Creator Marketing Playbooks
How to choose TikTok creators for your campaign
Rule people out, and order the checks by what each one can settle and what it costs.
Most guides to picking creators hand you the same list of things to check. Content style. Posting habits. Who's watching. Past brand work. Anything that looks like a risk. All of it can matter, and none of it tells you what to check first, or which check is allowed to end the conversation.
So you open a pile of tabs, start checking everything on all of them, and somewhere in the middle you're sorting by followers again — because that's the only number that sorts a list of people.
A shortlist isn't a ranking. It's what's left after you rule people out.
What this guide covers
- What should you write down before you open a single profile?
- Which check should come first?
- What do the two numbers on a profile actually count?
- What can you learn from the posts with no brand attached?
- When should you ask who's actually watching?
- Why write down the reason you cut someone?
- Frequently asked questions
What should you write down before you open a single profile?
One sentence: the thing a viewer should walk away understanding. Say you're launching a pen that lifts a fresh stain out of fabric. Your sentence might be you can get the coffee off a white shirt at the table, before it sets.
Without that sentence every creator "could work," which is how you end up back at the follower number. With it, you have something to hold each profile against. Does this person ever put themselves in the moment your sentence describes? Do the people watching them care about that moment? If either answer is no, you don't need the rest of the checklist.
Which check should come first?
Watching a few of someone's recent videos takes a minute. Getting a breakdown of who's actually watching them takes an email and a wait. Call that the cost: your time, plus whatever you have to ask of someone else.
A check earns an early slot by being cheap and able to settle whether someone fits.
For the stain pen, that's roughly:
- Do they ever go anywhere near the moment? Watch their recent videos. If mess, food, kids, clothes or the inside of a house never show up, stop here. Nothing you ask for later changes that answer.
- Is the moment recognizable to the people watching? Read the comments under their newest videos. You're checking whether the audience is there for the thing your sentence needs, or for something else the creator also happens to do.
- Have they made anything with a brand in it before, and how did that land? In the comments again, and still nothing asked of anyone. Slower than the first two, because you have to find the posts first.
- Who's actually watching? Now it costs you — you have to ask, and wait. Only worth spending on people who survived the first three.
Side by side, the two halves of the rule are easier to hold onto:
| Check | What it can settle | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Their recent videos | Whether the moment in your sentence has ever appeared in their work | A minute, and nothing asked of anyone |
| Comments on the newest posts | Whether the audience is there for that moment | A few minutes, still nothing asked |
| Their posts with a brand in them | How this audience took a product showing up | Longer, because you have to find the posts first |
| A breakdown of who's watching | Whether the audience is who the profile makes it look like | An email, and a wait |
The order isn't sacred. What matters is that you never spend an afternoon on a candidate a one-minute check would have cut.
What do the two numbers on a profile actually count?
TikTok puts two numbers in front of you, and they're built differently.
The follower total is cumulative. It's everyone who ever tapped follow and hasn't undone it, added up across the creator's whole history. It doesn't describe last week.
The view count sits on each individual video, in public, one number per post. That one is about a single video and nothing else.
They don't measure the same thing, so reading them side by side tells you where to look, not what to conclude. If a creator who films in a kitchen has recent posts landing far from their follower total in either direction, go watch those videos and find out what changed.
None of which makes the follower total noise. It's what you read every view count against, and someone with years of posts gives you far more to check than someone who started recently. The follower total is just a poor place to start: the cheapest thing on the page to read, and it still can't settle whether the moment your sentence describes has ever appeared in someone's work.
What can you learn from the posts with no brand attached?
For this decision, the most useful posts on a creator's profile are the ones with no brand attached.
Those posts show you what someone reaches for when nobody's asked them to reach for anything — the situations they film in, the words they use for those situations, the kind of thing people showed up for. Check that list for the moment in your sentence. If it's absent when nobody's asking, you're the one who has to put it there.
Then look at their branded content — step 3, in more detail. Find the posts carrying a disclosure and read the comments underneath. You're checking whether the audience treated it as one more video from someone they follow, or as an interruption. If it read as an interruption, set that post beside what they make unprompted and name the difference: the product on camera, a script that isn't theirs, a situation they don't normally film in. Then look for that same difference in your own sentence. If it's there, you're asking this creator to make the same move again, in front of the same audience.
Step 1 asked whether that moment has ever shown up; the posts with no brand attached tell you whether it shows up habitually — same videos, same cost, so it belongs in the same pass. If it does, your creator brief gets short: you name the product and the boundary, and let them do the thing they already do. If it doesn't, you're asking someone to build that situation from scratch, in their own voice, convincingly. That's a much harder brief to write and a much harder one to fill. Often that's your reason to cut.
When should you ask who's actually watching?
Even if this check were free it would still come last, because it can't tell you whether someone fits — only whether to trust what you're looking at. That's worth asking about a yes. It settles nothing about a pile of maybes.
Separate ways of checking whether a public number is what it appears to be already exist. What this order gives you is step 4: you asked the creator for a breakdown of who's watching, and this is where you read it against everything else you've seen. You're not accusing anyone. If it doesn't come, or doesn't match, you drop the candidate.
Why write down the reason you cut someone?
"Too small" isn't a reason. It doesn't tell you what to look for next time.
"Never films anywhere near a moment of mess" is a reason. So is "audience is there for the recipes, not the kitchen." Written down, those sentences are what you check the next batch of names against, and what you hand the next person who builds a list for you.
Frequently asked questions
Where do I find candidates in the first place?
Your own For You Page (FYP), the tags your category lives under, and the videos you saved because they were good. Getting names isn't the part that stalls.
What if a creator has never posted anything with a brand in it?
An empty branded content history is something you don't know, not something you've learned. It isn't a mark against anyone.
What stays unknown is narrow — how that audience reacts when a product turns up — and nothing else on the profile answers it. Posts with no brand attached are evidence of what the creator makes unprompted, which is a different question.
See what this looks like for your brand
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