0:00:44 Ben Wright: Hey, Jemimah.
0:00:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, how are you?
0:00:47 Ben Wright: I’m good. I’m always good. We say this every single podcast.
0:00:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s because you’re always good. And it always just makes me feel better about every world.
0:00:54 Ben Wright: Well, if you’re not mostly happy, you’re never going to be 100% happy. But if you’re not mostly happy, then I think you’re in the wrong life or you’re living the wrong lifestyle. You’re choosing the wrong lifestyle.
0:01:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: So that’s true. It’s very deep for the first 10 seconds of a podcast, wasn’t it?
0:01:09 Ben Wright: Well, yeah. I’ve been known to not pull any punches and be very, very direct.
0:01:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: There are times, Ben, where I was like, I think you hate me. And then you’re like, oh, let’s keep going. I was like, oh, no, that’s just Ben, that’s fine.
0:01:19 Ben Wright: Yeah, I am definitely a believer in if you’ve got feedback, no surprises.
0:01:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, you absolutely punch it. I love it.
0:01:25 Ben Wright: You put your feedback on.
0:01:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: No, I love it.
0:01:27 Ben Wright: Sometimes I need to remind myself that when I have a direct message to deliver, to ask permission, and that’s not permission to deliver the message, but that’s to do it now. And that’s along the lines of, hey, is now a good time? I just want to have a chat with you about something. Right.
0:01:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: The people, please remain. Just had a near panic attack because I was just like, no. What did I do? Mixed results, right?
0:01:52 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. And I think in any relationship, you’re left guessing in, then it’s a problem. But also I think if gotta be able to deliver that direct message, and in fact, it’s something we were talking about around today’s topic, was that the media, there’s no sensitivity from the media when it comes to delivering whatever they have to say. Right. There’s no filter. They generally won’t care about the other side of the fence, the emotions that it can portray. And it’s something that means we have to be quite mindful and careful of when we are approaching the media because we can be. If we’re misquoted, it can really look poorly on us. But at the same time there’s a lot we can do do to make sure we’re not. So we are actually doing a topic today all around media, which is one of your favorites, particularly from the visibility lab. So I’m going to throw the control of the mic to you for the next 20 or so minutes.
0:02:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Brilliant.
0:02:43 Ben Wright: So let’s get started.
0:02:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: So buckle in. Could go either way. Kidding. It’s going to be great. We’re talking about media today and particularly what you can do to get prepared to go to media. One of the things that I think we see a lot of businesses come to us about and particularly leaders come to us about is, is around we’re doing really cool stuff, but no one knows who we are. And that fundamentally I think can be really sum up, I think why a lot of businesses fail. So 97% of female led startups fail in the first five years.
0:03:07 Ben Wright: How’s that different to male led startups?
0:03:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, we fail at twice the rate of milestones. Yeah, stats aren’t good. World Health Organisation stats last year.
0:03:15 Ben Wright: Twice.
0:03:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: Twice the rate.
0:03:17 Ben Wright: Wow.
0:03:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: I know, isn’t it crazy? And a big reason for that is. And I could do a whole episode talking about this, but a lot of the reasoning is around childcare, invisible tasking and around there being other competing priorities. Businesses, as we know, take approximately two to three years to start getting really profit in. We often have just a bit of a good ROI to begin with and then we have to really work on that profit part.
0:03:38 Ben Wright: I think two to three years, you’re a fortunate business. I think a lot of businesses are still making losses or barely paying owner salaries after two to three years.
0:03:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: So then we have to start looking at the other ways that we can get ourselves out there. So one of the things we’re seeing quite regularly is I think businesses failing not because they’re not good at what they do. I think most of the business owners we see walk into our offices, we go, oh, you’re doing great, no one’s buying from you. And the big part is maybe the sales process is broken. Maybe this is. Maybe they just don’t know how to communicate to the outside world. And I know we’ve talked a lot about visibility. You’re talking about social media and speaking engagements. I want to talk specifically around the three things that you can do today really bite. Sizable chunky things you can do right now.
So you can actually go to a media agency and say, hey, listen, we Want to get featured on Today. Hey, Sunrise, we would love to have that conversation. I know we’ve spoken at length about this. But just a reminder, it is a 24 hour media cycle and every day there is a journalist, there is a TV channel, there is a publication out there. They need news stories and specifically they need sources. They need people to come forward and say, I’ve had this experience, this is what has happened.
At a very simple level, this looked for some businesses like blogging, this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re up to. And I think it’s a bit of a leap of faith to go, we’ve done one social media post. People come. That happen often to you just do one social media post and all the sales rolled in.
