Media kits: how to sift website enquiries from RHS Chelsea
All images on this page courtesy of the talented Carlita Benazito, Sherry Wright and Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Imagine that all has gone well at your big industry event, marketing campaign or RHS flower show: you prepped your website; got your follow-up marketing ready; and have generated a slew of fresh enquiries via your garden design website. Surely that’s job done? Not necessarily.
The next challenge is sifting out the best prospective clients from those who have chosen to give you a shot with their enquiry. Although it’s great that you have produced a bunch of leads via your garden website, it’s unlikely that they’re all necessarily be the best fit. Sometimes people send speculative enquiries or without intending to follow through.
This is where the media kit comes in and is one of our secret weapons alongside passion projects. They are especially effective when you start to generate more enquiries and leads than you can necessarily deal with.
We know Spring is peak season for many small businesses, especially those in the horticultural world - in and around the The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, demand for garden services and products and website traffic spikes. This is the exact time in which a media kit is worth its weight in gold, helping you stay sane in your small business by filtering your best clients from your enquiries:
Use your media kit to put the focus on value first (before price)
A media kit helps attract the right clients (and repel the wrong ones)
Your media kit allows you to unpack your prices (but on your terms)
A media kit guards your time by reducing time-waster calls
Your media kit safeguards your health, reputation & confidence
A media kit helps you focus on what you love & is most important to you
Build desire with your media kit (without being salesy & off-putting)
Wildings is a website design agency in Devon. Based in Torquay in South Devon we design standout websites for small businesses like garden designers, interior designers, florists and architects (garden, interiors and lifestyle brands). In this series, we’re looking at how to market your small garden business or brand off the back of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show or the Spring rush: catch up on the previous article, ‘How to boost your garden design website SEO for RHS Chelsea’ or explore the rest of our series on how to market your garden brand at the Chelsea Garden Show →
1. Use your media kit to put the focus on value first (before price)
A media kit is a great way to pace people through what you offer as a garden designer without having to jump straight to the price. (For the Brits out there, it’s an uncomfortable fact that talking about prices can be awkward!) It helps you emphasise key things that inform your pricing structure, avoiding the race to the bottom line.
By demonstrating the value of what you offer, the media kit does the difficult job of justifying your prices without you lifting a finger. You don’t need to have any awkward conversations about prices and can even charge more if you do your media kit well.
What do we mean by focussing on value? By value we mean the things that benefit clients that you work with, rather than lists of things you offer. (You may have heard people talk about ‘benefits vs. features’.) With product-based businesses, benefits will often be physical, as the product fits a gap that exists in its absence. However, for maximum impact, think about the emotional benefits. This is particularly so for service-based businesses. How do your products or services bring things like peace of mind, confidence, relief, satisfaction, happiness etc.?
By highlighting reasons to believe that your products and services bring heaps of value, you build up momentum through your media kit. When it gets to the budget or pricing section, it means there are likely to be fewer qualms with what you charge. By failing to indicate the value of what you do, you run the risk of ‘sticker shock’. This is when people are unprepared for your prices or feel you’re unjustified in charging your given rates.
The bottom line with a media kit is that it ensures you adhere to the fundamental principles of marketing and selling: identify pain point and establish value first, then move onto pricing.
2. A media kit helps attract the right clients (and repel the wrong ones)
Your media kit is an excellent place to reinforce your ideal kind of work and your ideal clients as a garden designer. The old adage rings true: you attract the kind of work you do or portray. The more you work with a certain type of client, the more likely it is that you will attract similar clients. The more you show certain types of work or clients on your website or social media, the more lookalikes will come to your door.
The reverse is true as well, which is where your media comes in and is so powerful. By showcasing the type of work and type of client you prefer working with, you will start to build a similar client base. Your media kit allows you to create a virtuous circle, constantly driving the preferred type of clients and work your way (although let’s be clear, it’s a process and not an overnight transformation).
What if I don’t have ideal client work to show? If you don’t have examples of your preferred kind of work, it’s not the end of the world. In this situation passion projects can come into play. We talked about passion projects in Part 1 of this series:
Passion projects are fictitious specimen pieces that allow you to take off the constraints and push the boundaries.
