Creator Prospect Research

This drill builds a scored shortlist of B2B micro-influencers to approach for sponsored posts. It covers discovery, audience validation, engagement scoring, and CRM staging.

Input

• Your ICP definition: job titles, industries, company sizes, pain points
• Budget range per creator post (e.g., $200-500 for micro-influencers)
• Target platform(s): LinkedIn, newsletter, YouTube, Twitter
• Number of creators to shortlist: 10-20 for Smoke, 50+ for Baseline

Steps

1. Run audience intelligence search

Use creator-discovery-search with SparkToro:

• Search for your ICP's job title or topic area
• Filter to creators with 1,000-50,000 followers (micro-influencer range)
• Export the top 30 accounts by audience overlap percentage

If SparkToro results are thin, supplement with Modash API search filtered by:

• Platform matching your target
• Bio keywords related to your product category
• Engagement rate above 2%
• Audience demographics matching your ICP age/location/industry

2. Browse Passionfroot for ready-to-book creators

Search Passionfroot's marketplace by category and platform. Creators listed here already sell sponsorship slots, which means:

• They are experienced with brand deals (less hand-holding)
• Pricing is transparent (their storefront shows rates)
• Booking is streamlined (no negotiation needed for standard slots)

Add Passionfroot finds to your shortlist with their listed pricing.

3. Import into Clay and enrich

Create a Clay table using clay-table-setup with columns:

• creator_name, platform, handle, follower_count, engagement_rate
• audience_overlap_pct (from SparkToro), topic_fit (1-5 manual score)
• avg_likes, avg_comments, post_frequency (posts per week)
• email, linkedin_url, passionfroot_url
• estimated_cost (their rate or your estimate based on follower count)

Use clay-enrichment-waterfall to find email addresses for outreach. Stack: Clearbit first, then People Data Labs, then Hunter.io.

4. Score and rank creators

Add a scoring formula using clay-scoring:

• Audience fit (40%): SparkToro overlap percentage, or manual assessment of audience-ICP match based on their content topics and follower demographics
• Engagement quality (30%): engagement rate (comments + meaningful replies, not just likes), reply rate on their posts, comment quality (are real professionals commenting?)
• Content fit (20%): how naturally could they mention your product category? Creators who already discuss adjacent topics score higher
• Cost efficiency (10%): estimated CPL based on follower count and typical conversion rates. Rule of thumb: expect 0.5-2% click rate on creator posts.

Score each factor 0-100, compute weighted total. Rank by score.

5. Manually validate top candidates

For the top 15 scored creators, do a manual check:

• Read their last 10 posts. Is the content quality high? Is the engagement genuine (not bots)?
• Check for past brand partnerships. Have they done sponsored posts before? Quality of those posts?
• Verify audience authenticity. Sudden follower spikes or engagement from non-ICP accounts are red flags.
• Check posting frequency. A creator who posts once a month is harder to work with than one posting 3x/week.

Remove any creators that fail manual validation. Backfill from the next tier.

6. Push to Attio

Use attio-contacts to create a contact record for each validated creator. Use attio-lists to create a list named "Creator Prospects — {{campaign_slug}}".

Tag each creator with:

• creator_score: their composite score
• creator_tier: Tier 1 (80+), Tier 2 (60-79), Tier 3 (40-59)
• creator_status: "prospect" (will change to "outreach_sent", "negotiating", "booked", "posted", "completed")
• creator_platform: primary platform
• estimated_cost: expected fee per post
• passionfroot_url: if they have a storefront

Output

• Clay table with 10-50+ scored and ranked creators
• Attio list of validated creator prospects, ready for outreach
• Top 5-10 creators identified for first batch of outreach

Triggers

Run once at the start of each campaign. Re-run quarterly to refresh the creator pool with new/emerging creators.