Why This Post Matters

Most influencer programs don’t fail because creators can’t sell. They fail because brands pick the wrong ones.

• Too many campaigns are built on vanity metrics like followers or engagement, which say nothing about sales impact.
• Discovery still takes weeks of manual searching, draining time and resources before campaigns even launch.
• Worst of all, brands often don’t know if a creator will drive revenue until after the budget is already spent.
  

The truth: if you want to scale with influencer marketing in 2025, success isn’t about finding more creators, it’s about finding the right creators, fast.

This post breaks down:

• Why traditional discovery fails performance teams
• How to define “relevance” in terms of revenue, not vanity metrics‍
• Benchmarks for creator efficiency (RoAS, CAC, LTV) in 2025
• How AI-powered discovery compresses weeks of work into hours
• Case studies from Lyma Life & Lookfantastic proving the model
• A step-by-step framework for finding revenue-driving influencers in days, not weeks

The Problem With Traditional Discovery

For most brands, creator discovery is still stuck in the past. A typical campaign begins with:

• ‍Hours lost scrolling Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube feeds, trying to manually identify potential partners‍
• Selections made on aesthetics, follower size, or personal referrals, metrics that rarely correlate with revenue‍
• Negotiations handled over endless email threads, slowing campaigns and creating bottlenecks‍
• Measurement reduced to impressions and likes, with no link back to sales impact

This process is not just inefficient, it’s fundamentally misaligned with performance marketing. It’s slow, unscalable, and built on guesswork.

The outcome is predictable: over 50% of influencer spend is wasted (Social Snowball, 2024). Without predictive ROI or revenue-level filters, brands overpay for underperformers, campaigns plateau after a few bursts, and influencer marketing stays siloed as a “brand experiment” instead of a scalable acquisition channel.

The truth is simple: manual discovery doesn’t scale. If you want influencer marketing to compete with Meta or Google Ads, you need a system that filters for performance from the very start.

Defining “Relevant” in 2025: It’s About Revenue

For years, “relevance” in influencer marketing was defined by surface-level fit. If a creator looked like your customer, or posted content in your niche, they were considered “relevant.” In 2025, that definition no longer holds.

The truth: a creator is only relevant if their audience buys like your customer.

Relevance must be measured in revenue alignment, not aesthetics:

• ‍Audience fit → Does the creator’s audience overlap with your ideal customer profile (ICP) in terms of age, location, interests, and lifestyle?‍
• Purchase behavior → Do their followers show actual buying intent and the disposable income needed to convert?‍
• Sales history → Has this creator already driven measurable conversions, either in your category or in comparable verticals?

A creator with a perfect feed but a disengaged or misaligned audience won’t move the needle. Meanwhile, a micro-influencer with a smaller following but proven buying power in your ICP can become one of your most profitable partners.

The most relevant influencer in 2025 isn’t the one who “fits the brand look”, it’s the one who can lower CAC, improve conversion rates, and increase LTV.

Benchmarks: Creator Efficiency in 2025

So how do you know if you’ve found the right influencers? The answer lies in efficiency benchmarks. At The Cirqle, we’ve analyzed aggregated campaign data across 2024–2025 to establish what “average” looks like versus what the top performers are achieving.

• ‍RoAS: A baseline campaign should generate at least 2.5–3.0x return. Top quartile brands consistently achieve 4x or higher by selecting creators who align with revenue outcomes, not vanity metrics.‍
• CAC: Anything above $45 is a red flag. Best-in-class influencer programs acquire customers for <$25, rivaling Meta and Google Ads benchmarks.‍
• LTV:CAC: Top performers aren’t just lowering CAC, they’re attracting better customers. A 3:1 ratio signals influencer-acquired buyers are sticking, spending more, and repurchasing faster.‍
• Conversion Rate: Baseline influencer ads convert 1.5–2.5% of traffic. Top performers, with the right creators and amplification strategy, consistently break 4%+.

The takeaway: Top-performing brands don’t just find influencers, they find the profitable ones. By benchmarking against RoAS, CAC, and LTV, performance teams can separate hype from revenue and scale only what works.

