Why we treat influencers like an ad channel (and you should too)
How to vet creators on engagement velocity, not follower counts, and turn their content into your media budget.
Stop running influencer like a vending machine
Pay → post → pray is not a channel. It's a wish. The brands winning at creator marketing in 2026 treat it the same way they treat Meta or Google: with audience definitions, hypothesis-driven creative, performance attribution, and a kill/scale playbook.
Which means the work isn't 'find an influencer'. The work is 'find a creator whose audience overlaps with my ICP, brief them like a co-creator, secure usage rights, and amplify the winning content with paid spend.'
Engagement velocity beats follower count, every time
A creator with 35k followers and 12% engagement will outperform a creator with 800k and 0.4% engagement, ten times out of ten. Velocity (how fast a post racks up engagement in the first 60 minutes) is the truest signal of audience health.
Tools we use to vet: Modash, Aspire, native platform analytics, and old-fashioned scrolling. Look at their last 12 posts and check the comment-to-like ratio — anything below 1:50 is a red flag.
New post every Friday.
One marketing tactic + one client win + one tool, every week. No fluff.
Whitelisting is the multiplier
The single highest-ROI thing you can do in influencer marketing is secure usage rights at the contract stage, then run the creator's organic content as Spark Ads (TikTok) or Partnership Ads (Meta) from their handle.
Why this works: it inherits their social proof, runs against your targeting, and CPMs are typically 30–50% cheaper than brand-handle ads. We've seen 5.8× lift on average vs. organic-only.