In your passion project you are in control of the brief and the outcomes, so you can shape a project in line with your strengths or your preferred type of work as a garden designer or business in the garden space.
A few other things to bear in mind with the work that you show is to ensure that you use high quality imagery. Good photography brings alive and reinforces the claims that you make. Even if you are not necessarily in a creative or design sector, great images can elevate your impact way beyond your competitors. Also, consider showing the range of your work, particularly if you offer a number of services or tiered packages. This will help to illustrate your offerings and allow people to engage with you at different price points according to their budgets.
3. Your media kit allows you to unpack your prices (but on your terms)
We started this blog by emphasising that value must come first in a media kit, but it’s then appropriate to get to the point of what things cost. Even if you are a service-based business or use a value-based pricing system, it’s still important to broach this subject, even simply to give an indicative ballpark figure for potential clients. As above, your media kit allows you to unpack this area in your own way and under your own terms.
There are a couple of really helpful things to bear in mind when it comes to pricing and what you charge.
Lead with your premium package (price anchoring)
Consider leading with your optimum, bells and whistles offering. This would be the full works that includes all the great things that you would ideally love to deliver in a project. Not everyone will go for this, but when people do, it’s really special. By leading with a price that is at the upper end of your offering, it gives you more room to present more moderate or budget offerings. It also leaves clients with a deep and lingering impression of the value that you can bring when considering your other options. It makes it more likely that clients go for your middle-of-the-road package than the budget one (more on this below).
Boost revenue with tiered packages
Think about presenting your services in a three-tiered way. Even if you are a product-based business, you can stock items that cover a range of prices. Your tiers essentially comprise lower, middle and upper. This tiered system benefits you in a couple of ways. Firstly, it means clients are less likely to compare you solely on price with others, as you give them more considered options, increasing the chance that one fits the bill. Secondly, you can calibrate tiers to guide clients to the middle option that works best for you. The lower one will tend to put more onus on the client and the upper one be slightly unattainable (but a bonus if they go for it).
To find out more about pricing psychology, we highly recommend: ‘The Psychology of Price: How to use price to increase demand, profit and customer satisfaction’ by Leigh Caldwell
4. A media kit guards your time by reducing time-waster calls
Another way a media kit does some serious heavy lifting for you is by reducing the number of initial or discovery calls you need to do as a garden designer. These initial consultation sessions at the start of an enquiry are quite draining mentally, plus in terms of time and capacity. Typically, you’ll cover the same ground and questions each time. What if the media kit could do that for you? Well, this is exactly what it can do!
If you design your media kit well, it will cover all the key questions and areas that you want to relay to clients or that they always ask about. For us with branding or website design projects, these include:
How long does a website take?
What do I get with my logo?
How much does it cost?
Even really mundane questions like ‘do your prices include VAT’ can be headed off with a media kit, reducing the amount of repetition you have to do! If you’ve answered a lot of these questions in your media kit, you can focus on more meaty things in a call, such as discovering their pain points and working out how you can deliver value.
Your media kit also serves to sift out those who are probably not going to be a good fit for your business. By working through all the key things to do with your products or services, anticipating the most common things that arise, your media kit leads the individual to a point of realisation. This may be a green or red light. A red light realisation is that although you are an amazing outfit, their problem is best dealt with elsewhere. If the kit can do that for you, what a timesaver!
It’s worth saying too that although not all enquiries may turn into sales via your media kit, it’s entirely likely they might come back to you down the line when they are in a position to work with you. The other bonus is that they may well recommend you to others they know based on the strength of the initial impression you made!
5. Your media kit safeguards your health, reputation & confidence
We’re sad to say it, but the marketplace can be a challenging place, sometimes damaging on a personal and professional level. It’s tough being a business leader and brand owner. We need to protect ourselves and a media kit provides some of your armour you need. Client conversations or interactions, particularly repeated ones - ones that involve rejection, negativity or conflict - can be highly detrimental, so again, why not put in place a layer of safeguarding?
