How Creators Can Use a Media Kit to Land More Brand Deals

A media kit lands more brand deals when it does the brand’s homework for them: your niche, your audience, your numbers, and your rate, on one page they can forward to a decision maker in ten seconds. Creators who skip this step make brands dig through a profile to guess whether a partnership is worth the budget, and most brands will not bother digging.

The good news is that a media kit is not a design project. It is a data project with a light design pass on top. Once you know which numbers to pull and where the proof lives, the document itself takes an afternoon.

Start With One Sentence

Before any number goes on the page, write one sentence that says who you are and who you talk to: “I help new parents figure out baby gear that is actually worth buying” reads very differently to a brand than “lifestyle and family content creator.” The first sentence tells a brand exactly which product category to pitch you for. The second makes them guess, and a brand that has to guess usually moves to the next creator in their list instead.

Put this sentence at the top of the page, above your follower count. It is the fastest filter a brand applies, and it costs you nothing to get right.

What a Media Kit Actually Does

A media kit is a one to three page summary a creator sends to a brand, agency, or talent manager before a deal is discussed. It exists to answer the questions a brand’s marketing team asks internally before they approve any spend: who is this person’s audience, do the numbers hold up, and what would working with them look like in practice.

Treat it as a pitch document, not a portfolio. A portfolio shows what you have made. A media kit shows what a brand would get: reach into a specific audience, a track record of delivering, and a clear price.

The Numbers Brands Actually Check

Follower count gets a media kit opened. Everything after that decides whether it gets a reply. Three numbers do most of the convincing.

• Engagement rate. Likes and comments divided by followers, expressed as a percentage. A brand comparing two creators with similar follower counts will pick the one with the higher rate almost every time, because it is the closest public proxy for an audience that actually pays attention. What counts as strong varies a lot by account size, so pull your number and check it against benchmarks by follower tier before you decide whether to lead with it.
• Audience demographics. Age range, top countries, and gender split. A brand selling to 25 to 34 year old women in the US will not care how large an audience is if it skews teenage and international. This is the section that gets a media kit forwarded internally, because it is the section a media buyer actually needs.
• Reach and average views. Follower count is a ceiling, not a measurement. Average reach per post or average views per video tells a brand what actually happens when you post, which is the number their budget is really paying for.

Pull these from your platform insights first. If a brand asks for anything you cannot verify from your own dashboard, such as audience overlap with a specific competitor’s followers or a fraud check on your own numbers, an audit tool can fill that gap without guesswork.

Credibility matters as much as size. A larger brand that has been burned once by a creator whose audience turned out to be full of purchased or inactive accounts will ask a follow-up question before they ask a second one, and a media kit with no answer to it stalls right there. Running your own account through a free check, such as Hexrate’s AI Instagram Profile Audit, and noting the result in your kit closes that question before a brand has to raise it.

Proof: Past Collaborations and Content Examples

Numbers establish reach. Past work establishes that you can execute. Include two or three examples of sponsored content you are proud of, ideally from brands in or near the category you are pitching, along with a one line result if you have one: units moved, a discount code’s redemption count, or a simple before and after on engagement for that post.

If you have not done a paid collaboration yet, use organic content that shows you can carry a brand message: a product you already use and mentioned unprompted, or a format (unboxing, tutorial, day in the life) that maps to what brands in your niche typically run. Name the format explicitly. “Tutorial format, 40 second average watch time” tells a brand more than a link to a video they now have to click through and judge themselves.

Rates and What You Offer

Include a simple rate card: one line per deliverable (a feed post, a story set, a video, a bundle), with a price or price range next to each. This does two things at once. It saves a back and forth that would otherwise cost you a week, and it signals that you run this as a business rather than something you will negotiate down to whatever a brand offers first.

Rates vary enormously by niche and market, so anchor your own to what similar accounts in your tier are charging rather than a single published average. As a rough reference point, one 2026 industry roundup put typical micro influencer rates at roughly the following, which is a reasonable starting point to adjust from rather than a number to quote verbatim:

Budgets are also more fragmented than the headline averages suggest. In a 2026 survey of marketers, 43 percent reported spending less than $10,000 a year on influencer marketing in total, so plenty of brands you pitch are working with modest budgets rather than the enterprise-size deals that dominate case studies. Price for the brand in front of you, not for the biggest deal you have heard about.

Format and Design

Keep it to one to three pages and export it as a PDF, since that is what gets forwarded between a marketer’s inbox and their manager’s without breaking. A few practical rules keep it readable on a phone, which is where most brand contacts will actually open it:

• One clear photo of yourself near the top, not a collage
• Your handle, niche, and a two sentence bio before any numbers
• Numbers as large, scannable figures rather than paragraphs of text
• Contact information (email, not just a DM) on every page
• Consistent colors and one font family throughout

Almost all of this activity is going to happen on one platform anyway. Around 93 percent of influencer campaigns run on Instagram, so if you only have time to polish the numbers for one channel before your next pitch, that is the one.

Pulling the Numbers Without Guessing

The slow part of building a media kit is rarely the layout, it is chasing down audience breakdowns and engagement history across a few months of posts by hand. This is where Hexrate’s tools for creators save the most time: audience demographics, engagement trends, and post performance are pulled from your account automatically, so the media kit reflects your real current numbers instead of a screenshot from six months ago.

Hexrate’s Reports and Media Kit tool is built specifically for this handoff. It turns your analytics into a shareable, brand-ready document without a separate design step, and it updates the same way your dashboard does, so you are not rebuilding the file by hand every time a brand asks for a fresher one. Agencies building the same kind of document for a whole roster can see the reporting side of this in what to include in a client-ready influencer marketing report, which covers the same numbers from the buyer’s side of the table.

How Often to Update It

Update the numbers every time you send the kit, not on a fixed schedule. A quarterly update is fine if you are pitching constantly, but a media kit that sits untouched for months quietly drifts out of date as your account grows or a bad month drags your engagement rate down. Since brands increasingly compare the number on your page against what they can see on your profile, a mismatch reads as carelessness even when it is just an old file.

Keep one master version with live numbers and export a fresh PDF right before you send it, rather than keeping several dated copies floating around in your downloads folder. If the brand you are pitching operates in a specific region or age group, it is worth spending five minutes trimming the demographics section to lead with the slice of your audience that matches them, rather than sending the same generic export to every brand.

Mistakes That Cost You the Deal

• Stale numbers. A media kit built once and reused for a year shows engagement and reach that no longer match reality. Brands that check will notice the gap.
• No audience data. Follower count with no demographics forces a brand to guess whether your audience matches theirs, and a guess usually resolves to no.
• No price. Leaving rates out does not protect your negotiating position, it just adds a round trip most brands will not bother making.
• Generic bio. “Content creator and storyteller” tells a brand nothing about who to pitch you for. Name your niche and your format specifically.

What to Do Next

Start with the three numbers that matter most: engagement rate, audience demographics, and average reach. Pull them straight from your account, add two proof pieces and a rate card, and put the whole thing on one page. If keeping those numbers current is the part that keeps this project on your to-do list, that is exactly the gap Hexrate’s Reports and Media Kit tool is built to close.