We begin with your goal and customer. Is the campaign about awareness in a city, leads for a service, sales of a product, app installs or event attendance? Who is your buyer: age, place, language, interests, the platforms they use and the creators they already trust? What is the budget range, and are there categories or personalities you would never work with? These answers become a scoring sheet with weighted criteria, agreed with you before any names are judged. We then take the candidate pool, whether from our own research or from names you supply; see influencer research. For each candidate, we gather the basics: platform, handle, follower count, posting frequency, typical views and engagement, content themes, languages, location and contact route. Next we check audience fit. Where creators share their audience reports, such as location, age and gender splits, we compare them with your target. Where they do not, we look at comments, the cities and languages visible, and the kinds of accounts that interact. We then check engagement quality. We compare likes, comments and views with follower count, look for sudden jumps in followers or likes that suggest bought activity, read comments for real conversation and repeated generic phrases and compare recent posts with older ones. A smaller creator with a loyal niche audience often beats a larger one with a thin audience. We review content: recent posts, how products are presented, accuracy of claims, tone, production quality and how often the creator posts sponsored content, since a feed of constant ads loses trust. We look at past brand partnerships, their results where visible, whether sponsored content was properly labelled and whether the creator works with competitors. We do risk checks using public searches for controversies, disputes with brands and statements that could clash with your values. We estimate cost where the creator publishes rates or by comparing similar creators, flagging that actual quotes will differ, and we note what formats each creator offers, such as reels, stories, videos, posts or live sessions. Using the scoring sheet, we rank candidates and prepare a shortlist, usually eight to fifteen names for a campaign that needs three to five, to leave room for refusals. For each we write a one-page profile: why they fit, strengths, concerns, suggested format, expected cost range and a sample of relevant posts. We also give a “not recommended” list with reasons, so that you can see what was rejected. We review the shortlist with you, adjust the order and agree the next step; see influencer outreach coordination. We keep the sheet for future campaigns, so that results can refine the criteria; see influencer performance reporting. We cannot see private analytics or guarantee a creator’s future performance, and public data can mislead, but a transparent scoring process avoids picking creators on follower counts alone.
