The order to pick in
1. Values: does the creator stand for what your brand stands for?
2. Reach: do enough of the right people follow them, in your markets and languages?
3. Relevance: do they make content about your product’s world, and do people trust them on it?
4. Resonance: do their posts get people to react, talk and act?
Each step is a check before the next. A creator with a big reach and the wrong values is still the wrong pick.
Values: your brand profile
Write your tone, values and no-go topics in the brand profile. Refresh checks a creator’s posts against your no-go topics, and the result shows as Brand-safety findings on their page.
If a creator is wrong for one brand, choose Not this brand. They stay available to your other brands.
Reach: followers and audience
Followers show on every creator. For a creator on Instagram and YouTube, the two counts are added, so the real number of people can be lower.
Audience age, gender and location come only from the creator’s own connection or a licensed provider. We never guess them. They are used only to match your product’s target audience.
Relevance and resonance: fit score and audience quality
The fit score (0 to 100) shows how well a creator fits one product. Product match counts most, then audience quality, then past performance. Open How this score is worked out to see each part.
The fit checklist tests the creator against each point in the product’s fit profile. Posts tagged Supports fit show where they already talk about your world.
The audience quality rating (Clear, Check or Risky) shows if their likes, views and comments look real. Real reactions are the first sign of resonance.
What a score never uses
Fit scores and audience quality ratings never use a creator’s gender, religion, caste, community, age, appearance or health.
Sources and dates
The pick order comes from Yesiloglu and Costello (eds.), Influencer Marketing, Routledge 2021, chapter by Riboldazzi and Capriello, figure 3.1, page 52.
Bigger is not always better. In a 2023 study of 802 campaigns, engagement was highest at middle follower counts (Wies, Bleier and Edeling, Journal of Marketing, 2023). A 2024 study of 1.88 million purchases found return on spend more than 3 times higher for nano creators than for macro creators (Beichert and others, Journal of Marketing, 2024).
These figures are research context as of 31-10-2026, not targets. Judge creators on your own results.