3 Tips for a Better Media Kit

Your media kit is how a brand will determine whether or not you’re the right fit for the campaign so it’s critical to show them how you are the best fit for the job. You want to make sure that it’s up-to-date, polished, and that it represents your SKILL in the NICHE that the brand is in.

We can’t say it enough- a champagne company doesn’t care that you worked with Home Depot.

Many creators don’t realize the best way to stand out in their media kit, is to customize it for the brand reaching out to you. Yes this means a *little* extra work at the beginning when editing it, but if you want to look like the perfect creator for the job, then you need to position yourself for such.

Three Tips for a Better Media Kit

If you're looking to get a leg up on the competition, tweaking your media kit with these three things will help you increase your opportunity to nail the job.

ONE: Customize your media kit to the brand niche that's reaching out to you

Seems obvious right- but so underrated. We mentioned it above, and yes while it absolutely IS great that you worked with the Home Depot, a prestigious champagne company, like Veuve Clicquot doesn't care that you worked with them.

Customizing your media kit for the brand niche that is reaching out to you helps you position yourself perfectly as THE expert in that niche. Think about your media kit as your resume and the final document of proof that you should get hired.

We recommend customizing a media kit for every niche you plan on partnering with. If you're a lifestyle mommy blogger who talks about interiors, we would create a parent/ kid focused media kit, an interiors focused media kit, and a general lifestyle focused media kit.

Make sure all photos, statistics, and brand partnership highlights are relevant to the niche the media kit is for.

TWO: This is the data brands really want to see on your media kit

A marketer's job is to predict the outcome of a marketing campaign and manage cost, which means they need relevant stats to help them do their job. If they aren't using an expensive system to collect this data on your behalf, then this is your opportunity to highlight metrics that matter for them.

Remember, marketing budgets INCREASE when the marketing team is able to meet and exceed their goals, help them do that with good data! 

The data brands want to see (bonus points for making it relative to their niche): 

• Past performance of sponsored posts in percentages. If you're regular posts get 1,000 likes but a sponsored post gets 500 likes, your sponsored post performance would be 50%. That's really good! Anything over 20% is what a marketer wants to see.
• Number of followers  and engagement rate across major channels (if you're a newsletter creator include your percent open rate & click rate)
• Conversion rate FOR the niche's (if applicable) affiliate links compared to all conversion rate
• Stories impressions
• A blurb from a brand you've worked with or a press feature describing your work/ work ethic
• Demographics: Regional penetration in percentages, age range/ generation affiliation by percentage
• Past sponsored brands that are relative to their niche/ very noteworthy (if you don't have a lot to choose from, just highlight the ones you have)
• Extra credit: a question/ comment from a follower wanting more info on the type of brand you're pitching right now

Brands want to know: is your audience going to be receptive to this product/ service/ them, can you help them reach one of their goals (awareness, trial, repeat), and do you have the skills aligned with the campaign initiative.

THREE: Speaking of skill, use this one page media kit to show off your hirable skill

What's the creator skill that you're hyping up here? Photography, videography, graphic design, copy writing, humor, etc? Use this space to highlight that as best as possible.

Make sure all photos are relative to the niche that's hiring you. If you're an automobile blogger but a luxury food company is requesting to partner with you, highlight photos of luxury cars, something that would be in the same income range as the customers the brand is trying to target.

This is called priming your target, where subconsciously you're portraying that your audience is aligned with the goods the company is representing.

For video, add the cover frame of your video and link that part of the document to the corresponding video. That way the marketer can be directed to your excellent transitions, well lit lifestyle scene, and cool videos.

By showcasing your skill relative to the brand, it's like giving them a glimpse into your creative process. They might be familiar with it, and now you're really putting it in front of their face but slightly tweaked to them.

Your media kit should be a reflection of your brand. If you don't have a media kit, you can find plenty of pre-made templates in Canva, buy one on Creative Market, or hire a designer to create one for you. It's important that you keep it short, concise and to one-page. Unless you're Martha Stewart Magazine level of editorial, you shouldn't have more than one page for a media kit.

The next big question, where do I put my rates on this kit? 

Well, that's a philosophical question that we'll be addressing another day.