0:05:00 Ben Wright: No, I still don’t get a lot of lead gen out of social media. I use it for different elements. I’m very descriptive with it. But no, social media is not a beautiful tick, quick win.
0:05:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s not a silver bullet and I think we all treat it as if it’s the North Star and we run towards it and go, if I post a lot, people buy stuff. That’s one help.
0:05:20 Ben Wright: It’s very important, but it’s 100%. It’s not the North Star, but it is.
0:05:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: There are points and different collateral here that we can do and the media is a really big part of that. So. So at the moment, TV usage is fairly consistent. People reading magazines and blogs, it’s increasing, podcasting stuff going up. So when we talk about media, we’re really encapsulating these three things. It does count as tv, it does count as print media and radio and podcasting. So what can you do right now? So I wanna give you my three top silver bullets today. You can pick your favorite. I can’t pick one. These are like my children. I’m out. Number one.
0:05:53 Ben Wright: Wow, that’s a first for this series.
0:05:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I was like, these are. I was writing this this morning and I thought, how am I going to choose? This is going to be really impossible. Number one is get clear about what your business does and specifically what you want to be known for. This is one thing I see a lot, Ben, is I see so many people say I just want to be featured in the media and they go and do stories about plants and painting and if you renovated your house and do you love the iPhone, these are legitimate stories I have seen. Brilliant. Not going to change sale.
0:06:24 Ben Wright: Great. Can you give me an example?
0:06:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: So I saw a media call out yesterday that was asking for Are you currently doing or have you done in the last 12 months, home renovations? That’s a media call out for businesses that do home decoration, that do plant installation, that are stylists, property stylists. This kind of story is your bread and butter. This is something you’d go, oh, yes, we’ve done that. We helped. We can also help promote our business moving forward. If you had an Airbnb, if you had a property that you rented out, this is where you would run towards this story and grab it. Ben, I know that you did some home renovations earlier in the year. Got a question. Could you hypothetically respond to that story?
0:07:06 Ben Wright: I think we’ve renovated every year for about the last six or eight years. We’ve moved around and chopped around. My wife would just roll her eyes when we spoke about. So, yeah, damn straight I could.
0:07:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is that going to. And this part’s important here. Is it important? Is that going to help you get a sale?
0:07:20 Ben Wright: It’s completely irrelevant to my business other than to build a personal profile, I guess.
0:07:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Put yourself in the media.
0:07:27 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. But no. No. The answer is no.
0:07:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:07:29 Ben Wright: Waste of time.
0:07:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s a waste of time. The problem is when you start to see these kind of media examples, when you really get. Your eyes get opened up to how many there are, you can get lost. The 20 minute interview is not the problem. The half an hour that I spent on the phone with the Herald sun the other day, I hunkered over at the market. When I was in Melbourne the other week at the night markets, I was like, I was hunkered over. It was worth me taking that half an hour of my night out, you to go and talk about how we picked a tile not relevant to your business and unfortunately quite addictive. Our ego can lead quite heavily here. And so my number one tip here is get very clear about what your business does and what you want to be known for.
0:08:09 Ben Wright: And I’m assuming that less is more.
0:08:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Less is 1000% more here. Because if we are spreading ourselves too thin, you could do every person in this podcast now. I could get you 50 media opportunities in the next week. That’s not the problem. Getting you high quality, relevant ones is going to be the issue. We only want to be talking about the things that we’re really passionate about. Number two, I really want you guys to focus on what media outlets you need to be featured in. It is brilliant. My favorite Notting Hill example, I use this all the time, is if I said to you, ben, Horse and Hound wants to interview you what a great opportunity. They have a million readers. Is it worthwhile you’re doing it?
0:08:48 Ben Wright: Many of them leaders in business or.
0:08:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s a really good question, isn’t it? And sometimes we’re not going to know the answer to that. What we have to do is almost reverse engineer this. We need to know what we’re talking about, but specifically we need to know who we’re going to try to talk to. It’s brilliant. If I said to you I’ve got myself a feature in Mamma Mia magazine, they have a 97% female led readership, they have predominantly over $100,000 salaries and most of them are there for stories and they have a high conversion of sales. Brilliant tick for me. For you, less ideal.
0:09:17 Ben Wright: Oh, for me it’s places like the BRW, HubSpot, Easy LinkedIn published articles. They’re definitely much more relevant to my business.
