[How to] create a media kit and work with brands

At a glance

Intended audience: Anyone who has/is looking to build an audience and is looking to collaborate with brands.

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You don’t need a million followers or subscribers in your audience to work with a brand

There are many brands out there which will value the quality of your audience relationship over the size of your audience. If you have an audience of 50 who actively engage with your content, many brands will view you as a much better investment than a platform with a larger, but unresponsive audience.

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Let Canva do the work for you 

If you want an attention-grabbing, modern design then use Canva to create one for free just like I did.

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Why should you make one?

They allow you to proactively approach brands, demonstrate professionalism to brands, and it forces you to analyse your progress, audience and visibility if you haven’t already.

Also money and things! You could potentially start using your platform to get more of both!

 

In a nutshell, a media kit is kind of like a CV for your platform.

I say platform because I don’t want to make it sound like a media kit is something that’s only for bloggers; anyone or any brand can benefit by using one that has any sort of following in any form. From YouTube creators, social media aficionados to bloggers, freelancers and businesses – having a media kit at your disposal can be a great way to showcase who you are in an engaging way.

But yeah, it works like a CV in that it’s designed to market your platform to the reader and provide them with an impression of what your platform is all about as well as who your audience are.

Media kits are great for a couple of reasons.

First, they provide you a means of actively approaching brands rather than remain passively optimistic that a marketer or brand will approach you first.

Second, they demonstrate a level of professionalism and self-awareness which make you a much more attractive prospect for collaboration with businesses.

Third, they force you to seriously consider who your audience is if you haven’t already. It’s an invaluable exercise for anyone to perform if they are considering marketing further or focusing on growing a particular audience.

Finally, it just feels kinda boss. Like, if you were on the fence before about whether or not what you’re doing is a more serious venture or a passive hobby; having a media kit helps affirm that you’re ready to start taking the platform you grew to the next level.

You can look back over it and just be like ‘…f*ck yeah, look at me go.’

Now since I’m yet to make one myself, I’m concerned that relying on my own knowledge would provide little value to anyone.

Instead, what I can do is go into a Google frenzy and check out as many different examples of media kits as humanly possible, pick out the best components I see from them and list each below.

Then, using the info I’ve found, I’ll create a media kit for Inkbike which you can use an example.

And guess what you wonderful unicorn-of-a-reader, that’s exactly what I did.

Was this insulting to include? Probably. You’re going to need to provide some contact information so that brands can get in touch.

Could include figures such as weekly activity on the website, like frequency of posts, range of topics discussed and how each subject performs with your audience etc.

What’s performed well for you? This is an excellent way to evidence the type of content which lands most effectively with your audience without being forced to state it. This section can be an especially effective selling point for you if your most popular posts are in any way related to the industry of the company that you want to work with.

For brands looking to break into different markets, this information is invaluable. So if you have a particular presence on Google (SEO) on LinkedIn as someone who regularly writes/posts articles where people engage, then don’t be afraid to shout out about it. Where are people seeing you and who are these people? What is their age, their gender or nationality?

These are things like; how many unique visitors do you get a day, a week or a month? What countries are your visitors typically from? How many pages do they view each visit?

Be honest! You might feel shy if you compare your numbers to bigger websites or profiles, but remember that numbers aren’t everything. You might get 50 people visit your website each month, but 50 can be way more effective than 5,000 if it’s a really active audience.

Wait, hold on, Unionmetrics.com does a way better job of explaining this then I’m about to;

“Consider who your followers are. Wouldn’t you rather have a small but real and relevant audience than a large one composed of bots and random people? You want to be followed by people who are interested in your posts, engaged in the community you’re trying to reach, and share compelling content of their own. Engagement from these people means a lot more than a bot account auto-retweeting your every post. The more relevant and real your followers are, the better the engagement from them will be.”

Why is engagement highly attractive to companies? Because a highly engaged audience is far more likely to trust something you’ve chosen to advertise than a larger but inactive one.

