JG Media Presses Forward

The Problem: JG Media retained the Crawford Austin Agency for the creation of a press kit that focused on the branding of a local news anchor.  The press kit would serve as an information source for potential organizations, individuals or companies to review in order to have a better understanding of the services the local anchor offers (moderator, panelist and speaker).  The press kit would give an overview of the anchor’s education, journalism background, provide a glimpse into her personal life and give examples of speaking topics/areas. The client felt they needed a press kit to streamline the weekly inquiries the anchor received to moderate panels, emcee events, serve as a program keynote speaker and reduce the instances of her name being misspelled.  The press kit would give potential booking organizations a document to follow to help guide their needs and provide a bio for them to use.  After researching past booking inquiries, we noticed that 40% of the time, the booking process took an average of 3-5 days to confirm because the requestors sent numerous emails asking questions such as: what topic areas can she speak about, where is she traveling from, what time is her newscast, is she married or have kids, etc. These questions and more created a laundry list of emails before the bookings could be finalized. The press kit would eliminate all of those questions. 

The Solution: The writing and re-writing took about two weeks to complete. Since the target audience was so wide (literally any viewer, organization or local company within the Midlands community) we decided to keep the copy short, simple and written on a third grade level for comprehension purposes.  We decided to keep it simple because we knew that the majority of people would print and copy the bio word for word when promoting the anchor as their speaker, panelist or emcee. In order to ensure that the anchor’s name was spelled correctly, the agency made sure that every graphic included her name. Once the press kit was created, revised and approved by the client, both the client and the agency used social media (Facebook and Instagram) to promote the anchor’s services. Branded graphics were created that announced current booked appearances and advertising post were created to announce that she was available for booking inquiries. One of the biggest difficulties was handling the initial volume of inquires after the social media promotion. In order to handle the volume, we created a contact booking form on the client’s website and also on the www.crawfordaustinagency.com site to help organize and funnel the requests. We also posted the press and used Facebook Live to promote the client’s participation in events that were already booked. Special care was also taken to make sure each social media post tagged the client’s professional television page and that her name was mentioned in each announcement two or more times to reinforce the proper spelling of both her first and last name. 

The Results: The implementation of the press kit helped in the following ways: 1) by creating the contact forms on both sites we were able to decrease the booking processing time from 3-5 days to one day; 2) Creating branded graphics for social media to announced her appearances and implementing Facebook Live increased request; 3) The misspelling of the client’s name went down to less than 2% because of the donation penalty we included in all booking contracts and our deliberate use of her name on all post multiple times.