How to Get Brand Deals on Instagram With Under 10k Followers

The short version: brands are actively choosing accounts under 10k over bigger ones right now because they're cheaper, more trusted by their audience, and easier to work with, and you can start landing paid deals with a media kit built from three numbers, a shortlist of twenty brands, and one honest email a day. It won't happen from posting and hoping. It happens from asking, with proof.

Why brands want your small account, not despite the number but because of it

I've sat in enough marketing meetings to know what a brand manager wants when they're briefing an influencer campaign, and it's rarely reach. It's trust. A friend of mine runs a small skincare line out of Bristol, and she told me flatly that she'd rather pay four accounts with 3,000 followers each than one account with 50,000. Her reasoning was simple: the small accounts get replies in the comments, people ask "does this work on oily skin" and get an answer from a real person, not a brand rep. That's the sale. The big account gets likes. The small account gets questions, and questions convert.

There's a category for this now, and it has a name: nano-influencer. Anything from around 1,000 to 10,000 followers sits in it, and brands like Glossier, Daniel Wellington, and countless smaller DTC brands have run entire marketing budgets through nano-influencer programmes because the cost per genuine engagement is lower than paid ads on Meta. If you've got under 10k followers, you're not the leftover option. You're the line item a lot of brands prefer.

The number that matters more than your follower count

Nobody serious in a brand's marketing team opens your profile and counts followers first. They calculate your engagement rate, and you should already know yours before you pitch anyone. Here's the formula: add up your likes and comments on your last 10 posts, divide by 10 to get an average, divide that by your follower count, then multiply by 100.

• Example: you average 340 likes and comments per post, you have 4,800 followers. 340 divided by 4,800 is 0.0708. Multiply by 100 and your engagement rate is 7.08%.
• Anything above 3% is considered solid. Above 6% is good and worth mentioning first in any pitch, before you even say how many followers you have.
• For comparison, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers often sit at 1% to 2%, because reach dilutes engagement. This is your use point, so use it in writing, in a sentence, near the top of your email.

If you want to see how wildly pay and expectations shift depending on platform and audience location, it's worth reading through the numbers in our breakdown of what 1,000-follower Instagram accounts earn in different markets, because "brand deal money" is not one flat figure, it moves a lot by country, niche, and format.

Build a one-page media kit before you pitch anyone

This took me twenty minutes with a client last year and it changed her reply rate from roughly one in twenty emails to closer to one in six. Keep it to one page, no design software needed, a Google Doc works.

• Your name, niche, and location at the top.
• Follower count and engagement rate, side by side, with the engagement rate in bold.
• Your top three posts by engagement, with screenshots and the actual numbers underneath.
• Audience breakdown from Instagram's own Insights: age range, top three cities, and gender split.
• Three past collaborations if you have them, even unpaid ones, or three examples of content you'd make for a similar brand if you don't.
• Your rates, or a line saying "rates available on request" if you'd rather negotiate case by case.

Attach it as a PDF to every pitch. Never make a brand click through to your bio and dig for this stuff themselves. They won't.

A real example, the baking account that landed £300 with 4,200 followers

I worked with a woman running a home baking account, real bakes, real kitchen, no filter tricks, sitting at 4,200 followers with an engagement rate around 8%, which is high. She wanted brand deals and had been posting for eighteen months with nothing but the occasional free bag of flour turning up unrequested.

We built her media kit in one sitting. She picked twenty small and mid-size kitchenware and baking ingredient brands, mostly UK-based, nothing huge, brands like local flour mills, independent cake stand sellers, small baking subscription boxes. She sent one pitch a day for two weeks, each one personalised with the brand's own product mentioned by name and one specific reason it suited her account. Fourteen emails, four replies, two paid deals. One was £150 for three posts and a reel for a cake decorating brand. The other was £300 plus product for a flour mill wanting a Christmas baking series. That second one turned into a recurring quarterly deal worth over £1,000 a year from a single cold email.

What got the reply wasn't her follower count. It was the specificity. She named their product, quoted her own engagement rate, and attached three photos of bakes she'd already made using similar ingredients. Brands don't want a stranger. They want proof you already understand their product.

Where to find brands worth pitching

• Search your own hashtags and location tags for brands already being tagged by accounts your size. If a competitor with a similar follower count is working with a brand, that brand already believes in nano-influencer campaigns, which means they're easier to convince than one that's never tried it.
• Check the comments and tags on similar-sized accounts in your niche for three months back. Brands that ran a campaign once often run it again seasonally.
• Look at brands' own Instagram Stories highlights, many save every creator collaboration there under a folder, which tells you exactly what kind of account they've said yes to before.
• Go direct to small and mid-size brands rather than agencies first. A founder replying to their own DMs will often say yes faster than a marketing department buried in approvals.

The pitch itself, kept short on purpose

Long pitches get skimmed and ignored. Five sentences, structured like this:

• Sentence one: who you are and your niche, one line.
• Sentence two: your engagement rate and one specific stat, not your follower count leading the way.
• Sentence three: why their specific product fits your audience, name the product.
• Sentence four: one concrete content idea, described in a single sentence.
• Sentence five: your ask, either a rate or an invitation to discuss options, with your media kit attached.

