By Andrea Galvez, partnrUP Chief Client Officer
One of my favorite things to do is catch up with long-time clients. I recently did that with April Bukofser, who runs marketing for the clinical oral rinse brand, Periactive. Admittedly, not exactly the most Instagrammable product category.
No satisfying unboxings, no glow-up content. And yet, two years into scaling Periactive’s influencer strategy, she has nearly 500 creator partnerships, a Meta ad strategy built almost entirely on creator content, and results that leave her in-house stuff in the dust.
I asked her how. Her answer wasn't a platform hack or a big budget. It was a process: knowing who to pick, and why, before clicking approve on a single creator.
Creator selection looks easy (scroll, vibe-check, approve), and it is not. Most campaigns underperform not because of the budget or the brief or even the creators themselves. It's because the wrong creators got picked in the first place. Selection is equal parts art and science, and once you have a framework for it, you'll spend less time reviewing profiles, build better relationships with creators, and honestly just feel a lot less like you're winging it.
Here's the six-part framework we use at partnrUP.
The Six-Step Creator Selection Framework
1. Niche: Is this creator actually talking to your customer?
This is the one that trips brands up most, and the mistake is surprisingly easy to make. When we're looking for creators, the instinct is to gravitate toward someone whose feed looks like our brand. But looking like your brand and reaching your customer are two very different things, and for organic reach campaigns, only one of them matters.
The shift: you want to partner with creators your purchasers already follow, not creators who are your purchasers.
April learned this the hard way and then the fun way. Her brand is clinical, serious, not flashy, so the easy move would've been dental hygienists and dentists. And yes, she went there ("we had one dentist at the top of our Meta ads for a long time"). But then she asked a different question: who else is buying this? And she found them. "We tested working with pregnant creators. Peri-Active is an oral rinse that reduces inflammation, and if you're pregnant, there's a 50% chance you have inflamed gums. So it was the exact right niche for us, and it was a great campaign."
TIP: Dust off your customer personas for this one (or build them, AI is genuinely great for this). For each persona, ask: what platforms do they use, and who do they actually follow? The answer is rarely just creators in your product category.
2. Content Quality / Authenticity: It's a spectrum, not a rule.
"Authenticity is everything" is true, and also it's not the whole story.
Content style runs on a spectrum. One end is totally polished: ring lights, scripted delivery, feed that looks like a brand shoot. The other end is your creator filming herself in the bathroom with genuinely unbrushed hair talking about her gum pain at 7am. Periactive, despite being a clinical product, was comfortable testing content pretty close to that second end, and it worked. But your brand might not, and that's completely fine.
What we do know is that most brands default too far toward polished, and it hurts them. The more produced something looks, the faster someone scrolls past it because their brain just went "ad." So even if you're a luxury brand that would never in a million years put a bathroom selfie on your Instagram, there's probably still a version of "more real" that would work better than what you're approving right now. Maybe it's one click more casual. Maybe it's just a creator who sounds like an actual person instead of a spokesperson.
April put it well: "There's so much fake or really composed content out there that working with smaller influencers who are just authentic and doing their own thing, it resonates really well." For her, that meant way-more-authentic-than-you'd-expect. For your brand, it might just mean finding creators whose content feels lived-in rather than produced.
When you're reviewing profiles, the question isn't really "does this look like our Instagram?" It's "does this person talk to their audience like a real human being, and does that human being feel like someone our customer would trust?"
3. Credibility: The follower count check that actually matters.
Credibility is the percentage of a creator's followers who are real, active accounts. Not bots, not ghost accounts, not purchased followers. Most large accounts sit somewhere between 70-80%. Smaller accounts tend to run higher, around 80-90%. The rule of thumb: aim above 75%, and be very skeptical of anyone below 50%, no matter how impressive their headline number looks.
This takes about ten seconds to check and can save you from wasting real money on fake reach.
4. Performance: Engagement rate is a starting point, not a finish line.
ER matters, but it needs context. A 1.2% engagement rate looks very different in beauty (where the Instagram benchmark is 1.19%) versus sports and fitness (where 1.74% is the floor). So before you call something "low," know what low actually means in your category.
That said, we recommend going one step further: look at the median video views across a creator's last 10 posts, excluding anything pinned. This gives you a recency filter, a realistic view of actual impressions, and a much more honest picture of what you're buying than a lifetime engagement average that peaked two years ago.
This will also allow you to calculate CPM or CPV, which will create an apples-to-apples metric you can use to evaluate all creators and compare them (and their rates) across tiers.
5. Audience Insights: Confirm before you commit.
You've found a creator in the right niche, with authentic content, real followers, and solid recent performance. Great. Now make sure their actual audience matches your actual customer. This is the step people skip, and it's where things quietly go wrong.
partnrUP makes this easy with our Audience Insights Reports: full audience breakdown: gender, age, ethnicity, location, brand affinities, notable followers. A creator who hits every other mark but whose audience is in the wrong country than your buyer is still the wrong creator. Check this before you send an offer.
Value Exchange: Use as a lever for all other steps.
It’s easy to forget that creators are humans! It’s possible that the perfect-fit creator for your brand is… busy. Or working with a competitor. Or simply too expensive. Just because a creator doesn’t fit every single criterion outlined above doesn’t mean the brand doesn’t want to work with them. It just means you need to make sure your value exchange is appropriately aligned.
A creator with a strong niche match, great credibility, and solid audience alignment, but median video views on the lower end of her tier? She's not a pass, but the comp should reflect the expected impressions, not what a higher-performing creator in that same tier would get. Either the rate comes down, or she delivers more content pieces for the same budget to make up the difference in reach. That's not a punitive thing. It's just how the math should work.
The main levers you're working with: number of content pieces per channel, usage rights (paid ads, allowlisting, exclusivity), amount of free product, incentive payment, and timeline. The stronger a creator looks across the other five dimensions, the more leverage she has on rate. The weaker any of those signals is, the more you should be adjusting somewhere else to balance it out.
Knowing which levers matter most to your brand going in, and which you can actually flex on, makes the whole thing faster and a lot less awkward for everyone.
April's campaigns got good not because she cracked some secret code, but because she tested, paid attention, and built real discipline around selection. "You just never know unless you're testing," she told me. The framework won't guarantee a perfect campaign. But it will guarantee you stop leaving those wins to chance.