Why You Need an Instagram Media Kit in 2019 (+ amazing examples!)

The Influencer industry is booming, and with the market projected to almost double between 2018 and 2020, competition is fierce. We have recently started to collaborate with brands, but the way to get there was tricky and it took a lot of work. This article is about our experience, and tips to get you started.

Every day, there are more people that call themselves influencers. Meanwhile, people that are actually doing brand collaborations for a living distant themselves from the term. For us, the terminology doesn’t really matter — what we care about is, how does it all work?

In April 2019, we finally started working with brands. This only started after we went over 10,000 followers. Not because that’s what it took, but rather because we simply didn’t know how to start.

Everybody that already does collaborations on a regular basis says the same: you need a media kit! Not only to look more professional but also to be crystal clear about what it is that you offer. It allows you to feature the best of your personal brand.

What Is a Media Kit?

Let’s start by answering the most obvious question — what is a media kit? Depending on who you ask, the answer will differ vastly. For us, it’s a PDF document that we attach to our emails when we pitch to the brand (in our case, an accommodation). It contains all the necessary information to immediately present not only who we are, but also what value we can provide to them.

The latter is something a lot of influencers often forget, but that’s a blog post for another day!

What’s Included in a Media Kit?

Again, this differs vastly from industry to industry and from person to person. We have analyzed a lot of successful media kits to really understand what works and why. After more than a month of trial and error, designing and writing several drafts, we came up with the content below.

Please note that these are based on user experience research. There are a lot of media kits out there that won’t include things like your value proposition or a call-to-action, but we firmly believe that these are the things that will make a difference to your success story.

Personal / About

For this to make sense, you need to understand why most brands work with you. Anything bigger than a small online shop will be carefully selecting who they work with. They do not only care about the exposure they might receive but moreover who they get associated with.

By telling them who you are and what you are all about, they can instantly decide if you are a good match for their image or not. Think of this as a high risk, high reward kind of thing. Sure, some brands may immediately disqualify you if you are not the right fit for them, but others may move you forward because of it — overall, everybody will save time!

Make this bio snappy! We kept ours really short. See for yourself!

Additionally, we have a 92-word description of who we are as a couple. This includes why we travel, where we have been so far, and what it is we want to do (i.e. inspire and help YOU! ?). This helps dial in your personality. If you’re a travel couple, we would highly recommend this.

If, however, you’re traveling alone, then a single section of about 40-50 words tops should suffice. Make sure that the most important information is at the top (first sentence), as people tend to be busy and skim through documents.

Instagram Statistics

Let’s talk those sweet sweet numbers. FOLLOWERS! Right? Well, kinda. A big following doesn’t hurt, but much more important is your engagement and the quality of your posts. Do you get a lot of organic hashtag reach? Do you have a meaningful amount of followers that religiously engage?

If so, you may qualify for some brands. Make sure to include not only the number of followers but also the other information provided in your Instagram Insights (available only to Business accounts). We consider the number of followers, top countries and male/female ratio essential.

For many brands, who you are, and who your audience is would be enough to decide if you’re a good fit for the collaboration you work for or not. Particularly, smaller brands that really only look for exposure will likely say yes if you have a few thousand followers and high engagement.

Value Proposition

Here’s something that most influencer media kits don’t think about. There is somewhat of a culture of entitlement in this industry. We’ve heard about Instagram accounts feeling like they are owed something. Let’s be straight here, you’re not owed anything.

For some brands, the exposure to your audience may be enough, however, the smaller your following, the more you will need to think about what else it is you can do to provide value.

Think about your skills and how you could provide value to the brands you would like to work with. We offer the following, but please note that this strongly depends on the number of followers, as well as what skills you really have.

• Stories — e.g. organically throughout our hotel stay.
• Feed Posts — e.g. 1-2 posts depending on the length of stay.
• Photography — e.g. 10 RAW/edited photos of the property.
• Videography — anything from a 15-second cinematic IG story to a 1-minute YouTube.
• Reviews — we always say that we do in-depth TripAdvisor reviews complimentary.

We do not offer all of this at the same time, but instead either send a default offer (comment below if you wanna know more!), or research what the brand could benefit most from, and offer that. It’s vital not to overpromise here. Offering too much devalues the entire industry and also makes you work more than you have to.

Call-to-Action

At the end of your media kit, you should definitely have a call-to-action. A final rally to encourage the brand to get in touch with you. You could add your email, Instagram profile or even phone number if that’s how you think they should contact you.

