's email address and it's a company email address like trustinsights.ai it will uh it will extract what their marketing technology stack is uh which is kind of handy. Um 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 and 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 are the what do event planners care about um limited time band constraints many profiles besides juggling multiple projects tight timeless and efficient execution overworked event planners may struggle to deliver exceptional events while managing their day-to-day workload does that seem reasonable to you Katie um it does and it strikes me so uh I was recently speaking at social media marketing world with you Chris in San Diego and they had uh what they called basically room monitors or their concierge where 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 different directions. They have, whether they wanted 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 a hundred percent what the I want a bowl of MMs with no green MMs.

Yeah, no, green only. That's the green only. Um, 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, uh, engage attendees, streamline the planning process, stay ahead of the curve.

Um, the decision makers who influences their decisions, you know, executives and sponsors, procurement teams, uh, important considerations for that. What are their buying triggers, right? So when something changes, um, you know, we know this just anecdotally. Uh once generative AI exploded on the scene in late 2022, my calendar got real full real fast because it's a it's a major change. And so a lot of events suddenly like, hey, we need more of this.

Uh 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 uh out of whack or something like that. What is the timeline? Uh is this a 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? Uh the one of the best things to do with it is exactly what you were talking about, Katie. Uh, which is let's talk to this thing and ask it um what things like what data they would want.

So let's go in here and say, 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 for 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, polish, concise and impactful, digital and easy access, key ingredients, intriguing introduction cover letters, speaker biographies, short, long, and industry specific, high resolution headshots, speaking topics, video reel, testimonials, past engagement, social proof, contact information things. Call to action, tell a story. What do you think, John? Yeah, that's pretty solid stuff.

I you have a good point about you know where do rates fit into this. But this is if you're a speaker, this is a good deck. All right. 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 in 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. Time saving and stress reduction focus, seamless execution. So this is really, I think, useful things. So the introduction letter and bios, testimonials, etc. Now, let's let's embarrass myself here.

Um why? Because it said let's talk design. No, no, no, no. Because this is the existing it hasn't been updated in a little while. Well, I mean, to be fair, you've been busy speaking.

This is true. Um this is uh okay, but not great. Um 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 always forget to update it everywhere else.

I appreciate that you at least keep it updated on our website. That's that's nice of you. You gotta pick one spot to do it. Um source of the truth. Yes, if you're considering hiring me, this is the place to go get it.

Um here's I'm giving it some basic information about uh 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 what you sound like. All right, so there's my bio. Great. 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 is we want it to write like me and not like some generic drone. Makes sense. Okay.

It does. You would think so. But the the this is the part people forget about generative AI. It is the world's smartest, most forgetful intern. So if you assume that it knows how you speak, it doesn't.

It has no idea. It knows how humanity speaks. Uh, 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, look, what is my writing style?

I write. Um even when the model is summarizing it, 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.

And let's see what it comes up with. 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 editor, 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. Exactly.

So it gave it starts with a nice hook. 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 standout. Here's me. I help business like yours cut the noise, data insights, blah, blah, blah.

Um, in this kit, you'll discover how my talks and workshops can become your event's secret weapon. We'll explore topics like generative AI, analytics, data science, and data-driven strategy. And together, Taylor message that resonates with your specific audience. Are you ready to create an unforgivable an unforgettable expense uh experience? Here you go.

That's a I don't know. I felt like that was very Freudian. That's a better, that's an improvement already. I 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, it starts with a pain point, and that's something if 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 gonna move on.

So starting with a pain point in general is always a really good idea. So they can go, oh yeah, that's me. Mm-hmm. Exactly. So we have the headshot and approved biography.

Um this is good, but one of the things that it pointed out early on was that you want a short version of your bio too. 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 important. Because otherwise it will just do a general summarization, which is fine.