0:09:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Where is your ideal client? The person you sell to, your. The people that you’re looking for to employ. Where are they physically spending their time? So what events are they at? Those kind of things. But one thing for the media, where are they spending their attention? Where is the attention economy going? What blogs are they reading? What podcasts are they already listening to? What TV channels have they gone on? One of the things we say all the time about when people say I want to be on Sunrise, one of the things I say really quickly is or today is a good other one. I get a lot and I’ve done both of them. They’re brilliant to do. It’s a really nice thing to have on the bottom of the signature block being featured on. There is often no conversion though because Ben, who watches Sunrise and today, be honest, if you had to guess.
0:10:11 Ben Wright: If I had to guess, Sunrise on today would be. The parent responsible for getting kids to school would be number one.
0:10:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: Nailed it.
0:10:18 Ben Wright: Number two would be now that can be male or female. And number two would be retirees. That would be my two, I’d guess.
0:10:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: What are mum and dads doing at that point? When they’ve got the kids though, what are they doing?
0:10:31 Ben Wright: Hell hour. Hell hour. Number one, there’s two in every day. The first one’s get your kid out and breakfast without fights and get them off to school or daycare or kind of whatever. And then the third one’s at the end of the day. But no, the TV’s on to keep things sane.
0:10:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: The second thing that happens is they’re making lunches, they’re trying to force feed the child, they’re trying to now Clean the yogurt off the shirt. They’re trying to make sure the lunches are packed. You then have the retiree.
0:10:55 Ben Wright: You just stepped out this morning.
0:10:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: What happened this morning?
0:10:58 Ben Wright: I just forgot the bit of negotiation with my daughter. Around what time she was getting picked up from daycare. And the tantrum that daddy spilled cereal on her.
0:11:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s exactly what happened this morning.
0:11:07 Ben Wright: Exactly right.
0:11:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Just behind the camera. So this all took place this morning. And we had trolls on, which was the TV show to keep everyone sane. The thing is, when the TV is on, it’s brilliant to have that. But then no one paying attention. And retirees, Ben, do they need your services?
0:11:22 Ben Wright: Look, unless they’re on boards, generally no.
0:11:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Generally, no. And this is where we have to really start going. Where is our ideal client spending time and money? Now, sometimes one is greater than zero. I want you guys to go and do media interviews. If you can get them. 10 out of 10. I cannot recommend these enough. Get practice, do the runs. But we need to figure out where the established places we need to go are and we need to start really pitching to them.
0:11:43 Ben Wright: Got it.
0:11:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: So number three, how do we start pitching? The first thing. And this is my absolute. I know you’re gonna make me pick a silver bullet. This might be it is have a media kit. Now, this sounds extremely daunting when I say this out loud. Cause I said, do you have a media kit?
0:11:57 Ben Wright: No, I am not striving to go hard in the media, but my content is self created. But look, it’s becoming inevitable because I’m getting more and more requests and I’m going to have to do it.
0:12:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And I keep talking about it. You’re like, oh, that does.
0:12:13 Ben Wright: I’m not camera shy, but I don’t strive for a profile
0:12:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: For sure. And I think the media kit part is really, really important. So there are two types of media kits we recommend for businesses and business owners. The first one, if you own a business, the business needs to have a media kit. This is talking about what sort of business it is. Turnover. I do not recommend putting anything like a P and L or profit and loss, anything about. But give us a ballpark, just say north of 100,000, north of a million. Whatever it is, we want to know because it becomes important for journalists, for them to understand really carefully. Well, if you’ve got a great idea, but you’ve only earned $25,000 and they’re eyeing that office as a $2 million portfolio over here and going, well, who do we put into Forbes
0:12:57 Ben Wright: Versus your billion dollar businesses all the way up here as well.
0:12:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: And then you’ve got Forbes. Forbes will be looking for the higher end, the one with a great idea better on struggle street still and it really still bootstrapping. We’re probably not going to get that feature. This part’s important because journalists will look for that as well as other media outlets they want to know. We need to know who your customers are. We need to know where you’re established and what you’re currently working on. So really outlay those products. This document is two to three pages maximum. If you have a social media team, if you have people who are doing that sort of work for you at the moment, virtual assistants, actual assistants, this should be something that you can task them over to do. For those of you guys who are entrepreneurs and small business owners and doing this mostly yourself, canva type in media kit. It will bring up some pretty great formats that you can just go and route from there.
For the entrepreneur, media kits for the business owners, for the leaders out here, you need to have your own separate one. And I don’t say that lightly. You can generally mimic pretty closely. They’re very, very similar ones. But one is far more focused on you as a person, as a thought leader about what you’re bringing to the table, what you could be interviewed on, what financial goals you’re trying to reach, what your ideal clients are watching. The other thing is here is this is the social proof for what we do. The great thing about media kits is we actually have what in our industry and what we’ve really coined the term is called a brag bar.
