How to Find Creators for Influencer Marketing

Where do brands actually find creators?

In five places, and most good campaigns use more than one.

Most brands still do this themselves. In Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 Benchmark Report, 66% of respondents run influencer marketing in-house, and AI-powered creator discovery was the single most common use of AI, picked by 36.7%. (Influencer Marketing Hub) Meta has been pushing in the same direction: Instagram’s creator marketplace now uses machine learning to recommend creators that fit a brand’s campaign, and connects straight into partnership ads. (Search Engine Land)

Searching all five places for every campaign is a part-time job on its own. At INFLUENCE, our team handpicks creators for each campaign using audience and performance data plus human judgment, and you approve every name before anyone’s booked. If you want to compare approaches, here’s how INFLUENCE differs from an influencer marketplace.

How to know who your creators should be before you search

Write down three things first. They’ll save you hours of scrolling.

1. Who your customer is, specifically. Not “women 25–34.” More like “first-time renters in big cities who cook on a budget.”

2. What they watch when they’re not thinking about you. That’s where your creators are. A budgeting app’s customers might watch “day in my life as a nurse” videos, not finance explainers.

3. What the creator needs to show. If your product only makes sense when someone uses it, you need creators who make demo or “try it with me” content, not just pretty photos.

Then turn those answers into search terms: the hashtags, keywords and topics your customer actually follows. The best creators for you are often next to your category, not in it. A meal-kit brand, for instance, may sell more through exhausted-parent creators than through chefs, since it’s the parents who are staring into the fridge at 6 p.m.

Turning a customer profile into a creator shortlist is the part most teams find hardest. INFLUENCE starts every campaign from your objective, audience and geography, then builds the creator list around them, so you begin with fit instead of follower counts. Once you’ve picked them, our influencer brief template covers what to send them.

What to look for in a creator (beyond followers)

Recent views and audience fit matter far more than follower count. A creator with 40,000 followers whose last ten videos all got 30,000 views can be a much better buy than one with 400,000 followers whose videos get 15,000.

Check these, in this order:

Engagement matters too, but read it carefully. Bigger accounts almost always engage less. In HypeAuditor’s 2026 numbers, nano accounts (1,000–10,000 followers) averaged 1.78% engagement on Instagram, while million-plus accounts averaged just 0.33%. (EMARKETER) Compare creators against others their size, not against each other. Our Instagram engagement rate calculator does that comparison for you.

Checking all of that for 50 creators takes days. INFLUENCE weighs creators on audience, geography, recent performance, content style, price and risk before they reach your shortlist, so the list you approve is already filtered.

How many creators do you need?

More than you think, and usually a mix of sizes. A single creator is a gamble: they might have a great week or a quiet one. A group of creators across different audiences gives you a much steadier result.

Rough starting points (our rules of thumb, not industry data):

• A first test: 10–20 creators, mostly small and mid-size, so you can learn what works without betting the budget.

• A real campaign: 30–80 creators across two or three platforms and a few audience types.

• An always-on program: a core group of creators who post regularly, plus new ones each month to test.

Brands are moving the same way. Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 survey found just over half planned to grow their micro (52.8%) and nano (51.4%) rosters, versus about one in five (20.6%) for macro creators. (Influencer Marketing Hub) For the trade-offs, see micro vs macro influencers.

Building a mix like that means comparing dozens of creators on price, audience and risk all at once. Internally we call this campaign composition: treating the creator group like a portfolio, so no single video has to carry the whole campaign.

How to vet creators before you pay them

Check for fake audiences, check their history, and check that they’ll actually deliver. Skipping this step is how brands end up paying for bots.

Fraud is real. In Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 report, fake or bot followers made up 56.5% of the fraud or quality problems brands reported. (Influencer Marketing Hub) It’s not just a nuisance, either. The FTC’s fake-review rule, which took effect in October 2024, reaches fake social signals too: buying bot followers or views you knew, or should have known, were fake is covered. (MarTech)

A quick vetting checklist:

• Views match followers. Big follower counts with tiny, flat view counts are a red flag.

• Comments are real. Specific, varied comments from real-looking accounts, not the same emojis over and over.

• Growth looks natural. Sudden jumps of thousands of followers overnight usually mean purchased followers.

• Audience location fits. If you sell in the U.S. and most of their audience is elsewhere, the views won’t help you.

• Past brand posts did okay. Sponsored posts that perform far worse than their normal content are worth asking about.

• They’re reliable. Do they reply, meet deadlines and follow disclosure rules?

Vetting is slow and repetitive, which is why it’s the task brands outsource most often. INFLUENCE handles creator qualification and brand-safety checks before anyone reaches your approval list, so you’re choosing between creators who’ve already passed.

Should you find creators yourself or get help?

Do it yourself if you have time and a small campaign. Get help when you need many creators fast, or when the people who’d do the searching have other jobs.

Most teams start in-house and get help once they need more than a couple of dozen creators. For a closer look at that choice, read how to run influencer marketing without an agency.

That’s the work INFLUENCE was built to take on: we find, vet, book, brief and pay creators, and you approve the creators and the content. You’re billed for the views posts actually get, never above the rate you chose (the pay-per-view model).

Finding creators isn’t about scrolling until someone looks right. It’s about knowing your customer, looking where they already watch, judging creators on recent views and real audiences, and vetting before you pay. Do that, and the rest of the campaign gets a lot easier. Searching is also the first job INFLUENCE takes off a brand’s plate.

Get the creators right, and everything after gets easier.