Works best if
You're already paying creators and want to reach past the audience you keep landing on. Your product would make sense to people you're not currently selling to. You can allow a few extra weeks of lead time before content goes live.
If you're a brand selling any kind of desktop machinery, chances are I've already got a framework I can fit your tool into and will give you a very good idea of what channels & videos your new customers are likely to be watching.
You're already paying creators and want to reach past the audience you keep landing on. Your product would make sense to people you're not currently selling to. You can allow a few extra weeks of lead time before content goes live.
You want a high volume of creators rather than a few well-matched ones. You need content live in the next couple of weeks. You already know which creators you want and just need someone to handle the admin.
As all my data is built on YouTube long form videos, that's the only form of influencer marketing I currently deal in. Where it's useful, those videos can also be cut down for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, to get more out of what's already been produced.
Before I go looking at creators, I want to know who else would actually want your machine. I'll score it against a long list of audiences and rank them on how well they fit and whether they've got the money to spend, so by the time a channel gets suggested there's already a reason behind it.
Audience sizing and interest trends come from Google Trends and Meta's published audience data. On top of that I look at what each group spends on the hobby itself, because what people spend on their own interests tells you far more than how many of them there are.
You can usually reason out the money. Someone restoring a classic car has more to spend than someone tinkering with an Arduino, and you don't need data to work that out. The harder question is which of them is actually a good fit for your machine, and that's what the data is there to answer.
A ranked list of audiences with the reasoning written next to each one, so you can take it into an internal meeting and make the case without me in the room. No creator has been approached at this point, so nothing is committed.