How I Found the Right Influencer for Our Campaign in One Afternoon

We were launching a new skincare line targeting Gen Z women, and my manager gave me two weeks to find and lock in five influencers. I'd done influencer campaigns before, but this time the brief was unusually specific: micro-influencers only, 50K to 200K followers, authentic skincare content, high engagement, and ideally some overlap with our existing customer base.

I started the usual way — scrolling through Instagram, clicking into profiles, checking follower counts, reading captions. After two hours, I had a list of maybe eight names, but I wasn't confident about any of them. Half had suspiciously round follower numbers. One had great content but her last three posts were all paid ads for competing brands.

A colleague suggested I try [**Karis**](https://karis.im/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_campaign=post\_dec). I described the brief and asked it to help me research and evaluate potential influencers.

What it did next was more systematic than anything I'd done manually. It searched across platforms, pulled engagement rate data, looked at comment quality to flag accounts with bot activity, and even checked whether each creator had promoted direct competitors in the past six months.

Within about forty minutes, it came back with a shortlist of twelve profiles, each with a summary. Not just follower counts — it noted things like "comments are mostly personal and conversational, not generic emoji reactions" and "has mentioned skincare routines organically in non-sponsored posts."

One creator caught my eye. She had 87K followers, a 6.2% engagement rate, and Karis flagged that she'd posted an unpaid review of a moisturizer similar to ours three months ago, which got over 2,000 comments. That kind of organic interest is exactly what we look for.

I asked Karis to help me draft outreach messages for the top five. It wrote personalized notes for each one, referencing specific posts they'd made rather than using a generic template. One creator replied within two hours saying it was "the most thoughtful brand email she'd ever received."

We ended up signing four of the five. The campaign launched on time, and the average engagement across the influencer posts was 5.8% — well above our benchmark of 3%.

I used to spend a full week on influencer research alone. Now I can get a solid shortlist in an afternoon and spend the rest of my time on the actual relationship-building. That's where the real work should be anyway.