Influencer Discovery: Find and Evaluate Creators That Match Your Brand

Whether you are launching your first campaign or scaling to work with thousands of creators, everything starts with finding the right people. This article is designed to show you exactly how our Influencer Discovery feature works within Influencer Hero and how you can use it to build a high-performing creator list in minutes.

The Influencer Discovery tool is a centralized search engine that gives you access to a global database of over 450 million influencers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It acts as your primary command center for identifying talent, allowing you to filter through millions of profiles to find creators who match your specific brand style, tone and values. 

Because Influencer Hero is an all-in-one platform, this feature is directly connected to your Influencer CRM. Once you identify a creator who fits your criteria, you can import them into a campaign with a single click, moving them instantly from "potential lead" to an active part of your outreach and gifting workflow.

Ready to see how it works in practice? Let’s dive in and look at how you can make the most out of these tools to find your next top-performing partners.

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How Influencer Discovery Works in Influencer Hero

Think of the Influencer Discovery tool as a high-powered search engine built specifically for the creator economy. Some of our users even describe it as "Google and ChatGPT combined, but for influencers". It’s designed to be the first place you go when you start a new campaign.

Step 1: Choosing Your Platform

When you first access the Discovery tool, you’ll notice a clean, tabbed interface. Instead of a messy search that mixes content types, we’ve organized the engine by platform. You can toggle between dedicated tabs for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

This is also where the "all-in-one" magic starts. If you have your e-commerce store, email marketing platform, or social accounts connected—such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Klaviyo, or Mailchimp—you’ll see an option to find your own customers and followers within the database. This allows you to identify "hidden gems" who already love your brand before you even look at external creators. Influencers who are already your customers are often 8x more likely to partner with you, making this the most efficient starting point for any discovery phase.

Step 2: Building Your Search with Precision

Once you’ve picked your platform, you have over 20 granular filters at your disposal to narrow down the 450M+ database. The system behaves intuitively by splitting filters into two main categories: the Influencer (their niche, location, and engagement) and the Audience (who is actually watching them).

To maximize your efficiency, Influencer Hero allows you to save your search filters. Instead of manually re-selecting complex criteria—like "United States + Beauty + 3% Engagement"—every time you start a search, you can save your setup as a template. This ensures consistency across your campaigns and allows you to refresh your results with a single click, instantly surfacing new creators who have recently met your specific brand standards.

• The Influencer Side: You can find hyper-niche partners by filtering for specific keywords in their content or bio. To ensure a perfect fit, you can layer on filters for the influencer’s location, follower count, and even their past partnerships, allowing you to see which creators already have experience working with your competitors or within your specific industry.
• The Audience Side: This is where you ensure the right people see your brand. You can set strict requirements for audience location (by country, state, or city), gender split, and age distribution. For example, you can tell the system to only show you influencers who have at least a 60% female following based in London.

Step 3: Smart Search, AI Powered Match Making

For a more intuitive experience, you can utilize the AI-assisted discovery tool. Instead of manually toggling dozens of options, you simply type your specific influencer criteria into the search bar (e.g., "Find me beauty influencers in the US who focus on organic skincare").

The AI then automates the matchmaking process by automatically selecting the relevant filters for you based on your description. This eliminates the guesswork, instantly narrowing the database to creators who are both highly relevant to your niche and likely to drive conversions.

Step 4: AI-Powered "Lookalikes"

If you already have a "star" influencer you’ve worked with, you don't need to start from scratch. Our Lookalike filter allows you to simply paste their handle into the search bar. The AI then scans the database to find millions of other creators with similar content styles, engagement patterns, and audience profiles. You can even use audience lookalikes to find creators with identical community profiles.

Step 5: Reviewing and Moving to Action

As you apply filters, the results update in real-time. For any creator that catches your eye, you can click into their Analytics for a comprehensive deep dive into their performance and audience. This includes:

• Authenticity Audits: Instantly detect fake followers or bot activity to protect your ROI and ensure your message reaches real people.
• Growth & Affinity Trends: Track follower growth over time to identify rising stars and see a list of brands they already mention to ensure a natural brand affinity.
• Deep Audience Intelligence: Look beyond the creator to see exactly who they reach, including audience location, demographics, and credibility scores. 
• Engagement Stats: A real-time summary of likes, comments, and shares, alongside an overall engagement rate compared to industry benchmarks.
• Past Performance: Review their history of sponsored content to evaluate how they handle brand partnerships and creative execution.

Once you’ve found your perfect matches, moving to action is a one-click process. You can select creators individually or use the bulk select feature to transition hundreds of leads into your CRM or campaign workflow at once.

What You Can Do With Influencer Discovery

Once you’ve set your filters and the engine has surfaced the right creators, the goal is to move from "searching" to "organizing" as quickly as possible. Here is how that workflow looks in practice:

1. Bulk-Organize Your Outreach

You don’t have to add creators one by one. If you’ve run a search for “vegan chefs in London” and found 50 great profiles, you can use the bulk select feature to highlight all of them at once. From there, you can assign them to a specific campaign folder with one click. This keeps your leads organized by niche or keyword right from the start.

2. Perform "Quality Controls"

Before you even reach out, you can use the discovery interface to verify a creator's value. You can instantly see their Engagement Rate. This ensures you aren't wasting your budget on "empty" numbers.