But because you've got the ICP in there, now it goes, okay, well, what's going to matter to this audience? It goes back to those pain points and will 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 for like specific industries, you would have a different ICP for that industry, and then you say rewrite the bio for this industry to emphasize the things in your experience that matter to that industry. 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. Um 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? It depends. It depends what's that what's in general like best practice like check in every 20 minutes or every five minutes, or it depends. So context windows are essentially the short-term working memory of a model, and they vary wildly.

So the free version of chat GPT, for example, has a context window of 8,000 tokens, give or take, which means about 5,000 words. So every 5,000 words, uh effectively, you have to tell it what it's doing again. Because and you will notice this when you're using the free version, it just starts to go off the rails. You're like, huh, it have you forgot what we're talking about? In the in the paid version.

So it's like talking to me. What? What are we talking about? Sorry. I mean, it was right, it was right there.

Sorry. I give up. Um 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 the paid versions, either 16,000 or 32,000 tokens, which is about 10,000 to 22,000 words.

Gemini, the paid version, the workspace version, uh, I believe is 20,000 words. Um, 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 if they're doing anything valuable, is have it have the responses sort of copy paste them into a document um, you know, 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, uh, I need to remind to have you re restate, you know, summarize or explain what we're doing. Um 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 3 has a context window.

I believe it's a quarter million tokens. I I didn't, I don't remember what's from the press release, but I know it's more than Claude 2. Um, that's about 200,000 words, 1900,000 words, right? So now you're talking like this is basically 60,000 words, right? This this book here by Ann Hand, like everybody writes.

So Claude is saying, I can remember three of these without you needing to tell me again. However, some academic studies have been done that says that Claude's 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 uh recallability is is kind of shot. The most advanced version of chat GPT holds 128,000 tokens, which is about 90,000 words. So chat GPT doesn't have as big a short-term memory, but it remembers better.

And supposedly it's coming soon. Um, Google's Gemini 1.5 model will have one million, one million tokens. So about 700,000 words. So about 10 business books. So I 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 we'll 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 distractable.

And it was like, wait, what were we talking about? And you, the human, have to remember that you're in control of the conversation, not the other way around. And you want to be saving your documents. So one of the things I again, I can't say this strongly enough. You need to have a prompt library.

Um that can just be any text tool, Evernote, OneNote, uh SharePoint if you if you enjoy uh pain, uh Joplin, you name it, but it 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 my ICP um my thing an 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. Yep.

Let's see. Well, keep your core credentials emphasizing value delivery results in the industries you understand. Helps businesses of all sizes. Sometimes I've been champion. Okay, yeah, this is good.

So this I might use this version or or expand on this version uh because it is a bit more tuned for the needs of an event planner. Um talking about things like bridging the gap between technical expertise and business outcomes. Like that's that's a nice bit of wordsmithing there. Okay. So that's the I guess the the dressing, if you will, um, in the speaking kit.

The next thing, of course, you have your usual logo slide. Everyone's got this. Um, it's not a bad thing to have. Um, testimonials. You do want go ahead, Katie.

Well, 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. Um, you know, John, I know uh 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?

Yeah, on that front, you know, you want to use full educational attack, right? You've got people that are visual auditory or kinesthetics. So if you can have some video, if you can have some audio, and then bulleted lists, something 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 that's you kind of I don't know, 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. Gotcha.

Yeah, that makes sense. 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. Gotcha. Um, and this is where you know I bring it up because I look at this 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. Yep. And you'll probably have different versions of this too. So if I was doing something that was healthcare, I might have some of the healthcare events uh that we were at, uh oh gosh, I don't even remember the name of the event.

So we're just gonna skip past it. But there I've done some healthcare conferences in the past, and I went, I would rearrange these logos and add new logos for healthcare events or for travel and tourism. I was just at the tourism industry of Alberta, um, their association thing. So if we were doing that, I would have that here would have uh ETC, the educational travel conference. I've spoken at that in the past.

So you'll have variations based on on which persona you're going after. Mm-hmm. Uh all the things, testimonials. Uh 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 to grab. And it just you just want to have people saying nice things.