How AI-Powered Discovery Solves This

The reason most influencer campaigns underperform isn’t that creators don’t work, it’s that brands choose them the wrong way. Manual discovery is slow, subjective, and based on surface-level metrics. AI changes that.

With The Cirqle’s AI-powered discovery engine, creator selection shifts from guesswork to precision:

• ‍Filter smarter → Search across 1.2M+ verified creators instantly, with filters for category, geography, audience size, and demographics to find the best-fit pool.‍
• Predict performance upfront → Every creator profile comes with RoAS forecasts and CAC predictions, giving you confidence in expected returns before spend.‍
• Verify audience alignment → AI validates whether a creator’s followers truly overlap with your ideal customer profile (ICP), eliminating wasted impressions on audiences that will never convert.‍
• Optimize costs → Built-in rate predictions ensure you pay fair value for performance, avoiding inflated fees for underperformers.

The result? A process that once took 40–60 hours of manual searching now takes less than a single workday (<8 hours), and instead of relying on gut feel, every shortlist is backed by data-driven probability of sales.

The takeaway: AI-powered discovery doesn’t just make influencer marketing faster, it makes it accountable, predictable, and scalable.

Case Study: About You

Challenge

As one of Europe’s fastest-growing fashion e-commerce platforms, About You needed to run influencer campaigns across multiple regions at scale. With hundreds of creators activated each quarter, manual discovery created inefficiencies, high variance in performance, and a lack of revenue attribution. It was difficult to compare influencer efficiency against other paid channels, making budget allocation decisions slow and uncertain.

Solution

About You implemented The Cirqle’s AI-powered discovery and ROI tracking. Using predictive RoAS forecasts, the team was able to shortlist creators with proven sales conversion history and audiences aligned to key fashion consumer segments in DACH and Eastern Europe. Real-time dashboards tracked CAC and RoAS by creator, allowing About You to optimize daily, shifting budget into Spark Ads for top performers and reducing spend on underperformers.

Results

• Campaign setup time reduced by 70%, allowing faster seasonal launches
• CAC efficiency improved by 25%, bringing influencer-driven acquisition close to paid social benchmarks
• Top-performing creators retained quarterly, building a compounding base of revenue-driving partners

👉 See how performance-driven fashion campaigns scale with The Cirqle.

Case Study: Johnson & Johnson

Challenge

Johnson & Johnson runs campaigns across multiple healthcare and consumer brands, from skincare to wellness to baby care. The challenge wasn’t finding influencers, it was proving ROI. With campaigns spanning global markets, manual discovery and traditional PR dashboards left gaps in attribution, making it difficult to measure CAC and LTV or compare efficiency to other acquisition channels.

Solution

By adopting The Cirqle’s ROI tracking software, J&J could unify organic influencer campaigns and paid amplification into a single view. AI discovery helped the team identify creators with high trust and proven performance in categories like skincare and wellness, while predictive RoAS forecasts provided confidence before spend. With integrations into Meta and TikTok Ads Manager, J&J could amplify winning creator content across markets while tracking sales impact in real time.

Results

• 3.2x RoAS across skincare campaigns, with influencer efficiency surpassing traditional paid media in certain markets
• Global CAC benchmarks reduced by 18% through better audience alignment and daily optimizations
• LTV tracking revealed influencer-acquired buyers had stronger retention in wellness and baby-care categories than customers acquired through Meta ads

👉 Explore how Johnson & Johnson scaled influencer ROI with The Cirqle.

Framework: Find Relevant Influencers for Revenue in 5 Steps

Finding creators who “look right” isn’t enough in 2025. To turn influencer marketing into a predictable revenue channel, you need a system. Here’s the 5-step framework top performance teams use to find relevant influencers fast and scale with confidence:

1. Define ROI goals

Before you even start searching, set your benchmarks. What RoAS do you need to hit for influencer spend to be competitive with Meta Ads? What CAC ceiling keeps you profitable? Defining these thresholds upfront ensures you’re searching with intent, not guessing after the fact.