3. Bridge the Gap to Your CRM

Discovery is the "top of the funnel" for your influencer marketing. Because the platform is all-in-one, your discovery results are directly connected to your Influencer CRM. When you "save" an influencer, their data, including their latest stats and contact info, populates in your CRM automatically, ready for you to start the Outreach phase.

4. Capture Leads as You Browse

Sometimes the best discovery happens when you aren't even in the dashboard. If you’re scrolling through Instagram or TikTok and find a creator you love, you can use the Chrome Extension to pull their live stats right then and there. You can import them directly into your Influencer Hero campaign without ever leaving the social media tab you’re on.

5. Connect with Your Community

Beyond searching the global database, you can use the discovery tool to "look inward." By connecting your e-commerce store, email marketing platforms, or social media accounts—such as Shopify, Magento, Klaviyo, Mailchimp or Instagram—you can specifically filter for influencers who are already your customers or newsletter subscribers. Since these individuals already have a relationship with your brand, they are often the most authentic and highest-converting partners to recruit into your community.

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When Teams Use Influencer Discovery

Is this feature for you? The best way to answer that is to look at how other brands are using it to solve real-world growth challenges. Whether you are a solo founder or a global marketing team, here are a few scenarios where the Discovery tool becomes your most valuable asset.

1. Launching a New Product or Entering a New Market

When you’re moving into a new territory, you don’t just need influencers, you need local experts who resonate with that specific culture.

• Real-World Example: Luxury fragrance brand Arabian Oud used Influencer Hero to scale their efforts across Europe, Asia, and North America. By using hyper-local filters (targeting cities like Milan, Madrid, and Paris), they activated 280+ influencers in just four months. This resulted in over 500 organic posts and 4.8M impressions without paying fixed fees.
• The Workflow: Use the Location and Audience Credibility filters to ensure you’re reaching real people in your target city, ensuring your launch has local "boots on the ground".

2. Scaling a "Gifting-Only" Strategy

If your goal is high-volume product seeding (sending products in exchange for content), you need to find hundreds of relevant creators quickly.

• The Scenario: You want to send your latest skincare line to 100 micro-influencers this month.
• The Workflow: Use the Lookalike filter to find creators similar to your current best performers. Then, use Bulk Select to move them into your Gifting campaign in seconds. This turns a week of manual research into a 10-minute task.

3. Turning Your Own Customers into Brand Advocates

Sometimes the best discovery happens within your own database. If you have an existing customer base, you likely already have influencers buying from you.

• The Scenario: You want to find people who already love your brand to create more authentic content.
• The Workflow: Connect your Shopify or Klaviyo account. Filter your customer list by follower count and engagement rate to identify "hidden" influencers. These creators are 8x more likely to collaborate because they already have a genuine affinity for your products.

4. Niche Targeting for Specific Campaigns

When your product is highly specialized, like a vegan kitchen tool or a specific gaming accessory, broad searches don't work.

• The Scenario: You need to find "Zero-Waste" enthusiasts who specifically mention "composting" in their content.
• The Workflow: Use the Keyword and Bio filters. While the "Topic" filter finds general categories, the Bio filter allows you to find those hyper-niche creators who explicitly define themselves by your target interest.

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How Influencer Discovery Connects With Other Influencer Hero Features

In many setups, finding an influencer is a completely separate task from managing them. You find a name, copy it into a spreadsheet, and then move to your email to reach out. We built Influencer Hero so that discovery isn't a standalone chore but the first step in a seamless, automated system.

Here is how your discovery efforts flow naturally into the rest of the platform:

From Discovery to Outreach & CRM

The moment you find a creator you like, you can move them directly into your Influencer CRM. There’s no manual data entry. All their stats, audience demographics, and contact info move with them. From there, you can:

• Launch Automated Outreach: Use Al-generated smart templates to send personalized emails to the hundreds of leads you just discovered.
• Track the Relationship: Your Campaign Boards give you a visual status of where every creator is—from "Initial Contact" to "Posted".

Discovery + Gifting & Payments

Once you’ve discovered and recruited your team, the platform handles the logistics.

• Seamless Product Seeding: Because Influencer Hero integrates with Shopify you can go from discovering a creator to sending them a "gift" (product) in just a few clicks.
• Automated Payments: When it's time to reward your creators, the system uses the same profile data to manage Affiliate Payments and commissions based on the sales they generate.

Discovery + Reporting & Analytics

The data doesn't stop once you find the influencer. The platform continues to track their performance in real-time.

• Data-Driven Strategy: If a specific type of influencer you discovered is driving high ROI, you can jump back into the Discovery tool and use the Lookalike filter to find 50 more just like them.

The Chrome Extension: Discovery Anywhere

Our Chrome Extension acts as a bridge between the social media world and your Influencer Hero dashboard. If you’re browsing Instagram or TikTok and stumble upon a great profile, the extension allows you to pull their live analytics and import them directly into a campaign without ever leaving your browser tab.

By keeping everything under one roof, you aren't just finding influencers—you’re building a repeatable, scalable machine that saves your team hours of manual work every single week.

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Final Thoughts

The best way to understand how Influencer Discovery can change your workflow is to see the data for yourself. Whether you're looking for a specific niche creator or using our Lookalike tool to find more of what already works, the platform is designed to get you from searching to outreach in a few clicks.

By integrating your discovery directly with your CRM and Gifting workflows, you eliminate the manual spreadsheets and focus entirely on building high-ROI partnerships.

Book a demo with our team to experience the simplicity of our all-in-one platform with a live look at our 450M+ influencer database!

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