The right influencers for your brand are the few whose audience already looks like your customers, who post about your category often, and whose followers actually respond to them. Follower count comes last. Start from your customer, find where they spend attention, then vet each creator's audience, engagement and past content before you contact anyone.
Here is the process we use, step by step.
1. Describe your customer, not your ideal influencer
Write down who buys from you today: age range, where they live, what they care about, what problem your product solves for them, and what they already follow. Your best customers are the brief. A creator with a huge audience of the wrong people is worth less than a small one whose followers could be your next customers.
If you have sales data, look at your top 20 percent of customers by order value or repeat purchases. Those are the people you want more of.
2. Find where those customers spend attention
Ask a handful of customers which accounts they follow for your category. Check which creators already tag your brand or your competitors. Look at the comments under content your customers engage with: other creators often show up there too.
Good places to search:
- Hashtags and keywords on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for your product category and the problems it solves.
- Competitors' tagged posts: creators who already work in your space, sometimes without exclusivity.
- Creator marketplaces run by the platforms (TikTok One, Instagram's creator marketplace, YouTube BrandConnect), which show audience data in one place.
- Your own followers and customers: some of them are creators, and they already like you.
3. Shortlist by fit before size
For each candidate, ask three questions:
- Does this creator post about my category regularly, not once?
- Would my customer recognise themselves in this creator's audience?
- Would a recommendation of my product feel natural in their feed?
If any answer is no, move on, however large the account. Aim for a shortlist of 10 to 20 creators, knowing you will run with a few.
4. Check the audience, not just the follower count
Ask shortlisted creators for a screenshot of their audience insights: country, city, age and gender split. Platforms show creators this data in their own analytics, and serious creators share it on request.
What you are looking for:
- Location that matches where you can ship or sell.
- Age that matches your buyers.
- Consistency between the audience and the content. A beauty creator with an audience that is mostly in another country than their content suggests deserves a closer look.
5. Read the engagement, then read the comments
Engagement rate tells you whether the audience responds. Calculate it the same way for every creator (we explain the formulas in how to calculate influencer engagement rate), and compare creators of a similar size in the same niche.
Then read the comments on their last ten posts. Real engagement looks like questions, opinions and people tagging friends. Warning signs:
- Many short generic comments ("Nice!", "Love this", a row of emojis) from accounts with no posts.
- Sudden jumps in follower count with no viral post to explain them.
- Likes that are very high compared with comments and views.
6. Check brand safety and past partnerships
Scroll back through at least three months of content. Would you be comfortable with your brand next to all of it? Look at their past sponsored posts too:
- Do they disclose partnerships clearly? (If not, that becomes your problem. See FTC disclosure rules for brands.)
- Do sponsored posts get similar engagement to their other posts, or does the audience tune out?
- Have they promoted a direct competitor recently?
7. Start with a small, measured test
Pick the few creators with the best fit, brief them well (here is how to write an influencer brief) and give each a tracked link and a discount code. After the first round, you will know which creators actually move your customers, and you can put more budget behind them, including running their best posts as ads.
A quick checklist
| Check | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Category fit | Posts about your category regularly |
| Audience | Location and age match your customers |
| Engagement | Real conversation in the comments, steady numbers |
| Brand safety | Nothing in the last three months you would not stand next to |
| Disclosure | Past partnerships clearly labelled |
| Measurement | Happy to use a tracked link and code |
Frequently asked questions
How many influencers should a small brand start with? As few as your budget allows to learn something: three to five creators with a strong audience match will tell you more than twenty loosely matched ones, because you can see clearly which ones work.
Are micro-influencers better than big ones? Not by default. Smaller creators often have closer relationships with their audience and lower fees, while larger ones give reach in one go. Choose by audience fit and your goal, then by size.
Should I use an influencer platform or search by hand? Platforms speed up discovery and give audience data in one place. Manual search finds creators the platforms miss and gives you a feel for their content. Most good shortlists use both.
If you would rather have a shortlist made for you, with audience data for each creator, book a call and tell us about your customers.