Creators
What brands actually want from a creator
Most advice for creators is about growing an audience. The part that actually turns into income is a different skill, and it is much less discussed.
Reach is not the product
Creators lead with follower count because it is the number they have. Brands, particularly local ones, are usually buying something else.
A restaurant in Edmonton does not need fifty thousand viewers. It needs two thousand people who could plausibly eat there this month. A creator with a small, genuinely local audience is more valuable to that business than a much larger account spread across the world, and pitching on raw reach actively undersells it.
Fit is doing most of the work
Before anything else, a brand is asking whether you already look like their world. Not whether you could adapt to it.
This is why creators who post about everything struggle to get booked. There is nothing for a brand to recognise. A creator with a narrower lane gets fewer opportunities and converts far more of them.
Being easy to work with is the whole second booking
This is the part nobody says out loud. Brands rebook creators who reply, who deliver on the date agreed, who send the file in the format asked for, and who do not need chasing.
That sounds insultingly basic. It is also where most creators lose the relationship, because the first deal goes fine and the follow up gets slow. The creators making a living from this are rarely the most talented ones. They are the ones a marketing manager does not have to worry about.
Give them something they can use
A post that lives on your feed and disappears is worth less to a brand than a post plus a version they can run themselves.
Offering the raw vertical cut, or a version without your voiceover, or a few extra seconds of the product on its own, costs you almost nothing and materially changes what the work is worth. It also gives you something to charge for properly, because you are now licensing usage rather than renting a slot on your feed.
Get the usage in writing
The single most common mistake is agreeing to make a video and discovering it is running as a paid advert for a year.
Where it runs, for how long, and whether it can be used in paid advertising are the terms that matter. A creator who raises this early reads as professional rather than difficult, and it is far easier to agree before the shoot than after the brand has already run it.
Common questions
How many followers do you need to get brand deals?
Fewer than most creators assume, and the number matters less than who is following. A local business would rather reach two thousand people in their city than fifty thousand scattered across the world who will never walk in.
What do brands look for in a creator?
Whether the audience overlaps with their customers, whether the creator's existing content already fits their world, and whether working with them will be straightforward. The third one decides who gets booked again.
Should creators have a media kit?
Something is better than nothing, and it does not need to be elaborate. Who your audience is, where they are, what you make, and examples of brand work you have done. Most creators lose deals to being slow and vague rather than to a weak kit.
How should a creator price brand work?
By what is being asked for and what rights the brand gets, not by follower count alone. Usage is the part creators most often give away by accident. A single post is not the same as a brand running your face in paid ads for a year, and the agreement should say which one it is.