How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand in 2026

You have a spreadsheet of 40 creators, and nobody on the team can say why any of them made the list.

To find influencers, write a one-page creator profile, then pick a method your budget allows: ask customers, search hashtags by hand, or use TikTok One, YouTube Creator Partnerships, Meta Creator Marketing Hub or a discovery tool. Vet each creator on comments and audience split, then shortlist those who fit your budget per creator.

Influencer discovery is the research that finds and identifies creators who match your audience, then checks each one against your goal and budget.

How to Find Influencers in Seven Steps

Seven steps take you from an empty list to a shortlist in about a week on a first run, and vetting takes the most time.

Step 1. Define Your Creator Profile Before You Search

Before you open TikTok or Instagram, write one page that says who the creator must reach and the most you can pay them.

The profile holds seven things:

• Audience: who buys from you, by age and gender

• Primary platform: where that audience buys

• Follower range: a band, so near misses stay in

• Engagement floor: the lowest rate you'd accept

• Content style: polished or raw, tutorial or everyday

• Geography: the countries or cities you sell in

• Budget per creator: the most you can pay one creator

Start from who your customer trusts. Say you sell a night cream to women in their 20s in Warsaw and women in their 60s in Vienna. Those are two separate profiles.

Younger customers trust creators far more than older ones. A Morning Consult and Business Insider poll of 2,003 US adults in September 2026 found that 62% of Gen Z and 64% of Millennials trust creator recommendations. Among Boomers it was 31%, and 43% have never bought on one.

These are US figures, but if your customer is a Boomer, test creators before you make them your first channel.

Then pick one primary platform. Statista surveyed 1,050 US adults in January 2026 for NeoReach's 2026 Creator Impact Report. Asked where they find creator-recommended products, and able to pick several answers, Gen Z most often named TikTok videos (47%) and Instagram Stories (42%), but across all respondents YouTube video descriptions came first.

Your budget per creator sets the tier you can shop in. The same campaign budget can pay 4 creators or 20, and those are different shortlists.

Hypefy tip: before any search runs, turn the brief into a short profile of audience, market and budget. If a field is blank, stop and ask.

Step 2. Match the Creator Tier to Your Goal and Budget

Book micro creators for a first campaign, and go up to macro only when you need to reach a new market quickly.

Each tier below covers a follower band and suits a different kind of campaign.

Compare views across tiers before you choose. Hypefy data from campaigns run from November 2024 to November 2026 puts micro creators at a median of about 14,000 views per TikTok video (at least 500 creators), nano creators at about 2,700 views per TikTok video (at least 200 creators) and macro creators at about 49,000 views per TikTok video (at least 200 creators). Most of those campaigns ran in Central and Eastern Europe, so expect different numbers elsewhere.

On Instagram over the same period and region, micro creators reached a median of about 17,000 views per Instagram Reel (at least 1,000 creators), nano creators about 5,700 views per Instagram Reel (at least 300 creators) and macro creators about 69,000 views per Instagram Reel (at least 200 creators).

When you have quotes from your own market, divide each fee by the views on that creator's recent posts so you can compare cost per view across tiers.

To plan before quotes come in, use our creator fee ranges by tier.

In the US survey behind NeoReach's 2026 Creator Impact Report, most respondents said they need to see a product at least two to three times before buying, and NeoReach reads that as repetition across creators and formats.

Hypefy tip: we build campaigns as portfolios of micro and nano creators, and you should decide your split when you set the budget. Micro creators bring more views than nano creators. Nano creators give you more posts for the money, which helps people see your product more than once.

Step 3. Choose the Discovery Method That Fits Your Budget

If you've never run a campaign, ask your customers and search hashtags yourself, then pay for a tool once you need many creators.

Start with your customers. Ask which creators they follow for your category in a post-purchase survey. An email or an Instagram poll does the same job, and any name that comes up twice already has your customers watching.

Marketplaces list creators who are open to paid work, so outreach moves faster but the pool is limited. Meta's Creator Marketplace, which Meta is merging into Meta Creator Marketing Hub, is one example: Meta's February 2024 announcement says creators join from their professional dashboard.

Once you're hiring many creators or working in several markets, compare the options in our list of the best influencer marketing tools before you pay for an influencer discovery tool.