And that's that's what it boils down to. 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 were actively talking about you on social.

Absolutely. And in fact, that's that sometimes might be better. If you get um 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 Marketing Props B2B Forum had this to say about my talk, and you have a couple of paragraphs of really nice text on there. You'd want to, you know, 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 in, say, hey, I really enjoyed this issue.

You know, anonymize them and put that in there. But whatever you always want to have some kind of social proof in a media kit. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Um, next, uh, you have 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, um, for newsletters, uh, 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.

Um, you may want to hash it for securities purposes, and then there's a company that HubSpot just bought uh called ClearBit. Uh, if you go to Clearbit.com, and uh 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 the secured version of your mailing list into it, and what it spits out is exactly this. It's oops, no, that's just slideshow mode. 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, one-third B2C. Uh, how large the companies are on that list. Uh for decision making roles.

So my list is uh 10.4% execs, 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 200, you know, 80,000 person mailing list, you know 28,000 of them are are senior execs to companies. That's that's nice to be able to say that. Um and then what industries they're in. That makes sense.

If you want other 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? Um, the locations, where is your audience located?

So like for me, 72% of my list is in the USA, 4% is Canadian. Um you can get the ages, the rough age brackets. So most of my list is above the age of 35. Um you can get broad interests. So you can get uh let's see if I have that handy.

The broad interests just tell you what kind of things uh other things your your audience is interested in, and that in turn helps you be able to say, like, here's here's kind of what I uh you know our our audience also likes. So ah, here I found it. So for my mailing list, uh a good chunk of people are into media and entertainment, news and politics, lifestyles, um, and hobbies. If I drill down into this, it's technophiles, meet uh movie lovers, entertainment news enthusiasts, TZ, TV lovers, shutterbugs, avid investors. If you're doing a 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 sectors you might want to go after.

If I I see shutterbugs as number five on my list, maybe Nikon might be a sponsor, right? Uh, maybe Canon, maybe uh Snap. You know, they call themselves a camera company. But things like soccer fans, probably not as much, right? So Manchester United will not be sponsoring all the almost timely newsletter.

It's just not a good fit. I feel like you wouldn't turn them down if they approached you, though. I wouldn't know what to do with them. I'd be like small. Well, and that's that's why we have John who would know deposit check.

John, do you so obviously marketing over coffee is a big podcast that's been around for very long time. It's very established. Um, if you're not familiar, go to marketingovercoffee.com, um, hosted by John and Chris. And do you have those kinds of stats for marketing over coffee? Because I know that, you know, uh, you know, every once in a while you'll throw me uh a random, how does what is this product look like for a sponsor?

Like, does it even a legit thing? Like, do you do you have these kinds of sub interest for marketing over coffee audience? Yeah, although I need to do the clear bit one, but uh, we've done a bunch of GA stuff, and you used to be able to get better data out of LinkedIn too back in the day. We had a bunch of stuff. So yeah, I have a stack of stats.

Um, 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 thousands of listeners. A lot of marketing over coffee sponsors are hardcore Martech people, and they just want leads, like they could care less about the demographic. As long as you're serving up 10 to 20 clicks from people that end up becoming um sales qualified leads, then they really could care less about the rest of the other stats.

So it's um yeah, it, 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 deck. You know that's interesting.

Like our audience is um 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 uh the stat 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 for marketing over coffee is it's Martech decision makers, people that are, you know, we even had some crazy stats about um companies that have a hundred 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 it's integrated. So yeah, if you're looking for a special audience like that, that that's our unique uh proposition.

Marketing over coffee. There it is, check it out. Yeah, and what uh another easy sell point too 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, and people 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 podcast I started out of my garage last week.

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. Yeah, and like you said, being the most ancient and decrepit podcast, where we have now like 17 years of Google uh reputation behind the URL, which is another that in itself is another whole selling point. You know, just the SEO value of getting on the site is worth something compared to everything else out there. 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 15, 17 years. Like you have that demonstrated if they invest with you, if they sponsor your podcast, you're not just gonna fold up tomorrow. This is true. Yeah, we got in way too early. There's no doubt about that.

