Finding a UGC Creator: How Brands Pick the Right Creator

Finding the right UGC creator is not a question of follower count. As a creator who regularly produces for brands, I keep seeing brands look at reach first and miss what actually matters: does my style, my language, my audience fit what the brand wants to sell? The short answer: if you want to find a UGC creator, check niche and audience first, not metrics.

Check niche and target audience before follower count

For brands, finding a UGC creator means looking for the creator whose organic audience matches your customer profile. A creator in the beauty space has a different audience than someone who covers tech products or children’s products. Before reaching out, look at which topics the creator covers regularly, which platform he or she is mainly active on, and whether the comment section shows real reactions from the target audience. Reach without relevance does nothing for performance ads.

Portfolio and quality: three things that actually matter

Before a brand books a UGC creator, I recommend three concrete checks. First: are there finished videos in the portfolio that show similar products? That gives a realistic picture of image quality, editing, and speaking style. Second: how do the scripts or hooks in previous videos sound, do they feel authentic or read off a page? UGC lives on credibility, and you can see it in the portfolio. Third: has the creator already worked with paid-ads formats, meaning short, direct clips with a clear call to action? For performance campaigns, that is a different craft than organic content.

Run that check on me too, so here are my numbers: a brand storytelling video for Femtasy reached 636,000 views, two cashback clips for Shopback 189,000 and 122,000, an app UGC for Lifesum 57,000. I have also produced for L’Oréal, Maybelline, Wolt, Sofatutor and SumUp. A creator who cannot or will not give you numbers like these is not automatically a bad choice. It only means you have to make the call yourself instead of getting it backed by data.

Settle usage rights before the job starts

Usage rights are often raised too late in the creator briefing, and that causes problems afterwards. As a UGC creator, let me be clear: without an agreement, the rights to a video stay with the creator, they do not automatically transfer to the brand. If you want to use the material in paid ads, on your own website, or as whitelisted content, you should put that in writing, and before production starts. Not because nothing counts without written form, but because otherwise the agreed scope cannot be proven if it is ever questioned. Typical points are duration of use, platforms, and whether exclusive or non-exclusive use is agreed. It sounds formal, but it protects both sides.

Ask directly instead of searching for weeks

Finding the right UGC creator on your own costs time, because searching through Instagram, TikTok, or creator platforms without a pre-filter is inefficient. The shorter route is to reach out directly to a creator whose portfolio you have already looked at.

That is how I work: no marketplace in between, one named contact, a portfolio you can check publicly, and usage rights written into the offer instead of into a platform’s terms. For brands rolling out across several markets there is one more thing: I speak EN, DE, RU and PL myself, which saves a second production with a second person. The honest downside: if you need ten creators in parallel for a large test, a marketplace serves you better than I do.

What a good creator brief contains

A UGC creator can only deliver fitting content if the briefing is clear. The minimum ingredients are: the specific product with its most important features, the target audience described in two to three sentences, the intended platform and format (length, ratio, editing style), a note on tone (casual, informative, emotional), and the usage-rights requirements. The more concrete the brief, the fewer revision rounds are needed.

If you are looking for a UGC creator for your brand right now, send me a short note about what you have in mind: info@lapotta.com. I reply within 24 hours with an honest read on whether I am the right fit. If I am not, I will say so.

More on this topic

• What does UGC cost? Price ranges and packages at a glance
• Booking a UGC creator: how the collaboration works
• UGC platform for brands: what really matters when choosing