Have you been featured on any other websites or platforms? If you have, showing this off is a great way to show off the kind of exposure your content gets and helps to demonstrate the kind of audience you have. So don’t be shy dropping any mentions you’ve received in the past.

7. Any advertising stats you might have – the results of things like any affiliate marketing activity, previous collaborations or direct sales you might have made from your own products.

This might not be your first foray into collaboration! If not, then what have you done before? If you can demonstrate experience, you can demonstrate that you are well-equipped to deliver the results that both you and the business owner are after.

You can include things like your experience of affiliate marketing, any collaborations you’ve done with other businesses/business owners or even direct sales you might have made from your own products.

I think this one’s important, especially if you feel like your audience is on the smaller side. If you can’t demonstrate raw numbers, it’s good practice to ask yourself if you can demonstrate how much your audience is willing to engage with your content. The argument then becomes, ‘ok so I only have 100 members in my audience, but actually, they really engage with the stuff I put out so my conversion rate is really high’ which is still an incredibly compelling argument for marketers.

Ultimately, they’re looking to find an opportunity that brings them the biggest possible returns for their investment.

How to demonstrate engagement activity with digestible statistics? What’s the percentage of article/post/tweet/video viewers that actively engage by commenting or liking after viewing? How many of your audience responded to any call to actions included in posts? How many of your audience will share an article on average?

Things like the above demonstrate that your audience is active rather than passive – and ultimately, an active audience is more likely to make a purchase based on your recommendations.

It helps going in if you have some sort of idea of what you’d be willing to do. Are you open to sponsored posts, brand ambassadorship, social media promotions, giveaways, reviews, event representation, website ads or affiliate programs?

Establishing this helps speed things up for both parties since you’re able to quickly massively speed up the process of understanding whether or not you might be a match for each other.

This one’s especially important if you’re planning to use your media kit to reach out to brands. If you’re sending it to them out of the blue, chances are they won’t have set aside any time of their time to read it and will be in the middle of other things when they open your message.

Make your media kit pop to keep the reader’s attention for as long as possible. The longer they spend with your silky smooth, persuasive copy, the more likely they are to be interested in working with you.

That sure was a lot of words up there now wasn’t it. If you’re like me, then inspiration comes from seeing some designs.

As per usual, I used Canva to find a template and Inkbike-ified it completely online. Take a look and see what you think;

The idea is to create something which can be read in minutes, but is visually striking enough to grab their attention in the first place.

I tried to achieve this by having each statistic displayed in a large font, with a colour that makes it pop.

What do you think? What changes would you make or how would you go about making a media pack for your platform? If you want to read a little more useful information on the topic then check out the links below!

If anyone feels inspired enough to make one, I’d love to see it so send it to me by email, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter!

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Email: kaeyo@inkbike.com
Twitter: @Inkbike
Facebook: @lnkbike
LinkedIn: Inkbike

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Template inspiration:

https://creativemarket.com/blog/media-kit-templates

https://www.canva.com/templates/media-kits/

Guides on starting work with brands:

https://creativemarket.com/blog/media-kit-templates

http://mostlymorgan.com/working-brands-2018/

https://www.melyssagriffin.com/how-to-work-with-brands-as-a-blogger/

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[Reward Management]: A guide to attracting and motivating amazing staff as a small business.

At a glance

Key Learning Points

The benefits of employing reward management strategies

The aims of the strategy are to enable a business to;

• encourage value-added performance from it’s employees to support the business in achieving its goals, and,
• compete in the global labour market by retaining high-quality staff.

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Reward management strategies don’t have to cost money

While money may be a motivator, studies have concluded that opportunities for personal development are far more appealing to people when they consider whether they are content working for their employer.

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Reward management in young, lean businesses

Small businesses are in a much better position to employ strategies which provide extrinsic motivation for their staff. In practice, this is providing staff the opportunities to take on additional responsibilities and grow a body of experience much faster than they would be able to if they worked for a larger organisation.

If you, as a smaller business owner, capitalise on that fact and focus on it in your recruitment strategy, it can help you to attract and retain skilled, motivated staff that can provide better-rounded value for your business.