Hypefy tip: switch to a lookalike search as soon as one creator delivers.

How Hypefy Runs This Step

Hypefy, our platform, runs discovery for you. You give it a brief and it matches that brief against 250M+ creators on Instagram and TikTok. It sources creators live for each campaign, so it's automation, not a database, and you approve the main decisions.

The same brief can source creators across 100+ markets, which helps when you're selling in a country you can't search yourself. Hypefy covers Instagram and TikTok only, so a YouTube campaign needs another route.

Step 4. Run the Search on Each Platform

To find influencers on social media, work one platform at a time from your profile, starting with that platform's own creator tool if you have access.

Find TikTok Influencers in TikTok One

TikTok One's Creator search is where we'd start on TikTok, and its filters fall into three groups:

• Creator details such as country or region, follower count and language

• Audience details such as country or region, age range and gender ratio

• Performance metrics, meaning median video views and engagement rate

Set the country in both creator details and audience details, which are separate filters. A creator who lives in Zagreb can pass the first filter and still fail the second when most of the people watching them are in Germany.

For a creator who isn't on TikTok One, create a Lite project and TikTok can share an invite link to it.

Find YouTube Influencers in Google Ads

YouTube Creator Partnerships is where advertisers find creators for sponsored content, and since June 2026 its Creator search has been available wherever the YouTube Partner Programme is active. The general search is open to all active Google Ads accounts registered in those countries.

The Creator search table has four default filters: subscriber count, average views, creator location and ways of contact.

Use creator location to narrow your search towards your area. Add the Audience demographics filter through Add filter, then confirm where the viewers are with the creator's YouTube Analytics.

Reaching creators is harder. The Contact and Send an inquiry features are limited to advertisers who meet set criteria, and one criterion is an account assigned to Large Customer Sales or Google Customer Solutions.

The inquiry form also works in only five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India and Indonesia. So build your list in Creator search and plan to reach creators through the business email or social links they've made public, where they've listed them.

Without a Google Ads account, search YouTube for your niche and narrow the results with YouTube's advanced search filters, such as upload date.

Instagram Search by Follower Count and Niche

Meta Creator Marketing Hub is where we'd start on Instagram. In June 2026 Meta said it was merging Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub into this one platform, and on 15 September 2026 it began the global launch, with access through Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite. Check that it's open in your market first. Meta's 2024 announcement says brands can filter Creator Marketplace by creator and audience attributes.

If your market has Meta's hub, start there. To search by follower count and niche by hand, search a niche hashtag, open the top posts and check each profile's follower count against your band. For the other manual routes, read how to find influencers on Instagram.

Hypefy tip: note which filter each creator passed, so every name on your list has a reason behind it.

Step 5. Narrow to Local Creators When Location Matters

Skip local search for a national launch, and add it if you're running a franchise, opening a store or selling from one location.

Hyperlocal social media marketing means reaching people in one city or district. Say you're opening a store in Split. A creator with 8,000 followers who mostly live nearby is a better fit for that opening than a national name whose viewers will never walk past your door.

To find local influencers, work through these sources:

• Location tags and place pages for your street and nearby venues

• City and neighbourhood hashtags paired with your category

• Local Facebook groups where you can ask who people follow

• Customers in store, asked at the till

• Local press and venues that already work with creators

• The creator location filter in YouTube's Creator search, as a first pass

Run every local creator through the audience check in Step 6.

Hypefy tip: for a multi-market rollout, use one brief. Our campaigns have run in 45 markets.

Step 6. Vet Each Creator Before You Send an Offer

Every creator gets four checks, and the comments come first, since a good engagement rate can hide pods and bots.

Engagement Quality

Read the comments on the creator's recent posts and look for product questions from people who come back. When it's all emoji and one-word praise, you may be looking at an engagement pod, which is a group that agrees to boost each other's posts.

Hypefy data from November 2024 to November 2026, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, puts the median micro creator at a 0.9% follower engagement rate per Instagram Reel (at least 1,000 creators). On TikTok, the same data gives a 1.8% follower engagement rate per TikTok video (at least 500 creators).

That rate is engagements divided by followers, so an engagement floor set far above it rules out most of the tier.