In our case, we are using “Let’s Collaborate” with our Instagram profile and email address.

Optional Optimizations

Additionally, we added some things we think sets our media kit apart. We put a lot of work into fine-turning these over the past weeks and months. These elements are highly customized to who we are, what we want, and who our audience is. Your mileage may vary, but here they are.

Mission Statement

Think about how to describe what you do and who you are in as few words as possible, and put it into a mission statement. This can take a second to grasp, but it can help a brand immediately understand what you are all about.

Here are some examples…

• Traveling on a budget and inspiring others to do the same is my purpose in life.
• A social media expert that is passionate about helping brands reach their full potential.
• We are passionate tech nerds that thrive mentoring people on YouTube & Instagram.

You get the idea. Give them one sentence early on to put them in the right mindset as they review the rest of your media kit.

Vision Statement

Not to confuse with the above. A vision statement is used to nail it down. After skimming through your media kit, you want to leave the reader with a sweet vision to drive it home. Inspire them to see what you want to do for them!

Here’s some examples of that…

• Our property photography will help your hotel convert more bookings than ever.
• Help us educate our YouTube audience about how amazing your new camera is.
• Our audience is constantly looking for cheaper air fairs, let me introduce them to yours.

Just think about something that will blow them away, and seal the deal. But keep it snappy!

More Statistics

This one firmly depends on the industry you’re in, but we feel that it helps our media kit perform better than others. We have added a lot of very specific/related statistics beyond your audience. For example, we mention that listings with more pictures get up to 216% more bookings, or that 96% of all online bookings are based on reading reviews.

Naturally, this needs to be designed well to be digested easily. When done nicely, this can really help make a brand understand that, not only do you have an Instagram account, but you also know what a specific industry could benefit from.

What Does a Media Kit Look Like?

Initially, we thought that we would design a free template. But the question quickly became how our users would edit it. Some sites offer Photoshop files, other Illustrator files. We thought we would do things a little differently, to make it as accessible as possible.

Below, you will find some media kits that we think are really good, for many reasons. Afterwards, we link to some media kits from a variety of sources to get you started with your travel/fashion/lifestyle account. Then it’s up to you to make a choice! ?

Media Kits That We Like

• Asiyami Gold — Well designed media kit with loads of information, uniform brand logos and associations. Clear statistics and beautiful photography overview.
• Refinery29 — Vibrant photos, powerful mission statement, useful statistics. Really well designed we think. Plus, they added more demographical information.
• TextureMedia — You probably see a trend here now. We love landscape, vibrant, photo-heavy designs with large statistics and beautiful fonts. This one is no exception!
• Jetlag for Two — Obviously, we could miss this. ? This is a modified version of what we use since ours is very specific to our industry and personality. It’s more of a layout guide!

Media Kit Templates

Long answer short, if you’re not a graphic designer yourself, or if Photoshop Layers or Illustrator Vectors are a foreign language to you, go and check out Canva. It’s an online graphic designer. No apps/downloads/installs. It’s all done in the browser. Super easy to get started for beginners, and it’s free for personal accounts.

If you need more options, here are some useful sources of media kit templates:

• Etsy — Loads of very low-priced options that look good. Will require you editing them in a variety of apps, like Photoshop, Word or InDesign.
• Creative Market — Like Etsy, but more expensive. Completely different designs, worth a look if you’re considering doing it based on a template in Photoshop or similar.
• Design Shack — A blog post containing a bunch of different media kits curated from sources like Envato. Mostly Photoshop and Illustrator files. If you know any of those two apps, then you could also find useful templates here!
• Dribbble — The world’s most famous designer portfolio website has a lot of really creative media kits. If you’re a designer yourself, definitely check this one out.

Further Reads

Let’s be honest, there’s so much more to learn. This article should get you started. However, if you want to read more about this, see more examples or try other approaches, here are some of our favorite articles.

• How to Create an Influencer Media Kit (+ Free Template!) — Later.com
• How to Create the Perfect Instagram Influencer Media Kit — michellezaporojets.com
• Influencer Media Kit Template — contentcareer.com
• How to Create a Killer Media Kit (for New Bloggers) — sylviakerali.com

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As always, we hope that our blog posts help a few people. We love to learn and share our knowledge about photography, videography and all things Instagram. If you love it, hit those amazing share buttons below and help us grow together. ✌?

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See you on the road,