In my recent interview with Cha Lounge owner Mandeep, she suggested an article on the topic of motivation and encouraging the best performance from her staff. An excellent but meaty subject!

To help me prepare, and make sure that the content would be as useful as possible for Mandeep and others like her, I decided to make the most of my employment at the University of Leeds and head to the library! Moseying around the deep regions of the business studies section, I happened to get talking to a lecturer that recommended an excellent book called ‘Reward Management: A Handbook of Remuneration Strategy and Practice’.

Despite the edition of the volume I picked up being published in 1993, he assured me that the fundamentals of reward management had remained the same, and that the book was still on the syllabus for many-a-student studying management or business across the world.

So let’s start at the top, what is reward management and how is it a useful concept for growing a business?

At it’s core, reward management is a tool for business owners to illicit impactful change on the way their business or organisation manages its human resources. It’s objectives are numerous, but the ones I’ve found most relevant are;

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Encouraging value-added performance from employees
By doing so turn, positively impact the business’ ability to achieve its goals;

Support culture management
As expressed by the value it provides in the areas of performance, innovation, risk-taking, quality, flexibility and team working;

Supporting managers
By providing them with the authority, skill and means to use rewards that help their team achieve their goals;

Empowering individuals
By using the reward system to raise performance and quality through empowering staff so that they have the scope and skills required to succeed and be rewarded;

Competing in the labour market
By attracting and retaining high quality people.

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So the core principle behind Reward Management is that it deals with the strategies required to make sure that the contribution of people to the business/organisation is recognized by some means. Successful reward management is about designing, implementing and maintaining a reward system which serves to encourage behaviours that help the business to achieve its strategic goals.

Writing that, I imagine the first concern any owner of a lean growing business likely has is; ‘how this can be useful to me if I don’t have room for budget allocated to staff rewards?‘

Fear not, valued reader, this article is written with you in mind.

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This is because reward management isn’t just concerned with pay and employee benefits. It places equal emphasis on non-financial rewards, ones which provide what the authors describe as intrinsic or extrinsic motivation.

 

Intrinsic motivation is motivation from the work itself
It’s achieved by satisfying an individual’s needs for achievement, responsibility, variety, challenge, influence in decision-making and sense of belonging to a supportive team.

 

Extrinsic non-financial motivation is what’s provided to them directly by the organisation through means other than monetary incentives 
It’s motivation that’s achieved through recognition, skill development/learning and career opportunities.

 

As a growing business, while you might not be able to provide financial incentives in the same way as larger businesses, you’re in a far, far better position to employ reward management strategies which meet your staff’s need for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to drive performance.

Small businesses, by their nature, can’t operate in the same ways as their larger counterparts. Where a larger business identifies that the management of a new task needs to be performed on a regular basis, they will create a role and hire someone to manage that responsibility (providing that the cost of filling that role is justified by the output).

In a smaller business however, unless that same responsibility is business critical, no new staff will be brought on to manage it until the business has grown to the point of financial security where it take on additional staff.

As such, there’s a huge scope for existing staff to start taking on responsibilities outside of their core duties and develop a body of professional experience which they would be unable to do elsewhere.

That’s incredibly valuable for workers, especially in the current employment market where experience is generally valued above any other attribute in potential candidates amongst employers. Own that. Make sure you’re completely aware of the fact that you offer this type of value, and take every available opportunity to make sure that your staff are aware of it too.

 

Have someone who’s interested in all things creative? Well why not have them take a look at working on your Instagram page, creating blog posts for your website or providing photography for events?

 

Someone else fancies marketing? They could look into social media marketing, networking with local bloggers or performing market research to help widen your audience.

 

Management or logistics more their thing? Cool, why not start introducing them to managing inventory, dealing with suppliers or leading team meetings?

 

These are opportunities that you can provide, in service to your business which benefit your staff in a way that they simply couldn’t find in any other type of employer. What you might not be able to reward in terms of monetary compensation to encourage certain behaviour types you can reward 100-fold by way of opportunities for learning, development, innovation and team-working.

