How to Make an Influencer Media Kit in 2026 (And What Brands Actually Check)

Most media kit guides are about design. Pick a template, choose a font, add a photo. That advice skips the part that decides whether you get a reply.

The brand reading your kit has a specific problem. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report 2026, published 4 May 2026 from a survey of over 600 industry respondents, fake or bot followers account for 56.5% of all reported fraud and quality issues. More than half of everything that goes wrong in influencer marketing traces back to numbers that were not real.

So when a marketing manager opens your kit, they are not admiring your layout. They are asking one question: can I check this?

That question should shape every part of your kit.

What a media kit is for

A media kit is the document you send a brand so they can decide whether to talk to you. That is its whole job.

It is not a portfolio, not a CV, and not a brand book. A brand contact reviewing partnerships has a shortlist to cut down and limited time per creator. Your kit either survives that pass or it does not.

Three things get you through:

1. Numbers they can verify
2. Evidence you reach the people they want
3. A way to reply without extra steps

Everything else is decoration. Decoration is fine, but it never rescues a kit that fails on those three.

The five things every media kit needs

1. Who you are, in one sentence

Not your life story. What you make, for whom, in a line a stranger understands.

"I test creator tools in French for a West African audience" tells a brand more than three paragraphs about your journey. They are matching you to a campaign brief. Make the match obvious.

2. Your platforms, with real handles

List every account you want a brand to consider, with the handle spelled exactly as it appears on the platform. Make them clickable.

This sounds trivial. It is the single most common reason a kit gets dropped: the brand cannot find you to check. A screenshot of an analytics dashboard proves nothing, because anyone can produce one. A link they can open proves everything, because they can look for themselves.

3. The three numbers that matter

Followers, engagement rate, and typical views per post. Per platform, never merged.

Merged numbers are the fastest way to look like you are hiding something. "500K across platforms" makes a brand wonder which platform carries it, and why you did not say. Break it out:

Platform	Followers	Engagement	Median views
YouTube	281	10.7%	981
TikTok	144	5.8%	2,154

That table is from a real, small account, and every figure in it was read off the channels rather than typed in. It works precisely because it is specific and checkable: a brand can open both channels and see whether the numbers hold.

That is the difference worth building your kit around. ProveitGo exists to produce that table for you, which is a narrow job, but it is the one that decides whether the rest of your kit is believed.

4. Who your audience is

Age, main countries, and split by gender if you know it. Say where each figure comes from.

If it comes from your platform analytics, say so. If it is your own estimate, say that too. A brand can work with "declared by the creator". A brand cannot work with a number that turns out to be invented after they have paid.

5. How to reach you

One address, at the top and the bottom. Not a contact form on a website you have not finished, not a DM request.

What brands actually check

Here is the part the design guides leave out. When a brand receives your kit, they run through a short list. Knowing it changes what you put in.

Does the account exist, and is it the one in the kit? They open your handle. If your kit says 50K and the profile shows 12K, the conversation is over. Nobody asks you to explain.

Does the engagement rate look possible? An unusually high rate is a red flag, not a selling point. A nano account claiming 25% engagement gets flagged, because that is the shape of bought engagement. See how brands detect fake followers for what they look for.

Do the comments read like people? "🔥🔥🔥" and "nice post" repeated fifty times is the signature of an engagement pod. Brands scroll your recent posts and read.

Do the numbers match what the platform shows? Views are public on YouTube and TikTok. If your kit claims 50,000 average views and the last ten videos show 4,000, that gap is visible in thirty seconds.

Is the audience where the campaign is? A brand selling in France does not need your American followers, however many there are.

Notice that four of those five checks are things a brand does without asking you. Your kit does not get to explain itself. It either survives an independent look or it does not.

The mistakes that cost deals

Screenshots as proof. A cropped analytics screenshot is the weakest possible evidence. It is trivially editable, it has no date, and everyone knows it. If you use screenshots, use them to illustrate, never to prove.

Best-post numbers presented as typical. One video did 200,000 views and the rest do 3,000. Putting 200,000 in your kit is not a lie exactly, but the brand finds out in one scroll, and now everything else in your kit is suspect. Use the median, not the best, and not the mean. One viral post drags a mean upward; the median is what a brand can expect.

Stale numbers. A kit built in January and sent in September is describing someone else. If you cannot update it monthly, use something that updates itself: ProveitGo re-reads your channels and refreshes the figures when someone opens your kit, so the brand always sees this week's numbers rather than the ones you last had time to type.

A rate with no basis. Naming a price is good. Naming a price with nothing behind it invites a negotiation you will lose. Tie the number to your reach. See how to price a sponsored post from your real numbers.

Merged platform totals. Covered above, and worth repeating, because it is the most common one.

PDF, Canva, or a link?

Format	Strength	Weakness
PDF	Works everywhere, easy to attach	Frozen the moment you export it
Canva link	Free, looks good, easy to edit	Numbers are typed by hand, so unverifiable
Notion page	Fast to update	Reads like an internal document
Live kit page	Updates itself, numbers are measured	Needs a tool that measures them

The format matters less than whether the numbers are current. But there is a real difference between a document where you typed the numbers and a page where they were measured, and a brand can tell which is which.

A PDF made in Canva says: here is what I claim. A page where the figures were pulled from the platforms says: here is what is true, check it yourself. That is the whole reason ProveitGo reads your channels instead of giving you a form to fill in. There is no field where you type your engagement rate, because a field you can type in is a field a brand has to take on trust.

A template you can copy

Keep it to one screen. A brand reads the top third.

[Name] : [what you make, for whom]

YouTube  @handle   281 subscribers   10.7% engagement   981 median views
TikTok   @handle   144 followers      5.8% engagement   2,154 median views
Measured 1 September 2026

Audience: 18-34, mainly Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal (declared)

Past partners: [three names, or leave it out entirely]

Rates: Integrated video from $X. Usage rights and exclusivity quoted separately.

[email]

That is a complete media kit. Add a photo and your brand colours if you like. Do not add a fourth page.

Two details in it are doing real work. The measurement date tells the brand the numbers are current. Splitting rates from usage rights signals you know how the business works, which is more persuasive than any adjective about yourself.

Questions creators ask

How long should a media kit be? One page. Two if you have real case studies with results. Anything longer is read by nobody.

Should I include my rates? Yes, as a starting figure. It filters out brands with no budget before either of you spends time. Quote usage rights and exclusivity separately, because those are the terms that move a price the most, and both Hootsuite's 2026 rate guide and standard contract practice treat them as separate line items.

What if my numbers are small? Say them anyway. Small and honest beats large and unverifiable, and small accounts are actively sought: the same 2026 benchmark data shows nano and micro creators clustering under $500 per post, which is exactly why brands run campaigns with dozens of them. What kills a small account is not the size, it is claiming otherwise.

Do I need past brand partnerships? No. If you have none, leave the section out rather than padding it with unpaid mentions. An absent section reads as new. A padded one reads as dishonest.

How often should I update it? Monthly at minimum. Your engagement rate moves more than your follower count, and it is the number brands weigh most.

Should I use a template? Templates are fine for layout. They cannot help with the part that decides the outcome, which is whether your numbers hold up when someone checks them.

The short version

A media kit is a claim. What makes it work is not how it looks, it is whether a brand can confirm it in under a minute without asking you anything.

So put in what can be checked, split it by platform, date it, and leave out anything you would not want a marketing manager to look up. The design is the easy part. Do the other part first.

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Your numbers, measured rather than typed: build a free media kit with ProveitGo. It reads your channels, works out the figures, and gives you a link you can send a brand.