Attracting the right partners — those who are interested in connecting with your audience and willing to pay for that opportunity — is one of the best ways to monetize your digital properties. Whether you own a blog, website, mobile app, email newsletter, social accounts, or some combination, you need to demonstrate the value you can bring to ad buyers, affiliate merchants, and other partners.
However, online publishers seldom have the opportunity to connect directly with merchants. In the absence of traditional sales meetings and pitch decks, smart publishers rely on media kits to tell their story — and sell their value — to potential partners.
What exactly is a media kit?
Media kits are an ideal way for even small and medium-sized publishers to put their best foot forward, impress merchant partners, and increase their earning potential. The typical media kit is simply a document (usually a PDF or PowerPoint) that publishers create to highlight relevant information about their business, their reach, and their value.
While there are countless ways to structure a media kit, its purpose is to help merchants understand the opportunities you provide and the benefits of partnering with you. So you’ll want to include information that’s important to merchants as they consider a possible partnership. (More on that below.)
There are also many ways of distributing your media kit to merchants. Sometimes a merchant will request your media kit; other times you may want to share it proactively — especially if there’s a particular merchant you’d like to partner with. You can also include your media kit as an attachment in any touchpoint with potential merchant partners.
Pro tip: If you’re a Sovrn customer, you can send us a copy of your media kit, as well. That way we can share it with merchant partners on your behalf when questions or opportunities arise.
What should a media kit include?
Building a media kit doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, our advice is to keep it simple! Ideally, your media kit will only include information that can truly help a merchant to understand your business and the value of partnering with you. This includes:
- An overview of your site and the type of content you create
- Information about your business model
- Audience demographics like male/female ratio, average age, average income, education level, hobbies and interests
- Relevant statistics and data such as website traffic, time on site, average order value, click-through rate, reach and readership
- Opportunities available to the merchant including ad types, affiliate features, paid sponsorships, and newsletter placements
- Pricing information
Visually, the design of your media kit should reflect your brand identity and style and align closely with the look-and-feel of your site.
Remember, you likely won’t have an opportunity to “present” your media kit to potential partners, so it needs to stand on its own. Keep the content short and engaging to maintain the reader’s attention. It’s safe to assume merchants will spend five minutes or less reviewing your media kit, so resist the urge to include non-essential information or vanity metrics.
Who needs a media kit?
Media kits can be a valuable tool for publishers of all sizes, but they’re relatively rare among small and mid-sized publishers. In fact, many publishers aren’t even aware that media kits exist.
The truth is, you may not need a media kit if you’re just getting started, or if your opportunities for merchants are limited to basic affiliate marketing. But as you scale your business and expand your monetization efforts, a well-crafted media kit is a strong indicator of business maturity. Creating a media kit can help to attract high-quality merchant partners and drive more revenue.
Media kits can be especially beneficial for publishers who operate less traditional properties, such as mobile apps, browser extensions, search engines, newsletters, and the like. Merchants sometimes struggle to understand the reader experience and placement opportunities outside of mainstream content and social channels, so a media kit can really help to demonstrate potential value.
Ready to start earning with Sovrn?
Sovrn provides tools, technology, and services to help tens of thousands of publishers make more money, move their businesses forward, and navigate the complex challenges they face every day.
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