So Ben, you know when you send signature blocks and you get an email and it’s got like 5,000 being featured on this is what we refer to as a brag bar. One piece of media is social proof. It is third party validation. It is telling us that then the reason today and Sunrise work, they wanted us on the show. We were so good at what we did. We’re on that show.
0:14:43 Ben Wright: Great. Got it. Love it. Okay. And look, I sit here thinking about how a media kit could also help us as leaders, business owners or leaders, doesn’t matter. But be able to actually articulate what we do and we talk about our unique value propositions and being able to engage with customers is really important. I think this could have some added benefits there. Okay, great. So let’s recap those three things.
0:15:07 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number one, get very clear about what problem you solve and what you want to be known for. This will look generally looks like what we refer to as the 10 things and something we should definitely establish very early on in the process because we want to make sure that people are really focusing on those media opportunities that are relevant. It is very painfully easy to get lost. It’s a fun little exercise of running with people and going find all the ones you can find. They come up with 100. One of them might convert a sale.
Number two, we really need to start focusing on going towards the right places. So where is your ideal client spending time and money? Where is their attention already? You need to look at what TV shows, what podcasts, what print media these guys are already listening to, where they’re already reading so you can get featured. You need to be in front of those people in those third party validation places.
0:15:55 Ben Wright: Cool. Got it.
0:15:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: And finally, sort out a media kit. If that sounds so daunting you don’t know where to start, send us an email. Happy to sort you out. The Visibility Lab. We do these every day, our bread and butter. And we have plenty of templates available. But it is one of those things that I think you need to really, not just the business, but also for the independent leader, for the entrepreneur, for that business owner.
0:16:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Because like we’ve already spoken about, we’ve had multiple careers and multiple life changes. Yeah, who I am is all wrapped up in that media kit. The Visibility Lab is separate.
0:16:24 Ben Wright: Yeah, no doubt. At a later level, whether you’re leading a function, a division or a business.
0:16:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:16:29 Ben Wright: This is worthwhile doing because at the very least it’s going to help you in your next role.
0:16:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, 100%. Look, it’s a really kind of fancy resume and speakers agencies love them and you can change and it can become different things and you update them every couple of months and it’s on a silver platter for business owners when they want to grow their profile.
0:16:47 Ben Wright: Now you, to be fair, you opted out of picking your top tip from today, so I’m not going to ask you. So I’m okay with that. But for me now, I’ve had to think about this as we go. My number one tip out of today is to decide if you want to do media. And the reason I say that’s my number one tip is because it clearly needs some commitment. And so far in my career I have engaged through, for example, social media has been one of my key drivers, but I haven’t chosen to engage in media. It’s coming to that point where I’m going to need to naturally. So make that decision. I’m in or I’m not. Now, if you’re not in media, that’s cool. Focus on all your other forms of marketing and lead generation that your business will entail, be it big or small. But don’t get distracted or resist that lure that’s in there. Don’t take a bite and try and bit do media because I think you’ll get chewed up because you won’t be practiced at it. You’ll get misquoted, you’ll get publicized somewhere that’s not ideal for you and it won’t necessarily work for your business. If you do decide that media is for you, then follow these three steps.
0:17:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:17:53 Ben Wright: Because I don’t think they’re onerous. I think, I don’t think that those three steps we’re talking about hours work here, particularly if you can grab a media kit, get someone within your business to set it up for you, most part and then you write the very personal parts. Right. I think that’s easy enough to do. So that’s going to be mine for the day.
0:18:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, it’s great tip. Because it is a choice, honestly. It’s not for everyone and it may not actually be relevant to your business, but if it is and if it’s something you wanting to grow your profile, it’s so easy to do. It’s painfully easy to do. I love teaching people how to do this.
0:18:23 Ben Wright: Excellent. Well, I think that’s been a really impactful episode. That the only downside is that I know the next time I’m featured on any form of significant media, I’m going to get a note from you saying don’t want a public profile. Hey, Ben. Hey, hey, hey. Alright, I’m going to get that…
0:18:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: If you didn’t want a public profile, why did you go out of business with someone who has one? Anyway, we’re here now.
0:18:42 Ben Wright: Well, that’s right. And sometimes, you know, we need a yindi then. So thank you very much everyone for today. Loved having you here. Can’t wait for next week. Until then, we’re your Friends in Business. Bye for now.
0:18:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Bye.
