November 20, 2025
How Can Brands Discover the Most Effective Influencers for Their Campaigns?
In today’s dynamic digital landscape, influencer marketing has moved from a niche tactic to a cornerstone of effective brand strategy. But with so much noise and so many creators, how do brands ensure their investment truly pays off? The answer lies not just in spending big, but in identifying the right influencers.
The Goat Agency’s influencer identification services
At The Goat Agency, we understand that true impact comes from precision. Our dedicated campaigns and data team is at the heart of this. Our campaigns team match brands with influencers who genuinely reflect our clients’ values and objectives, delving deep into brand identity to find creators who embody its spirit. Fluent in the language of influencers, our team knows the creators shaping culture, from emerging micro-influencers to established macro-voices, and understands the nuances of different platforms and communities. They seamlessly manage every stage of our influencer-first campaigns, from initial discovery and meticulous briefing to content approvals and comprehensive measurement, ensuring a smooth and effective journey from start to finish.
Why is selecting the right influencer so important?
There are many misconceptions swirling around influencer marketing that can lead brands astray. For instance, the idea that “big influencers always equal big results,” or that “campaign tracking is difficult,” or even that influencer marketing “only fits certain brands” like beauty, food & beverage, or fashion.
Our rigorous identification process proves these aren’t true. We demonstrate that selecting the right influencers – whether they are macro-influencers with millions of followers or micro-influencers with highly engaged niche communities – is paramount. A micro-influencer with perfect brand synergy can deliver far greater ROI than a macro-influencer whose audience isn’t genuinely interested in your product.
This is where our proprietary technology, IBEX, comes into play.
What is IBEX?
We use IBEX to disprove these misconceptions and ensure every campaign is built on a foundation of data-driven insight.
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Georgia Weiner, Data & Insights Manager, The Goat Agency
“With hundreds of thousands of data points from past campaigns, the data and insight team surfaces performance trends and optimisations to empower every team to use data to fuel new ideas, optimise campaigns, and shape future-proofed strategies.
IBEX, our proprietary data tool, allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of social and influencer shifts in real time. It enables us to connect the dots across every piece of content, ad, and campaign using granular performance and cost data to reveal what’s driving industry momentum and audience action.
Digging deeper into content analytics, everything from hook rates and watch times to clicks, and using data-backed benchmarks, we identify what makes audiences stop, engage, and convert, and apply these insights across the board.”
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Powered by data and engineered by experts, IBEX offers unparalleled capabilities. For influencer discovery, we source the right influencers and content creators for the right campaigns based on constantly evolving data, ensuring genuine connections and optimal audience fit. When it comes to pricing, we can accurately negotiate costs for influencer work and content based on previous campaigns and performance metrics, ensuring fair value and maximising budget efficiency.
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Tom Bore, Global VP, Data & Technology, The Goat Agency
“At Goat, our approach to influencer discovery combines data intelligence with human judgment. Our proprietary platform, IBEX, gives us the ability to analyse performance at scale, so we can identify creators who genuinely drive results like sales or app downloads, while also understanding their interests, previous brand associations, audience make-up, and brand safety profile. But data alone isn’t enough. Our Delivery teams add the crucial layer of context, assessing whether a creator feels authentic for the brand and its audience. It’s that balance between data and human understanding that ensures we choose creators who perform and who represent our clients in the right way.”
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For campaign management, our teams use IBEX as the source of the port of call for data-driven decision making, recording and tracking against agreed timelines and workflows, keeping every campaign on track and transparent. Through content insights, we analyse how our campaign content has performed and why, using all of these insights to spot patterns for future optimisation and continually refine our approach. Finally, for reporting, everything is tracked, measured, and reported on, ready to inform our strategy going forward and provide clear, actionable results to our clients.
Goat leverages IBEX to focus on long-term effectiveness for clients. By meticulously tracking campaign data, influencer performance, and audience engagement over time, we build strategies that deliver sustained growth and brand loyalty, not just fleeting trends.
