Before I jump into today’s topic, I want to invite you to our next Modash Live: How brands do affiliate marketing.
We’ve got two different brands running affiliate influencer programs in two different ways. If your affiliate program has stalled, or you’re looking for inspiration, this will be a good one to jump in on.
If you’ve never been to one of our Modash Lives, the chat blows up! Questions, comments, and yaps shoot across my screen so fast that it feels like I’m watching the most popular Twitch streamer.
What’s the one question the audience asks every guest?
“How do you choose creators?”
It doesn’t surprise me. Influencer marketing is so logistically intensive that we often forget there’s a real strategy behind it. The usual marketing fundamentals apply. But we don’t often hear how people make decisions. It’s simple when it’s one big creator and one big brand. We can understand that. But how do you pick 20 or 50?
Across all the influencer programs I’ve seen, it always comes back to marketing strategy, goals, and campaigns. That’s the first layer of how you choose.
The next few layers? I think about it like a soundboard with different dials: you’ve got a baseline creator profile that’s always humming along in the background, and then you dial certain things up and down depending on the goal.
Here’s how to build a soundboard for your brand.
Build #1: Your baseline creator profile (non-negotiables)
Before you start fiddling with the “dials,” you need something stable.
Your baseline creator profile is what matters most of the time, for most goals. It answers: “Would this creator be a reasonable fit for us in general?”
Here’s what I’d include as baseline criteria:
Audience match: Does their audience resemble the people you want to reach? These are things like demographics. If a creator is amazing but their audience isn’t your buyer, you’re paying to convince people who won’t buy. You also want to make sure that the audience is real, and not bots or fake accounts. (Modash helps with this; check our free fake follower tool)
Engagement that makes sense for their size: Is this healthy when compared to similar creators of their size? This protects you from two classic mistakes: overvaluing tiny creators because their % looks huge, and undervaluing bigger creators because their % looks lower. The question is: do they get a normal amount of reactions/views for their size? (We’ve also got a free engagement rate tool with benchmarks to answer this for you.)
Content quality + consistency: Do they show up, and does their content feel like they know what they’re doing? Consistency (whether that’s views, posting cadence, tone) is what makes a creator a repeatable bet.
Brand safety: Are they likely to cause headaches you don’t want? You don’t want to take on any unnecessary risk. Think: controversial history that your brand cares about or sloppy sponsored content.
Practical constraints: Everyone has them. Whether that’s the platform, language, or shipping markets. Low budget? That’s something that’ll affect who you can choose. Put it in your baseline profile.
This baseline is what keeps you from doing something silly like hiring someone with the right aesthetic but the wrong audience, or hiring someone with a big audience but a comment section that looks like bot-city.
Build #2: Your dials
Once you have a baseline (or your non-negotiables), create your specific dials. These dials are always there if you need them. But you can dial them up or down, depending on your goals or campaign type.
Here are the dials I’d use.
Relevance dial: How tightly do they need to match your niche/category?
Trust dial: How much does the creator need to feel credible and persuasive?
Conversion dial: How much do you care about clicks, link CTR, and past performance?
Production dial: Do you need them to produce great content, or to deliver influence? (Those overlap sometimes. Sometimes they don’t.)
Control dial: How strict should the collaboration be? (Claims, messaging, approvals, usage rights, timelines.)
Depending on your goals or the campaign, these dials will rise or fall in importance. For example, if your goal is awareness, your job is to get attention and be remembered in specific buying situations. In this case, you may want to dial up the trust, production, and control dial, and dial down the conversion and relevance dials.
If your goal is conversions, your “baseline” matters the most because audience mismatch kills performance. But you’ll also want to dial up the conversion, relevance, and trust dials. You’ll dial down the production dial because you don’t always need the most cinematic creator. (Some of the highest-converting content looks like it was filmed in a kitchen at 7 am. Because it was!)
Build #3: Your campaign-specific creator profile
At this point, you’ve got: a baseline creator profile (your non-negotiables), a set of dials you can turn up or down depending on the goal or campaign.
Now you’re ready to build the creator profile for the current campaign.
Take the baseline. Look at the goal. Turn the dials. Then write down the “version of the creator” you’re hiring for.
Keep it simple. 6–10 bullets are enough:
Non-negotiables (baseline): audience, market, platform, brand safety, etc.
Top priorities (dials up): what you’re optimizing for in this campaign
Nice-to-haves (dials neutral): bonus points, but not blockers
What you’re relaxing (dials down): the thing you’re explicitly not going to over-index on
If you do this upfront, your search criteria becomes clearer and prevents you from accidentally running an “awareness” campaign with “conversion” expectations (or vice versa).
Your baseline protects you from bad fits. Your dials ensure you’re choosing creators aligned with your goals. And your documented campaign-specific profile helps you narrow down who you’re looking for and if they’ll be a good choice.
And still: it’s a bet. You won’t always get the perfect creator, and “perfect on paper” can still underperform. Use the profile to focus, not to over-control. Leave room for surprise winners and then update the profile for next time.
🩷 A good influence
Anna, Modash’s influencer marketer, shared this creator with me a few weeks ago, and honestly, she’s become part of my routine. Meet @toni_adeyemi.
Who she is: Toni Adeyemi, a comedy writer, performer, and UCB improviser with about 24K followers on Instagram, who has one very specific bit that will either confuse you immediately or become the highlight of your scroll.
Why she's worth a follow: Toni has a recurring series where she takes any word containing "man," "men," or "he" and corrects it.
As in: Manhattan. More like, Womanhatten. No, Themhatten.
Or: Othello. More like Oshello. No, Othello.
That’s it. That’s the bit.
She's been posting these since January, and they just keep coming. The format never changes. The delivery never wavers. And somehow, it gets funnier every time. She’s so committed to the bit that you either scroll past or become completely devoted.
Dream collab: Any brand brave enough to let her do the bit with their name. Mango? More like Shango. No, Themgo. Hermes? Don't even get her started. A brand that says yes to this understands the internet.
If you've discovered a creator that you love and have a dream collab in mind, shoot me an email at [email protected] so I can share it with the group.
See you next time!
Eleni Zoe xx
Brand @ Modash. Say hi on LinkedIn
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