Influencer Sourcing
Finding and vetting the right creators: audience checked rather than assumed, engagement verified, and past brand work reviewed before anyone is approached.
Overview
The sourcing stage decides most of a campaign's outcome, and it is where the least time gets spent. A creator with the right audience and modest reach will outperform a larger one whose followers are in the wrong country, the wrong age group, or not real.
Vetting is unglamorous and specific: audience demographics against your market, engagement patterns that look organic, comment quality, past brand partnerships, and a look through their history for anything you would not want to be associated with afterwards.
Who this is for
- Brands who have been burned by a creator with inflated numbers
- Companies entering a category or country where they know nobody
- Teams spending hours on discovery with little to show for it
How we approach influencer sourcing
The specific pieces of work a typical engagement covers. Scope is agreed up front — nothing here is a surprise line item later.
Discovery
Building a longlist from platform search, tools and manual work. The best fits are frequently not in any database.
Audience verification
Demographics, location and authenticity checked against data rather than taken from a media kit.
Engagement quality review
Whether comments are real conversation or pods and bots. Engagement rate alone is easy to manufacture.
Brand safety check
Reviewing history for content and associations that would be a problem later. Cheaper to find now than after the partnership is announced.
Past partnership review
What they have promoted, how often, and how their audience responded. Creators who post sponsorships weekly deliver less.
Outreach and negotiation
Approaching with a real brief, and negotiating rates against comparable market data rather than the first number quoted.
From first call to measured result
The same sequence every time, so you always know what happens next.
Profile
Define the audience you need to reach and the creator characteristics that would deliver it.
Longlist
Build a broad candidate set from several sources rather than one tool's rankings.
Vet
Audience, engagement, safety and history, with each candidate scored the same way.
Approach
Outreach with a specific brief and a rate benchmark, then negotiate and contract.
Outcomes, not deliverables
A pile of artefacts isn't progress. These are the changes the work is meant to produce — and what we report against.
Budget spent on real audiences
Verification removes the candidates whose numbers would not have survived a campaign.
Better fit, better results
Audience match beats reach on almost every measure that matters, and costs less.
Fewer unpleasant surprises
History checks catch the association problems that become a news story after launch.
Rates you can defend
Benchmarking against comparable deals typically moves the first quoted price considerably.
Common questions about Influencer Sourcing
The things people ask before they get in touch. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
How do you spot fake followers?
Follower growth that arrives in sudden steps, engagement far out of line with audience size, comments that are generic or repeated across posts, and audience locations that do not match the creator's language or content. No single signal is conclusive; the pattern usually is.
What engagement rate should we look for?
It varies enormously by platform and audience size, so a universal benchmark is misleading. What matters more is whether engagement is proportionate for that creator's size on that platform, and whether the comments read like a real audience.
Should we use an influencer marketplace?
As one source among several. Marketplaces are convenient and their rosters are picked over, so the fits everyone has already worked with are over-represented. The most effective creators for a niche are often not signed to anything.
How many creators should we shortlist?
Expect to review several times the number you will book. Vetting eliminates a large share of any longlist, and building in that attrition from the start avoids compromising at the end when time runs out.
Thinking about Influencer Sourcing?
Tell us what you are trying to change. If we are not the right fit we will say so, and point you somewhere better.
Looking at the wider picture?
Influencer Sourcing usually sits alongside other work in Influencer & Creator Marketing. Browse the full area to see what it connects to.