You have probably heard about Media Kits or Press Kits and wondered what exactly is that and why do I need one? In this article I breakdown exactly what a media kit is and why it is so important for bloggers and influencers.
I also dive into the differences between a media kit and a press kit, how to create a media kit for free, what to include on your media kit and the other documents you need to secure partnerships with brands.
What Is A Media Kit?
Traditionally a media kit was a document that was created by businesses to explain more about their business, the products they are selling or an event they might be hosting. The purpose of the media kit or press kit was to share this with journalists to help them write a story about your brand.
The media kit provided all the information that a journalist would need to understand your business, your products and events and be able to write an article or conduct an interview.
These days a media kit is also used by bloggers and influencers to give more information about their blog and social media presence (essentially more information about their own business) to brands and journalists.
The idea is that the media kit contains everything a brand needs to determine if they should work with you, or a journalist needs to cite you as a source or write about your business. The blogger Media Kit or influencer Media Kit is a summary of who you are the content you create, your audience and what you offer.
Who Needs A Media Kit?
As mentioned most businesses will have a Media Kit and/or a Press Kit. As a blogger or an influencer, you are creating your own business and therefore having a media kit is an essential part of that to be able to present to brands.
How Are Media Kits and Press Kits Different?
Media Kits and Press Kits can often be used interchangeably, but the two are different. The media kit is typically a one-stop-shop for a marketer, is used for collaborations, partnerships and influencer marketing and typically includes information and statistics about a blog and social media channels. The Media Kit is a long term document that is updated with new stats but the purpose of the document and what is presented inside doesn’t change regularly.
The press kit is a more timely document that provides the necessary information for immediate coverage on a timely event. The information contained is what is necessary for the media to cover a specific topic or event promptly with details, dates and times for topics such as the launch of a new product, an event or a new program. A press kit will only be necessary for you to create if you do press outreach for a product or event you are creating, otherwise the Media Kit is the key document you should be creating.
Who Is Your Media Kit For?
One of the ways that bloggers can make money is through brand partnerships, where you promote brands products and services to your audience. Influencer marketing is a huge industry with brands allocating more and more budget every year to this method of promotion.
According to Insider Intelligence, the influencer marketing industry is on track to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022, up from $8 billion in 2019 based on Mediakix data. Source: Influencer Marketing: Social media influencer market stats and research for 2021, Business Insider
A blogger or influencers media kit is typically used to present to brands that they would like to work with or brands that have reached out to you for a partnership to give them more information about your blog and social media reach more.
When you are pitching a brand to work together this is the perfect time to present your media kit so that they can quickly see more information about your audience, your demographics and if the audience you reach with your blog and social media is the target audience the brand is looking to reach.
What Should You Include On Your Media Kit
Now you understand what a Media Kit is, you might be wondering exactly what is in a Media Kit. A media kit should include details about you, your blog and your social media channels. In summary, it should have information on the following:
- Your blog name and logo
- Introduction to your blog and who you are
- Relevant images that best represent the content you typically create
- Your audience demographics
- Social Media Followers
- Social Media Statistics
- Blog Statistics (from Google Analytics)
- Links to your blog and social media channels
- Ways you can work together e.g. content creation, videography, destination marketing
- Contact information
Optional Things To Include:
- Noteworthy press coverage
- Testimonials
- Past partnerships with brands
- Links to collaboration examples
- Your rates (although I recommend that you keep this separate from the Media Kit and only present rates once you have moved forward with your discussions with a brand. Each partnership will be unique and your rates and promotional packages will likely change for different brands)
Check out Plan.Pitch.Partner. my bundle of customisable templates, workbooks, tools and calculators to help you save time and charge more for brand partnerships!
What Else Do You Need Besides A Media Kit?
The media kit is an essential tool to share with brands, but it is not the only document that you need in your armoury when you are pitching brands and reaching out to journalists. In addition to the Media Kit, you should also create other documents that can be shared at specific points in the process to agree on a brand partnership.
1) A Pricing Schedule
You should create a pricing schedule to share with brands that details the pricing for individual promotions such as a blog post, an Instagram post or a YouTube video, as well as partnership or collaboration packages. These packages are bundles of your promotional services that when put together offer a discount to individual al la carte services.
2) Case Study Packs
A collaboration case study pack shares details of past partnerships with brands and helps the brand to understand more about the type of content that you will create for them. The case study pack will include 3-5 of your best partnerships with the brand name, the creative brief, photos from the partnership, links to the content you created, reach and engagement statistics, ROI (return on investment) results and testimonials.
Create 5 – 10 examples from different types of brands. You don’t need to share them all with each brand, having several examples means you can pick and choose 3-5 of the most appropriate ones to present to specific brands when you are pitching.
3) A One-Pager Media Kit and A Longer Media Kit
It is important to have both a 1-page Media Kit that includes all the basic details about your blog and social media that a brand can review at a glance. Brands and journalists are busy and often do not have time to review a long document, so the 1-pager serves as an introduction when you are first in contact and you can share a longer more detailed document if the partnership moves forward and more information about you and your audience is needed.
4) Customised Media Kits
Having more than one Media Kit is important if you plan to pitch and work with brands in different niches.
For example, if you are a travel blogger you may want to pitch a hotel or destination to stay at their venue and create content. For this, you would want your Media Kit to include photography and testimonials from past partnerships with hotels to help the hotel see what type of content you might create for them. For a partnership with a lifestyle brand such as a luggage company, you would want to include different examples of photography and testimonials from other lifestyle brands.
I recommend having a couple of different media kits ready to go for 2-3 main groups of brands you might be pitching to.
What is a social media kit? A social media kit is an extension of your media kit that focuses on just one specific social media channel.
Why do you need a social media kit? A typical media kit will give a high level summary of your social media statistics across all channels, and probably just detail your follower count. If you have a large social media following on one channel such as Instagram or YouTube it is important to create a standalone document (or add an extra page in your media kit) that details more information about your audience on this channel.
For example, if your largest following is Instagram the social media kit would include followers, post reach, post engagement, post saves, average Instagram story views, Reels views, your audience demographics by location, gender and age. In some cases brands are just interested in partnering with you on one channel so this extra document comes in handy to give them all the details on this specific social media platform.
How To Create Your Media Kit
You can create a free media kit using a graphic design tool such as Canva or Adobe Illustrator to create your Media Kit. Canva has some basic Media Kit templates to get you started.
I have Media Kit templates that can be customised in Canva that come together in a bundle of templates, tools and resources to help you get started pitching brands for paid collaboration. The bundle includes several media kit templates, a pricing calculator, pricing package template, case study templates and more for just $27!
And you can add on 27 brand collaboration email templates that can be used to pitch brands and negotiate rates for paid partnerships.
These templates are the perfect Media Kits for bloggers and are the exact templates and emails that I have personally used to land multiple five-figure collaborations with brands such as Google, TUMI, Kayak, Trello and Kevin Murphy.
I hope that you found this article helpful to understand more about Media Kits and why you need one as a blogger and influencer. If you have any questions about Media Kits or brand collaborations drop them in the comments.
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