Judge whether a creator's audience matches your buyer before you approach them.
Choose a creator by how many of their followers are your buyers. The total follower number matters far less. This share is the creator's audience fit for you. When most of a big audience is the wrong people, most of what you pay for is wasted. When a small audience is largely your buyers, it can bring you more, and it usually costs less as well.
Farah runs a business selling blouses. First, she paid a fashion creator with a very large following to post about one of her blouses. The video looked polished and drew plenty of views. It produced two orders.
A few months later, she gave a blouse to a working mother whose following was modest. It was a gift, and Farah paid her nothing. This woman films her mornings: getting three kids to school and getting herself to the office by 8.30. She wore Farah's blouse in one of those videos. It brought Farah more orders than the paid video did, along with dozens of messages from people asking about sizes. The two results were different because the two audiences were made up of different people. Their size was not what decided it.
There are other reasons to distrust the follower number. Follower counts can be inflated without much effort, and views can come from any country. A creator who lives in Singapore might have followers who are mostly abroad. If you deliver only within Singapore, those followers can't buy from you.
Begin with the question you have used throughout the course: who is my buyer? Then search for creators whose followers are that person. Plenty of good candidates don't think of themselves as influencers at all. Examples are a teacher sharing study tips, a dad reviewing playgrounds, a nurse describing shift life and a hawker filming his early mornings.
Comments on a creator's recent posts are the fastest way to see who follows them. Read what the comments say instead of counting them. Then click into a handful of the commenters' accounts and check whether they resemble your buyer in age, in life situation and in where they live.
Some comments ask where to buy the item, how it works, or whether it would suit the person asking. People who write those tend to act on what they watch. Other comments are only emojis, or vague praise from accounts that have never posted anything. These tell you little about the audience, and a large number of them can be a warning sign.
Look at the creator's replies too. A creator who holds real conversations with their commenters has an audience that trusts them. You are hoping some of that trust carries over to your product.
Mei Ling sells to mothers planning children's parties and activities. A parenting creator she liked had comments full of mothers asking about party venues, school holiday plans and where to buy things for their kids. Those mothers were her buyers. She then checked a creator with ten times the parenting creator's following and found the comments came mostly from teenagers. She decided both creators were good at what they did, but only the parenting creator's audience was made up of her buyers.
When a creator passes the comment check, ask them for their audience data, which is the analytics their platform shows them. Ask for:
where the audience is, by country and sometimes by city the age range the gender split average views on recent posts, not views on their single best post
Ask for a recent screenshot with a date on it, taken straight from their analytics screen. Be cautious of a media kit that lists only followers and likes, or one that shows screenshots of a single viral post. Creators who do brand work regularly will be used to this request. If a creator won't share any audience data at all, treat that as a signal. You aren't asking to catch anyone out. You are checking that the people you would pay to reach are the people you want to reach.
You don't always need a creator. A partner business serves the same buyer as you without competing with you, and these businesses can make excellent partners. A florist and a cake shop both serve people planning a celebration. A tuition centre and a children's bookshop both serve parents who care about learning. A modest workwear label and a hijab brand both serve the same working women.
With partners, you can often swap instead of paying. They appear in your video and you appear in theirs, or the two of you film something together. Mei Ling did this with a florist in Punggol. They made a video about setting up a party table, each filmed their own part, and both posted it. Neither paid the other, and each of them reached the other's buyers.
To find partners, think about what your buyer does just before buying from you and just after. The businesses they use at those moments are your best candidates to approach with a swap.
Now find ten creators or partner businesses in your niche. For each one, read the comments on their recent posts and write down who seems to be in them.
List ten creators or partner businesses in your niche. For each one, write down who seems to be commenting on their posts.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).