2. Run AI discovery

Use AI filters and predictive analytics to instantly shortlist high-potential creators. With The Cirqle’s 1.2M+ verified profiles, you can cut days of manual searching down to hours, all while seeing projected RoAS and CAC forecasts attached to each creator.

3. Vet for alignment

Relevance means revenue alignment. Verify that the creator’s audience overlaps with your ICP, and check their past sales history in your category. AI validation prevents wasted spend on creators whose followers may look engaged but won’t convert.

4. Test at scale

Don’t bet the farm on one creator. Apply the 20:20:20 rule → 20 creators × 20 assets × 20 lookalike audiences = 8,000 test surfaces. This broad test environment gives algorithms the inputs they need to find breakout winners while minimizing risk.

5. Double down

Once you’ve identified top performers, keep them. Place them on retainers for consistent content and predictable results. At the same time, refresh with new AI-discovered creators each cycle to keep campaigns optimized and audiences expanding.

The takeaway: This framework shifts discovery from a gamble into a repeatable growth engine. With predictive ROI upfront and structured testing, influencer marketing stops being a side tactic, and becomes one of your most profitable acquisition channels.

The Takeaway

In 2025, finding “relevant” influencers has nothing to do with aesthetics or follower size, it’s about who can actually drive revenue. The brands that scale aren’t chasing the biggest names; they’re systematically investing in creators whose audiences align with their ICP and whose track record shows they can convert.

That’s exactly what AI-powered discovery enables. By moving beyond vanity metrics, The Cirqle gives performance teams the ability to:

• ‍Find relevant creators fast → Search across 1.2M+ verified profiles with instant filters by geography, audience, and category.‍
• Forecast performance before spending → Use RoAS and CAC predictions to de-risk investments and allocate budget with confidence.‍
• Scale programs predictably → Double down on proven performers, amplify their content through Spark/Partnership Ads, and turn influencer marketing into a repeatable acquisition channel.

The truth: influencer marketing ROI doesn’t come from guessing, it comes from data-driven discovery.

👉 Ready to find the right creators for revenue, faster? Book a demo today.

FAQs

Q: How fast can AI-powered discovery find relevant creators?

Traditionally, building a creator shortlist meant 40–60 hours of manual searching across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube feeds. With AI-powered discovery, that same process takes less than a single workday (<8 hours), no matter the market. Whether you’re activating creators in the US, UK, DACH, or APAC, The Cirqle’s 1.2M+ verified profiles allow brands to instantly filter by location, category, and audience demographics, ensuring you’re matching with the right creators in the right geo.

Q: Does “relevant” mean niche alignment or revenue alignment?

Both matter, but the ultimate test of relevance is revenue alignment. A creator is only truly relevant if their audience overlaps with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and they have a track record of driving sales. AI discovery verifies both: niche fit (beauty, fashion, health, etc.) and sales probability. For performance marketers, this distinction is critical, because niche alignment without conversion history still leads to wasted spend.

Q: How accurate are RoAS forecasts?

The Cirqle’s RoAS forecasts are built on first-party sales data collected across campaigns with more than 1.2M verified creators. This depth allows forecasts to factor in historical conversion rates, average order values, and audience quality. While no prediction is perfect, brands using The Cirqle consistently find forecasts align closely with actual outcomes, giving performance teams confidence to allocate budget upfront and avoid costly misfires.

Q: Can this work for micro-influencers?

Yes, and in many categories, micro-influencers outperform larger creators on efficiency. Predictive RoAS tagging highlights smaller creators with high conversion potential, helping brands unlock lower CAC and higher LTV than they might achieve with macro partnerships. For local or regional activations (e.g. beauty launches in London or health campaigns in California), micro-creators are often the fastest route to profitable scale.

Q: Which industries see the biggest gains?

The strongest results come from beauty, fashion, health, and consumer tech, industries where influencer-driven discovery is natural and purchase intent is high. For example, DTC beauty brands see RoAS benchmarks of 3–4x, while fashion campaigns often deliver CACs below Meta Ads benchmarks when scaled correctly. That said, any performance-driven DTC vertical, from supplements to home goods, benefits from predictive selection, especially when expanding into new geographies.