SocialGrid: Influencer Discovery
Marketing
Marketplace
CLIENT
Social Grid
CATEGORY
Marketing
TIMEFRAME
7 Weeks
SERVICE
Product Strategy
Development
About Project
- Creator shortlisting from 3 weeks to 2 hours for a campaign brief.
- 2.4M creator profiles indexed with performance history.
- Campaign ROI up 58% for brands selecting on audience fit rather than follower count.
- Fraudulent or inflated accounts flagged at 19% of the profiles brands had shortlisted manually.
- 3,100 campaigns run through the platform.
- Built in 7 weeks.
Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Brands struggled to evaluate influencer performance and identify creators aligned with campaign goals due to fragmented discovery tools and limited performance insights.
Solution
We built a data driven influencer discovery platform that enables brands to filter creators, review content performance, and initiate partnerships efficiently, improving campaign targeting and collaboration workflows.
Brands were selecting influencers on follower count, which is the one metric that predicts almost nothing and is the easiest to fake. The result was campaigns that reached large numbers of people with no interest in the product, and a category-wide suspicion that influencer marketing does not work.
The research process was manual and slow. A marketing team would spend the better part of three weeks with a spreadsheet, screenshots of engagement rates, and a lot of scrolling, and end up with a shortlist assembled largely on instinct.
The client had run campaigns on both sides and knew the real question was audience composition rather than audience size. A creator with forty thousand engaged followers in the right demographic outperforms one with a million scattered across the world, and there was no practical way for a brand to know which was which before committing budget.
The 58% ROI improvement came almost entirely from the selection change. Same budgets, same creative approach, different creators, chosen on who their audience actually is.
The authenticity data has had a secondary effect the client did not anticipate. Brands now use it to audit creators they were already working with, and several long-running relationships have ended as a result.
Creator profiles built on audience composition rather than follower count: demographics, geography, interest categories and engagement quality, with historical performance across past campaigns.
Authenticity scoring flags follower spikes, engagement pods and comment patterns typical of purchased engagement, which is what removes the nineteen percent brands were otherwise shortlisting.
Discovery searches on audience attributes rather than creator attributes, so a brief specifies who needs to be reached and the platform returns creators whose audiences match.
Beyond that: campaign briefs with deliverables and usage rights, in-platform negotiation and contracting, content approval before posting, live performance tracking against campaign goals, and comparative reporting across creators in the same campaign.
Typography & Color