All right, Chris, you've been you've been playing around with your data. What did what did John and I miss? Oh no, I was just I was just adding in those demographic things into the newsletter kit. And then the the next section is what is there, right? So for inventory at a glance, you would have the main newsletter, then there's three different, you know, this headline ad, there's you know, a first initial, there's the different slots.

There's dedicated send, or if you wanted to buy a dedicated send to the entire list, you know, there's here's an example of what one would look like. And there's it, you know, 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, et cetera, they're gonna have like 20 different pages of all the different uh types of inventory that's available for those purchases and stuff. So from a media kit perspective, uh, you know, I think you could 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 then on the speaking side, you want to have your your current topics and talks, and then what's included in the fee, right?

So, for example, um, in my thing, if you pay full fare for a full fee keynote, you get uh you get me to hang out for the entire day that I'm speaking. You get social media promotion, get inclusion in the newsletter, you get a promotional video clip, uh, you get travel the day before, and the talk is going to be customized to your event. So I will spend some time, you know, I'll spend 45 minutes in an input call with you to say, okay, who is your customer, who's your audience, et cetera, et cetera. And this goes in the speaking kit to say, like, you're not just getting a random talking head that's going to use the exact same deck at the you know the next 23 events, it's gonna 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'm looking at consumer price indexes, I'm looking at data from the government of Australia for its citizens, and all of that's gonna 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. Like, hey, I know this this is probably important to you. What data would you like to see in the presentation?

Um, so that's you know, we're we're almost at 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 gonna have Google Analytics data to show that you can actually measure things. You're gonna have generative AI and the qualitative data you've pulled together to assemble the language, the approach, maybe even the strategy, and you're gonna sew it up all together like this. And this is what you get to hand out to people when they're interested in in purchasing from your your media property or your your speaking career.

You know, one thing to 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 you want Chris's uh third week in September, uh those right rates don't apply. Nothing applies in there. In fact, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford in that week.

But uh, and just the opposite too, 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 um, you know, take that as the starting point of the discussion. Exactly. And use your own data.

I 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 if you're looking at media buys by purchasing media, do a predictive forecast on your uh 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 you know, however long your sales cycle is, so that you can mitigate that that impact.

Makes 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 putting putting pulling things together a little bit quicker. Um, and you know, the industry, the world as a whole is buzzing about generative AI and it's gonna 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. Um, and so, you know, when you're putting together these speaking kits and media kits, like we skipped over a lot of steps. And so, no, and I mean because you and I, Chris, went through it the other day, and it was at least two hours of us sitting there going, oh, I don't know if this is right. And then we eventually got to a good result.

Well, yeah, I mean, we were pulling data out of our CRM. We were pulling data out of uh, you know, previous pitches that we've submitted. We were pulling data from all over the place. And the generative AI is a tool, right? It's a very powerful tool for dealing, particularly in this case, with language.

It is not going to do all of 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 uh accelerate but right now and you know in early 2024 you the human being 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 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 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 uh the appliances are good. I I wouldn't want to try making you know uh any number of dishes without them like cooking a beef wellington without a stove is a pain but it's not magic. Well and 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 trust insights AI slash contact you can talk with the one and only John Wall.

Um he's happy to take your call operators are standing by um you know and no projects too big no fee is too big yes it's ghost sponsors so you know I think I 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. Yep. And like you said, generative AI is now part of your toolkit.

And so you watch you you should be as a marketer looking at all of 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 build your ideal customer profile and then take the top five emails that your 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 uh at the feedback you get because it's probably gonna say, Wow, you're kind of pushy. Right? 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, you can do the AI services form. But either way, use these tools to improve everything that you're doing because they they are capable of doing that with your guidance. Any final parting words? Nice working with you, Dr. Venckman.

Ray, 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 TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast.

At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.