Follower count is the least useful number on the profile
Every brief that lands with us starts the same way: a follower range. Fifty thousand to two hundred thousand, say, on Instagram, in the client's city. It is an understandable place to start, because it is the only number a brand can see from outside. It is also the number that correlates least with whether a campaign works.
The reason is simple. A creator's follower count tells you how many people once tapped follow. It tells you nothing about how many of those people still see the posts, how many of them are in the country you sell in, and how many of them would consider buying what you make. Those are three separate filters, and each one cuts the number down. A creator with 40,000 followers whose audience is 80 per cent Delhi-NCR women aged 25 to 34 is worth more to a skincare brand than a creator with 300,000 followers spread thin across the subcontinent and a chunk of Southeast Asia.
So start with the audience, not the creator.
Ask for the audience data before you ask for the rate
Any creator working seriously will have Instagram or YouTube analytics they can screenshot: audience location by city, age bands, gender split, and the reach of their last ten posts as against their follower count. Ask for all four. A creator who will not share them is either not tracking their own numbers or has something they would rather you not see, and both are reasons to move on.
The single most revealing figure is reach against followers on recent posts. If someone with 100,000 followers is reaching 6,000 people a post, their account is coasting on an audience that has stopped watching. If someone with 20,000 followers is reaching 35,000, the algorithm is actively pushing their work to people who do not follow them yet — which is what you are actually buying.
Two warnings. Averages hide a lot, so look at the spread across ten posts rather than the best one. And a single viral reel can inflate an account's follower count with people who have no interest in its usual subject, which shows up later as high reach and dead comments.
Read the comments, not the likes
Likes are cheap and easy to buy. Comments are harder to fake convincingly, and the texture of a comment section tells you what kind of relationship a creator has with the people watching.
What you want to see is specificity. People asking where something was bought, how much it cost, whether it works on oily skin, whether the place takes reservations. That is an audience that treats the creator as a source of decisions, and a recommendation from that creator carries weight. What you do not want is a wall of emoji, generic praise, and other creators leaving reciprocal compliments — a pattern that usually means the account is being watched by other people in the influencer economy rather than by consumers.
Then scroll back to their last three or four paid collaborations and read those comment sections specifically. Did engagement collapse the moment the post was an ad? Did anyone ask a buying question? A creator whose audience tolerates their sponsored work is far more valuable than one whose audience only turns up for the free stuff.
Check what they have sold before
Category history matters more than most brands expect. An audience learns what a creator is for. If someone has spent two years reviewing budget phones, their followers will take a phone recommendation seriously and ignore a protein powder. A creator who promotes a different category every week has trained their audience to scroll past anything branded.
Look at whether any brand has come back to them twice. Repeat collaborations are the closest thing to a public performance record in this market — nobody re-books a creator who delivered nothing.
Get the commercial terms straight before the shortlist gets emotional
Rates in India vary enormously for the same follower band, and there is no published rate card that means anything. What protects you is asking every creator on the shortlist the same set of questions before you fall in love with any of them.
Ask what the fee covers: how many posts, in which formats, on which platforms. Ask how long the content stays live, because a story that disappears in 24 hours and a grid post that stays up for a year are not the same purchase. Ask whether you may run the content as a paid ad from your own handle, and for how long — creator-made content used as ad creative is often worth more than the organic post it came from, and it is much cheaper to negotiate at the start than as an afterthought. Ask about exclusivity: whether they will decline your competitors for a period, and what that costs.
Put the answers in a single sheet. The creator who looked expensive often turns out to be the cheapest per usable asset once whitelisting rights are in the column.
The checks worth running before you pay
Look for a sudden vertical jump in follower count with no matching jump in engagement, which usually means the audience was bought. Check the audience location data against where you actually sell. Check that disclosure has been handled properly on past paid work, because the ASCI guidelines put the obligation on the advertiser as well as the creator, and an undisclosed ad is your compliance problem, not only theirs. And do a plain search of the creator's name to see what they have been publicly associated with, because you are borrowing their reputation for as long as the post is live.
One creator who fits beats ten who nearly do
The temptation with a fixed budget is to spread it — twelve creators instead of three, on the reasoning that more posts means more reach. In practice, campaigns built on a handful of well-matched creators and repeat posting almost always outperform a wide thin spread, because the same audience seeing the same product three times from someone they trust is what actually moves a purchase. One exposure to twelve different audiences is advertising. Three exposures to one audience is a recommendation.
Fit is what you are buying. Everything else is a proxy for it, and most of the proxies are wrong.
If you would rather not run the shortlist yourself, that is most of what our influencer marketing work consists of. There is also a companion piece on what D2C brands should do differently.