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How micro influencers get paid partnerships, from templates for reaching out to brands for collaborations to media kits
Micro influencer Lillian Zhang landed her first paid deal through a TikTok DM.Lillian Zhang.
How to get paid as a micro influencer and reach out to brands with the right tools. We spoke with 22 micro influencers ...
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How micro influencers get paid partnerships, from templates for reaching out to brands for collaborations to media kits

How to get paid as a micro influencer and reach out to brands with the right tools. We spoke with 22 micro influencers ...
  • Micro influencers are pitching brands and landing lucrative paid partnerships.
  • Some slide into a brand's DMs while others create and send a media kit.

The creator economy has grown so much there are now different tiers — nano influencers, micro influencers, macro influencers, and mega influencers. The micro influencer tier in particular is rapidly expanding its earning potential as people with a few thousand followers are being offered lucrative collaborations with brands like Adidas, Banana Republic, and Toyota.

Micro influencers are generally defined in the industry as those with up to 100,000 followers on a social-media platform like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. Many brands have gravitated toward these kinds of influencers because they often have high engagement rates and charge less to partner with than celebrities.

Insider spoke with 22 micro influencers, who broke down the top brands they work with.

Read about 7 top brands to pitch as a micro influencer, from Dunkin' to Mejuri.

Lillian Zhang, a micro influencer whose content focuses on college and early-career job advice, landed her first paid deal when she had only 10,000 followers. Before reaching out to brands, she thoroughly researches them to figure out how her content fits in with their values and assess how much she can earn.

"If you don't have a strong grasp on these concepts beforehand, it is very easy to get lowballed," she previously told Insider.

She uses TikTok, where she's amassed around 40,000 followers, to message brands she wants to work with.

Take a look at the exact DM she used to get her first paid brand deal and her advice for pitching.

While DMing on a social-media platform is the preferred method of outreach for some influencers, others have created their own media kits, which are documents that often include information like engagement data, previous collaborations and press, and a biography. It's such a popular tool among influencers that last year, Instagram announced it would let some users build media kits within the social-media platform.

Twenty-two-year-old Jour'dan Haynes used a simple, one-page media kit to land her first paid collaboration when she had 2,000 followers on Instagram. She's since grown her platform to 6,100 followers, expanded her kit to three pages, and collaborated with brands like Burger King and Garnier.

Browse the exact 3-page media kit she attaches when emailing brands.

Other creators have email templates they customize based on the brand and what they want the partnership to look like.

Julie Tecson, who's built a following of 7,100 Instagram followers, curated three different email templates — one for a personal project, one for an event, and one for a design project. She said it was pretty easy to explain why companies preferred working with micro influencers like her over those with millions of followers.

"If a brand can have a small creator make them an amazing TikTok video in exchange for just one product, that's way cheaper than hiring out a whole studio to make them video content," she previously told Insider.

Here are the different templates she uses for herself and other clients.

Insider spoke with 22 micro influencers who have pitched brands and landed paid collaborations using various templates and documents.

Micro influencer media kit examples:

Email templates creators use to pitch brands:

How influencers DM brands on social media:

Other types of documents creators use for brand deals:

This post has been updated with new information and examples.