This is also something to advertise as part of your recruitment process, ensure that potential candidates know about the potential scope of the role, and the kinds of career development opportunities you’re offering.

Doing so helps to ensure that you attract people that aren’t just looking for a steady income, but motivated individuals who are looking to actively contribute to your business for mutual benefit.

A company which does this exceptionally well is Monzo, take a look at this screenshot from a vacancy advert for a Data Protection Officer on their website;

In particular, the first two questions do a fantastic job of demonstrating the type of candidate they’re looking for and the scope for freedom in the role without having to even explicitly state it.

They demonstrate that the company encourages an open dialogue with candidates as to how best policies can be implemented within their operation, with honest feedback being valued and openly considered.

Still unsure whether or not this all sounds like wishy-washy nonsense?

 

Let’s take a look at Maslow’s theory on the hierarchy of human needs as published in his still extremely popular paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. In it, after extensive study, Maslow concludes that self-fulfilment or self-actualisation is the highest need of all and the ultimate human motivator.

You know where money places? Fourth, under the heading ‘Security‘ (i.e. financial security). This isn’t to say that money isn’t an important factor for most people, ask anyone if they want to earn more and they’re going to say yes. But what Maslow is saying most motivates and drives people, is something which provides a sense of self-fulfillment.

Self-fulfilment, he defines as ‘the need to develop potentialities and skills, to become what one believes one is capable of becoming’.

Ambitious and determined people will seek and find these opportunities for themselves, though it’s imperative that the organisation clarifies the scope for growth and development it can provide (if it does not, they will go away and grow elsewhere).

Increasingly, however, individuals at all levels of organisations, whether or not they are eaten up by ambition, recognise the importance of continually upgrading their skills and of progressively developing their careers. This is the philosophy of continuous development – appealing to that need in your staff is an excellent method for ensuring they provide the maximum value for your business and towards its success.
In making use of this advantage, you can provide intrinsic motivation in the form of responsibility, variety, challenge and influence as well as extrinsic motivation through development, learning and career opportunities.

Ultimately this serves to provide four key benefits for you;

You are encouraging your staff to actively look for opportunities to take on additional tasks which will help support your business, and in doing so, align the behaviour of your staff with achieving your business goals;

Encouraging employees to seek out and take on additional responsibilities allows you to expand the scope of your current operation without being forced to manage the cost of an additional salary;

You create a positive, supportive team-environment which encourages innovation, quality and performance;

You attract, retain and develop high quality people.

So I hope I’ve somewhat provided some information on the basics of reward management theory; the question then becomes, how are reward management strategies of use for start-ups or growing businesses?

My view is that they offer a fantastic means of motivating and getting the maximum value from your staff and that, in the context of a leaner business environment, they can be employed without the requirement for additional financial burden.

Ultimately, this is because the conclusions of many studies in social sciences determine that factors such as self-fulfilment, recognition, skill development and empowerment play a much larger role in motivation and an individual’s sense of employment equity than monetary compensation does.

To fully employ these strategies will undoubtedly be a time-consuming endeavour, as the business will need to spend time mapping out potential new responsibilities and making colleagues aware of them. However the benefits that employing such strategies can have on your staff and business are significant and potentially far-reaching.

At the very least, it’s worth a shot right?

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Sorry if I butchered Reward Management Theory for you, but if you’d like to read more, I absolutely recommend checking out the book. The lecturer who told me about it gave the great advice of going for a pre-owned, earlier edition copy of the book. He explained that little of substance is changed in newer versions but they cost a lot more. To buy the same edition as me, you can literally pay 1p on Amazon and just cover the cost of postage.

Point in case, I paid £1.67 for my 1993 edition whereas the 2015 edition will set you back a lofty £40.

What do you think about Reward Management? Any merit to the idea in context of a growing business? I’d love to chat with you about it!

Email me!: kaeyo@inkbike.com
Social Media!: Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin
Send a Carrier Pigeon!: How to train a carrier pigeon

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