How to pitch your media kit to a brand

Pick a brand that fits, then find a real person

Start with brands you'd genuinely use or already talk about, not just the biggest names you can think of. Fit beats size, a brand can tell within seconds whether you post in their category. Once you've picked one, find an actual person to send it to: a marketing or partnerships contact on LinkedIn, or a collab email in their Instagram bio. A pitch addressed to a real name gets read. A pitch to info@ usually gets filtered before anyone sees it.

Open with one specific, real detail

Reference a recent launch, a specific product, or a campaign you genuinely liked. Researched, specific outreach is the single biggest driver of reply rate in every major study on cold outreach. It takes two minutes of scrolling their page, and it's the difference between sounding like a template and sounding like a person.

Lead with fit and results, not follower count

A Journal of Marketing study analyzing 1.8 million purchases found smaller, highly engaged creators consistently delivered better return per follower than larger accounts with more passive audiences. Brands increasingly know this. Lead with who your audience is and why they'd care about this specific brand, not just how many of them there are.

Send your media kit link, never a PDF attachment

Attachments get left unopened and go stale the moment your stats change. A link takes one tap to open, always shows your current numbers, and, with Statlyx, tells you the moment the brand actually views it, so you're never left wondering if your pitch landed.

Make one clear, low-pressure ask

End with a single, specific ask, like "open to a quick collab this month?", instead of a vague "let me know if you're interested." One clear question is easy to say yes to. A pitch with three questions and no clear next step is easy to skip entirely.

Follow up once, maybe twice

Give it three or four days of silence before following up. Most replies never come from the first message anyway, so don't read silence as a no, read it as unread. Keep the follow-up short: a one-line bump that adds a small new reason to reply, not a repeat of what you already said. One or two is usually enough. Beyond that, replies barely move, and you risk reading as pushy instead of persistent.

When they reply, let your rate card do the talking

If they ask about pricing, point back to your rate card instead of naming a number on the spot. It's already thought through, it's consistent across every brand you talk to, and it keeps the conversation from turning into an on-the-fly negotiation you didn't prepare for.