You don’t want to be promoting one skin-care range at the top of your (digital) lungs for three weeks, only to have to switch to its competitor a month or two later, because your influencer business needs to maintain a certain number of sold posts to pay your rent. You need to allow for the fact that if you work with one brand in a particular market segment this month, you probably won’t be able to legitimately pull off partnering with a competitor in the same space for the next few months. This is why negotiating a series of posts at a lower rate per post – but in the hope of setting up a relationship that leads to a consistent income over a number of weeks or months – is more sustainable.
How to build a media kit
We often think of influencers as people who do not have real jobs, so you might think that once your influencer ship comes in, you will never need a CV again. You would be dead wrong, though!
In the industry, we refer to an influencer’s CV as a “media kit” and it is even more important than a CV, because you’re constantly interviewing for new jobs. I always feel as though every bit of work I do is an audition, since as a freelance content creator, I invoice for every bit of effort. In this industry we have to maintain a level of performance, a certain kind of dedication to excellence that keeps us fit, disciplined and ultimately employed.
A media kit is a compilation of information that professionally presents your business and your strengths, and outlines your follower profile and the audience with whom you consistently engage. It can even outline your standard rates. If you are adept at using Photoshop, you can easily create a media kit, but even if you’re not, you can find simple, free and user-friendly alternatives on the web.
Webfluential.com offers this as one of their free resources: you can simply let the platform do the hard work and build you a generic, digitally hosted media kit, which automatically updates your engagement rates based on recent posts and information on your audience demographic.
Mine looks like this:
You can also build a fully downloadable one using a free media kit template available on canva.com. This gives you the opportunity to really fine-tune and customise:
Websites such as later.com also have free media kit templates you can download. One of the great – and I think essential – sections that they offer in their template is one where you can add testimonials from people you have recently worked with or for. Of course, you can simply build this into any other template you already have as well.
Facts, statistics and other quantifiable contributions are incredibly important. This is something I picked up from Maps Maponyane.
I ask businesses to tell me about their key performance indicators, their agenda. I want to see the numbers after a campaign. I want to see what it did for their bottom line. We have analytics on the back end of everything we do now; it’s good to see what that does. I want to see what the difference is that we get to make.
I take it very personally when I get asked to do something – in them having hopes of a particular outcome. If it doesn’t look like it’s working, I’ll just do the rest of the campaign at no cost. With a lot of brands, the value add will be: “Let’s have a meeting; let’s sit down; let’s plan how we can do this.” I don’t think this is the right approach. This is where the market is at; this is the audience. I recommend these people to join this, so we can find more success.’ I try to be as hands-on as possible. I’m probably more of a consultant than just an ambassador. I try to add real value.
Really flex the great value you have created for your partners; don’t only focus on who you are and who your followers are. Let your previous clients tell your prospective collaborators all about you, in their own words. In fact, if you had to include a trackable link in sponsored content – to keep an eye on how many followers clicked through from your posts to a client’s website – ask for the insights on that click-through rate and include these numbers in support of their opinions.
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AND WHEN I START MAKING MONEY?
Traditional media lessons apply
A close friend once asked me what my policy is when it comes to how much sponsored content I carry on my feed. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I still remember exactly where I was when we had this conversation. She was complaining about an influencer who seemed to feature sponsored content in eight out of every ten posts. She loved following this person for the other two posts but couldn’t ride out the heavy commercial load any longer.
I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of it as a hard number, or even a percentage, until she asked. It was just an intuitive balance I consistently kept an eye on and diligently maintained. I realised that I would probably pin my maximum number of sponsored posts at about three for every ten pieces of content – roughly 30% overall. But I must have got that idea from somewhere, right?
Someone else pointed out that in print media, they refer to the amount of sponsored real estate in a publication as the commercial “load”. The balance in a newspaper used to hover around a load of 30% advertising to 70% content. When I worked as the music compiler at 5FM for about 18 months, shortly after I finished