Audience Fit

Ask for the country and city split and the age and gender split, as screenshots from the creator's own analytics. Compare both with your profile and treat a refusal as a no.

Brand Safety

Go through past posts for clashes with your brand and for recent deals with competitors. Then check disclosure habits.

The sweep the European Commission and national authorities released in February 2024 found that 97% of 576 influencers posted commercial content and only 20% systematically disclosed it as advertising. How many of this creator's last sponsored posts carry a clear label? Regulators expect a clear label, so put disclosure in the contract in every market:

• In the US, the FTC says "Your company is ultimately responsible for what others do on your behalf," and that advertisers need reasonable programs to train and monitor their network.

• In the UK, the ASA says brands and influencers are both responsible. At a minimum, it's likely to expect a prominent "ad" label upfront, which people can see without clicking.

• In the EU, the Commission says any promotion that earns an influencer revenue or other benefits must be disclosed as advertising, and its Influencer Legal Hub applies that to products given free for advertising.

Past Work

Look at how the creator worked past sponsored posts into their normal content, and ask how those posts performed. If a sponsored post reads like a script, expect yours to read the same way.

Hypefy tip: ask for the audience screenshots, recent sponsored views and fee in one message so you can compare creators side by side.

Step 7. Build a Shortlist That Fits Your Budget

Rank your vetted creators against the profile and budget, and hold a few reserves for anyone who won't reply or agree terms.

Put the closest match to your profile at the top, then add up the first-choice fees against your budget. If the total runs over, drop a creator before you ask anyone to cut a fee.

Hypefy campaigns finished from November 2024 to November 2026, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, had a median of 7 creators per campaign. Use that as a starting point for your first-choice list, then add reserves.

Your shortlist needs these columns:

• Creator name, profile link and primary platform

• Tier, format and the fee the creator quoted

• Share of the audience in your market

• Notes from each of your four vetting checks

• Status, either a first choice or a reserve

Hypefy tip: a creator becomes a first choice after passing all four checks at a fee the budget can carry.

How Do You Hire an Influencer Once You Have a Shortlist?

Send each creator an offer that names the product and the fee, then get the brief and contract in writing before anyone films.

1. Send outreach that names the product, dates, deliverables and fee.

2. Draft a brief with our influencer brief generator.

3. Sign a contract that covers disclosure and usage rights, meaning your permission to reuse the creator's video in ads or on your own channels. Settle both before the post goes live.

4. Agree a payment date in writing.

Hypefy's influencer hiring platform takes you from brief to signed contract if you'd rather hand this part over.

Frequently Asked Questions

You can start finding creators for free, and you should put the fee and usage rights in writing before anyone posts.

1. How Do I Find Influencers for My Brand for Free?

Your customers and a manual search cost only your time, so start there. Ask in a post-purchase survey which creators they follow for your category. Then search hashtags and location tags on your primary platform, and save anyone who matches your creator profile.

2. How Can I Hire an Influencer to Promote My Brand?

Send the creator a specific offer that names the product and dates, then add the deliverables and fee. Agree a written brief and a contract that covers disclosure and usage rights. Leave the execution to the creator, and pay on the exact date you agreed.

3. How Much Do Brands Pay for Influencers?

Fees depend on tier and format, and your budget per creator sets the tier you can shop in. Ask each creator for a quote, then divide the fee by the views on their recent posts so you can compare cost per view across tiers. Our full influencer marketing cost breakdown gives fee ranges by tier to plan with.

4. How Do I Find Local Influencers?

Start with location tags and city hashtags for your area. Then ask in local Facebook groups and at the till. Before you send an offer, ask each creator for the audience-by-city screenshot, since living nearby says little about who watches.

5. What Is a Lookalike Influencer?

A lookalike influencer is a creator whose audience, niche and engagement patterns match a creator who already worked for your brand. You start from that creator and search for similar ones, so you need one who delivered. That makes lookalike search a better fit for your second campaign than your first.

What to Do Next

With no campaign history and a short creator list, ask customers and search by hand, then pay for a tool once you need several creators or markets.

Whichever method you pick, write the one-page profile first. Set the budget per creator before you compare tools, so the price of a tool never decides your tier.