Persil Wonder Wash’s Fast Wash and Rave
Unilever Homecare UK tasked us with driving awareness for the new Persil Wonder Wash range, highlighting Wonder Wash’s 15-minute cycle function. Unilever’s research into the habits of 2000 adults found that those aged between 25 – 43 were most likely to complete tasks quickly before and after their 9-5. Leaning into this, Goat created an experiential event – Persil Wonder Wash’s Fast Wash and Rave – held at a recreation of an old-school laundromat where attendees could ‘put a quick wash on’ and go enjoy themselves.
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Hannah Rendall, Senior Campaign Manager, The Goat Agency
“To help us identify creators, we use a mix of qualitative and quantitive data. Qualitatively, we find creators whose content style resonates authentically with the campaign creatives, they fit the brand target audience/verticals and they foster strong sentiment from their community. Quantitatively, we use IBEX, our internal data warehouse holding 50,000+ campaigns and 15,000,000+ influencers. IBEX provides us with detailed reports per influencer showing audience breakdown, performance benchmarks across key metrics (ER, CPM etc), previous campaign work and more. Our team truly has access to best-in-class data reports to determine their ability to drive the top performing results for clients.
A key example of success in pairing influencers with a brand was our Persil Wonder Wash’s Fast Wash and Rave – where Persil wanted to target young affluence urbanist seeking 15 minute short cycles. We strategically looked at what criteria we wanted our influencers to hit to seek this audience out on socials. The outcome; we worked with a range of influencers across Fitness, Lifestyle, Comedy and Fashion verticals, core audience followings between the ages of 20 – 35, and a mix of tiers to build mass awareness and FOMO through hero/macros and target highly engaged niche sub-communities with mids/micros.”
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Selecting the right influencers was critical to the success of this activation, acting as the red thread between Persil’s new Wonder Wash product and its target audience. Each creator’s personal brand, tone, and lifestyle naturally reflected the quick, efficient, and modern habits that Wonder Wash was designed to support with its short cycles. By aligning with influencers who their audiences genuinely trust and see as relatable, the campaign ensured that the product message went beyond simply reaching people. This alignment amplified engagement, encouraged organic conversations, and ultimately transformed a product demonstration into a cultural moment rooted in real consumer behaviour.
And the proof is in the pudding.
This experience delivered 2.8 million impressions, over 667K engagements, and 92 pieces of earned content. Plus, the event generated an earned-media value of £102,500, appeared across various media outlets like the Daily Express and The Verge, and 3 award nominations from The Drum and The Shorty Awards.
How is influencer identification evolving?
The landscape of content consumption is constantly shifting, particularly with the rise of AI-generated content. In an era of AI consumption, the importance of human voices has never been more crucial. Consumers crave genuine connection and trust, making the role of carefully selected, credible influencers even more vital.
Goat has continuously evolved its influencer identification process to meet these challenges. We’re moving beyond broad matches to focus on niche, vertical alignment that actually drives impact. This means diving deeper into subcultures, micro-communities, and specialised interests to find creators who are not just relevant, but truly embedded within the specific audience a brand wants to reach. This approach ensures maximum impact and engagement in an increasingly complex digital world.
Take World of Warcraft: The War Within.
For this campaign, selecting vertical-adjacent influencers – creators whose audiences shared overlapping passions and behaviours with core gamers – proved especially powerful. Instead of limiting outreach to traditional gaming influencers, Goat expanded the ecosystem to include adjacent communities such as musicians, artists, and storytellers who naturally intersected with World of Warcraft’s world-building and lore. This strategy introduced the game to new audiences through trusted voices who could speak to the emotional and cultural appeal of the franchise. By activating these carefully aligned adjacent verticals, the campaign generated stronger engagement, richer storytelling, and more sustained audience interest than a conventional gaming-only approach could achieve.
By selecting influencers who embody the audience’s mindset and values, Goat ensures that each campaign feels personal, relevant, and trustworthy. Goat turns insights into Influence Everywhere.
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If you’re ready to incorporate the best influencers into your marketing strategy, chat to our team to discover how Goat can help.