Send it to a real person if you can find one, not a general info@ inbox. LinkedIn is useful here, most small brand founders have a profile and you can find their name in thirty seconds.

What to charge, in real figures

UK nano-influencer rates as of 2026, for reference, based on what I've seen brands pay accounts under 10k followers:

• A single feed post: £50 to £200, depending on niche and engagement rate, with beauty, food, and parenting typically at the higher end.
• A Reel: £75 to £300, because video gets prioritised by brands right now over static images.
• A Stories set of three to five slides: £30 to £120.
• A bundle deal, one post plus Stories plus a Reel: £150 to £500.
• Product-only deals: fine occasionally for genuine excitement about a brand, but I'd cap unpaid product collaborations at one a month once you're past 3,000 followers, because every free deal you accept teaches that brand, and every brand watching, that your work is worth product and nothing else.

Pay rates vary hugely by content type and platform, and if you want a wider sense of how this compares across TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, the full creator pay rates breakdown is worth a read before you set your own numbers, because anchoring your price only to Instagram norms can leave money on the table if a brand also wants cross-platform content.

The uncomfortable part nobody tells you

Here's the bit that doesn't get said enough: most small accounts undercharge because they're afraid the brand will say no, and brands know this, so they lowball first and rely on you to accept it out of relief that anyone replied at all. I've watched people accept £40 for content that took six hours to shoot and edit because they were just glad to be asked. That's not gratitude, that's a pricing problem you're creating for the next creator too, because brands remember what worked cheap.

The fix is boring but it works: quote your real rate first, every time, and let the brand negotiate down if they need to, rather than starting low and hoping they'll offer more. Nine times out of ten they won't. They'll just pay what you asked, because most brands running small-creator programmes have a budget line already set aside and no strong opinion on where within that range you land.

Mistakes that quietly kill deals

• Pitching brands wildly outside your niche because they're big or exciting. A gaming account pitching a skincare brand wastes both people's time.
• Not disclosing paid partnerships. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority and the US Federal Trade Commission both require clear, upfront disclosure of paid content, and brands increasingly check this before working with you a second time because it protects them too.
• Sending the same generic pitch to fifty brands at once. It's obvious, and it reads as obvious.
• Going quiet after the first no. The baking account example above needed fourteen emails to land two deals. That ratio is normal, not a sign something's wrong with your account.
• Forgetting to follow up. A polite nudge after five to seven days with no reply doubles response rates in most of the pitching I've watched clients do.

Where this leads

Brand deals at this size aren't usually the destination, they're proof of concept. Once you've got three or four paid collaborations logged with real numbers attached, pitching gets easier because you're no longer asking a brand to take a first chance on you, you're showing them you already do this. Some accounts stay small on purpose and just run a steady stream of nano deals worth £1,000 to £3,000 a month. Others use it as the evidence base to pitch bigger brands, or to move into consulting, content creation for other businesses, or paid speaking, which is closer to how I rebuilt parts of my own business after stepping back from full-time influencer work. Either path starts the same way: know your numbers, put them on one page, and ask.

I have written more around this on the site: How Much Does Instagram Pay for 1000 Views in India? (2026 Real Numbers), How Much Does a Facebook Page With 100k Followers Earn in 2026, Instagram 1000 Followers Income in India: The Real Numbers for 2026.

This guide is part of my Instagram Help: 81 Guides to Followers, Hashtags, Money, Accounts and Fixes. To see who does not follow you back, use the free tool that lists who unfollowed you.

Related: the beauty page.

Frequently asked questions

Can you get brand deals with under 1,000 followers?

Yes, though it's harder and usually product-only rather than paid, since most brands set a rough floor around 1,000 to 3,000 followers for cash deals. Engagement rate matters more than the raw number, so a highly engaged 800-follower account in a tight niche can still land small paid work, particularly from local or independent brands rather than national ones.

How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram?

There's no fixed threshold, and plenty of accounts under 10,000 followers earn a genuine side income from brand deals once they have a clear niche and an engagement rate above 3%. Money tends to follow trust and specificity, not scale, which is why nano-influencer budgets exist at all.

Do micro and nano influencers get paid in cash or just free product?

Both happen, and it should shift toward cash the more your account grows and the more collaborations you complete. Product-only deals are reasonable occasionally, especially early on, but once you're consistently pitching, aim to negotiate at least partial payment rather than product alone.

What niches get the most brand deal interest under 10k followers?

Food, parenting, home and interiors, beauty, fitness, and personal finance tend to attract the most nano-influencer budget in the UK right now, largely because these categories have obvious, trackable product tie-ins. Niche specificity within these, like gluten-free baking rather than baking generally, usually outperforms broad accounts on both engagement and brand interest.

Sources worth reading

• Instagram's own Help Centre
• Meta's Business Help Centre