As an exhibitor at SHOT Show, your primary focus is, without a doubt, about selling. For just a few short days, you have the highest number of current and potential clients available to learn about what you offer in a face-to-face setting—and there’s no better way to sell. But wholesalers and retailers aren’t the only folks who need what you have.
I’m talking about the media. No, they don’t need 20 or 2,000 or 20,000 cases of what you’re selling like a buyer for a range or retail store would (though they might need a sample for testing and evaluation). What they need from you at the show is information—and they need it in a press kit.
Truly, the magazine staff, bloggers, photographers, radio hosts and videographers you’ll meet at SHOT are, perhaps, your greatest selling tool after the show. These are the people the consumer trusts to tell it like it is before they invest their next paycheck in a $35 duck call or a $55 box of specialty ammunition or a $2,500 binocular. But they can’t get the word out without you.
Press kits should be at the top of your show marketing tool lists. If you haven’t composed one before, and even if you’ve provided them in the past, here are 10 tips that can make this easy on you and have every media person there grinning from ear to ear and sharing your business all year long.
- Digital is a must. Gone are the days when media returned home from with SHOT lugging cartons of catalogs and CDs. At the most, your press kit should sit on a collection of portable computer flash drives. Even better? Make it a website portal and put that website address on a media-only business card to hand out, eliminating annoying passwords and IDs media members have to remember.
- At the very least, your products should be photographed on a white background. All photos should be hi-resolution, full-color and with a minimum size of 300 dpi. That said, writers appreciate it when they have a variety of images to choose from. Variety helps your products appear fresh and exciting in the many publications and websites they may appear—and most writers sell their stories to more than one place. Take photos of your product from varying angles, with different backdrops, and include realistic action photos with humans actually using them if possible. Not sure of your photographic abilities? Hire a local photographer to spend a day with you—it’s a few hundred dollars that could reap huge benefits for you when those pics get coverage by the press.
- This may sound tedious, but rename your photo files with the product they are. Happyduckcall1.jpeg, 223bestboattailever2.jpeg, Riflemodellongrange2miler3.jpeg. When writers are working with editors and graphic artists to coordinate text and captions and photos, having a list of photos with file names like 987X$5nh123@#.jpeg can get very confusing, very quickly—and the last thing you want to see is your tack-driving wondergun Long-Range 2-Miler identified as a .22-caliber youth model.
- Put photos of both your brand new products and all other current products you’re selling in your media kit. If you’re still making it, you’re still selling it. Remember, too, that media need material all year long, and the brand new stuff gets covered early and often.
- Create a press release or at least a full specification sheet for each new product you’re introducing at SHOT or soon after. Help the press selling your product by selling them on it first!
- Put your press releases in Microsoft Word documents at least of generation Word 97-2004 Document (.doc suffix). Most writers we talked with didn’t like PDFs, and don’t even think about using something weird like Google Docs or Microsoft One Note, or some other ancient typing foundation like Word Perfect or Text Maker.
- Clearly identify exactly who your media contact person is and be sure to include their phone number and e-mail. One of the constant complaints we hear from press members is that all they often get for a contact is some media@whatevercompany.com general mailbox that never gets looked at, never gets responded to.
- Clipart of your company logo and branding images are appreciated.
- Most press members we talked to say they do not need your entire catalog PDF’ed in a press kit.
- Keep it organized. Simple things like labeling product folders on a jump drive (or in a dropdown on a media-only web page) as “New Products 2015,” “All Current 2015 Products,” “New Product Images 2015,” etc., can go a long way toward making sure your products are correctly identified in the press.
One final tip. If you run out of press kits during SHOT and a press member asks you to mail them one, do it—and we do not mean months after SHOT Show is nothing but a distant memory. Magazines and other print media highlighting new products go to press within weeks of SHOT Show ending. Web, of course, is most often in real time. After the flurry of new product write-ups are over, the press is in the field, this time using and testing all those products so that they can produce more articles on them. Take six months to mail a press kit and you might as well just say, “I’ll catch you next year.”