We’ve touched on pricing throughout this blog and it’s a fact of life that there are lots of people who love what you do, but unfortunately can’t afford it (although maybe in future). If you’re having repeated client calls in which people say your prices are too high, that’s unpleasant. That kind of comment fails to recognise a myriad of factors that go into your pricing. Nobody wants to have to sit through that! Your media kit can protect your sanity by ensuring you don’t need to endure that. If a client is serious, he or she will persevere and you can explore alternative options, but it gives you the backup to avoid discounting or trimming your great offerings.
There’s also something about the written, printed word that carries gravitas like nothing else. Official branded literature immediately puts you on an elevated plane. It indicates serious thought, care and attention to your craft, small details and how you want to look after your clients. Imagine if you could convey those emotions through part of your marketing arsenal - what a weapon! In a way, a media kit is like ‘soft power’ in politics, compared with military ‘hard power’ it exerts persuasive influence to effect decisions, as opposed to hitting people over the head (’Pick me! Pick me!’ is never attractive).
Given that confidence is a critical part of sales and marketing, your media kit gives you and maintains that inner drive that you need to be successful.
6. A media kit helps you focus on what you love & is most important to you
In time, as your business grows (more quickly than you might imagine), you will get to the point where you have more enquiries than you can handle. You might decide this is an opportunity to scale. Equally, many decide that fewer clients but higher value projects is the road to go down. If you choose the second route, you need to sift, filter and qualify those knocking at your door. A media kit allows you to undertake this activity. The upshot is that rather than losing work, you gain time to give more of your focus to the work that truly brings you alive.
As we touched on above too, higher value clients also tend to expect a more tailored, personalised and intimate experience. A branded client experience from enquiry to project close is a perfect way to craft that journey that people love. Particularly at the start of a process, being able to wield a beautiful, incisive media kit creates a great initial impression, paving the way for all your following interactions with your clients. Crucially, it puts ‘capital in the bank’ - favour in the eyes of your client, which you can rely on when it comes to key parts of a project when you need to steer a client.
Again, allow yourself to imagine what it would be like to incorporate a media kit into your enquiry process. Someone pops up in your direct messages on social media or completes your enquiry form. Imagine being able to send back a beautiful, balanced, well-rounded media kit and then be able to get on with your day. The media kit says everything you need to say and has your top Call to Action if the client wants to go ahead. You don’t need to scramble around for your templates or scripts - it’s all been done for you.
If you really refine this process too, you can even automate the delivery of your media kits using your enquiry form by integrating it with Zapier zap automations. You don’t need to do anything until the point a client books a call (again, can be fully automated).
7. Build desire with your media kit (without being salesy & off-putting)
Finally, a big one to close with that reinforces our first point on value. If your media kit has done its job, a client should be convinced that you are the only option for them and their project. Again, imagine if that’s the case for your business. Immediately your media kit has reduced the time and effort required to get people ‘over the line’. Less time working through objections; less need to convince people.
It’s an established fact that as humans we make decisions first based on emotional triggers and second based on factual evidence. Note that emotion comes first, not facts. Facts back up our emotions, but it’s emotions that drive the ultimate desire to buy a product or service. This is another key reason why a media kit is so powerful. You may not necessarily feel like a natural salesperson or the archetypal extrovert. Don’t stress. Let the media kit do the selling for you!
Your media kit will include all the fabulous elements that light burning desire in prospective clients that get them over the line and deal with any objections they may have. It will incorporate beautiful brand or product photography; the copywriting zones in on the pain points people have, allowing them to resonate with your offering; it shows off past projects that take clients breath away. Imagine having to do all of that over and over again, including every element and not missing anything out - that’s quite a lot of pressure.
The fact is that a media kit conforms to your preferred, established mode of marketing and selling your brand and leaves the reader totally hooked by the end. You don’t even need to be salesy, which makes everyone skin creep. As above, you’ve put all the critical things in, so there’s no need to get in people’s faces, let alone do that yourself on a phone call (can you imagine!).
Anything else I need to know about converting website enquiries into sales with a media kit?
That’s all for this time on using a media kit to complement your garden design website, especially if you’re involved in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. It’s part 4 in our ‘How to market your garden brand at RHS Chelsea Flower Show‘ series, helping your business make the most of the Spring surge, if you’re a garden brand or preparing for a big industry event. If you’d like to get more helpful tips from us or visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram; or read more of our garden designer-focussed blogs on website design below.
