How to Find UGC Creators in 2025

today I'm going to show you how to source and recruit top ugc creators over the last few years my agency has worked with thousands of creators we've made every mistake there is to make when it comes to sourcing creators we've tried

every method out there we've sourced creators for demographics that you probably shouldn't be able to Source creators for but today I'm going to show you everything I'm going to show you what we found to be the best method to Source creators and by the way if you don't know who I am I'm Alex Cooper I

make content on uh Ai and advertising and helping you make better ads so we're going to start off with Tik Tok uh Tik Tok is where we get about 40 50% of our creators the platform we get the most

creators from I'm just going to search ugc plus my industry so if I've got a product you know um a cat bed I'm going

to search ugc cat um by the way uh if you're outside of America or if you're outside of the demographic that you're sourcing from just put a a VPN on as you can see here I'm in Cape toown currently

I've got a a VPN um for the us so that it brings me mainly us creators uh which is what we're trying to source for right now just going to go through these and

one by one open them up and see if they are creators uh in our demo that have their emails uh in their profile so let's start looking through these uh so

this lady has a cat um and she has an email brilliant so I'm just going to take down uh the name and the email in a simple spreadsheet that we will build

off of and you can very easily have a vaa do this in fact we actually have two people fulltime we have one who's a creative sourcer and one a Crea a coordinator um you don't need to have two people fulltime obviously we're an agency with

20 clients you may just have one person parttime um as a brand but as we go through these uh you see another one here does she have a cat I don't know I have to double check but yes she does I

just take down a bunch of these uh Tik Tok accounts uh sometimes I click onto the hashtag so when I was doing research the other day I saw some on like hasht catf fluenc so I just clicked on the

ashtag I found a bunch more accounts off of doing that too I know this is a pretty broad example exle but you can do this for any industry uh we were sourcing the other day for uh pregnant

women um between 7 and 9 months and we just looked into the hashtags look what they're us and we found a bunch of accounts found a bunch of creators through uh doing that so Tik Tok is our main source alternatively what you can

do is you can go through Instagram and just type in like site uh Instagram uh ugc cat in this case and just go through a bunch of these different pages to see

if we can find any more uh cat influences in this case and uh Instagram is great for this because as you know when you press follow it will give you a bunch of other suggestions and we found so many accounts Again by just going off

of suggestions off of suggestions suggestions and reaching out to those people so cap are looking for the hashtags they're using and uh using that to dictate uh the searches that we make

onto these uh onto these platforms now one thing that might seem obvious but you'd be surprised how many people don't do this is actually like sourcing creators in the demographic that you're looking for one thing that I like to do

when I come on to any uh new account is just go into that account and do uh some demographic reporting to see where ADS are being delivered to currently so I come into uh this specific account I ran

a male uh female uh breakdown um for the year to date now it looks like about 70% of their spend is going to mail right now and you want to work out whether

that's correlation or causation because they might have all their ads with guys in it and they're still getting a good amount of spend towards female um they might be doing 50/50 if they are then

they probably want to lean to to guys more going forward because that's where the ads have been delivered you can do this for gender you can also do this for age this is really important as well not just for the creators that you Source but for the type ads that you're going

to create the ads you're going to go and create for a uh well a 65 plus audience which is the biggest spending demographic in this account so far this year is very different to the ad going and create for an 18 to 24 25 to 34

audience as we spoke about many times on this channel before so that's something that I always like to look at and just be cognizant of when I'm sourcing new creators so what about if you are advertising for say an older audience

and it's not as easy to find creators on Tik Tok or on Instagram well that is where backstage comes in we get quite a lot of our older uh audience demographic creators from backstage so let me show

you how you would go about doing that if we jump into backstage now let's just say I'm looking for uh creators for um say like an electric razor uh so I might

say you know gender is going to be male uh I want someone who's 30 plus um the skills are going to be user generated content

and let's say we want someone who's Bor so now we're going to search I've got a bunch of different options here uh of which I can look into their profiles I've got this guy here I've got his uh socials here if I want to reach out to

him so I can go through each of these see if there is a link uh sorry not a link see if there's an email in any of these uh there's not on his Tik Tok Instagram or Facebook but on his YouTube

I did manage to find uh this so we've got an email and I'm just going to take that and I'm going to add it to my spreadsheet boss hotsource

boss.com fantastic now if you do find any creators that uh you can't find contact details for but you could just reach out to them like via social media which we have done many times or you

could do something like this go and find them on LinkedIn uh James is that him there he is uh and you can just use a tool like uh contact out um which is the

one that we use as you can see here we've got his own page uh I'm just going to pull his email from here and perfect we've got his email we can put that into our spreadsheet and now we are good to go and you just want to get a a VA to

just go and do this for um everyone they can find in your demographic Tik Tok Instagram and backstage have been responsible for about 75 80% of the creators that we've sourced over the

last few years and uh we have sourced Crees in pretty much every demographic at this point um so would highly recommend alternatively if you can't find anyone on any of those platforms which I highly doubt um but let's just

say you want other options uh Twitter um we have found a few creators through Twitter can be hit and miss sometimes the creats on there a little bit overpriced in my opinion uh but just putting a Twitter like this um you know use your opportunity for couple's crats

or whatever and you don't need to have a p on twit to do this like if you just hash ugc or ugc Community like people will find it and then once it gets a few replies then you know then you'll get a lot of replies uh we've got a few

projects um comment below or drop me a DM um and we got a load of engagement and some CA off the back of that as well you can go through platforms not the biggest fan of them uh collaba is good

uh what's the one we we've been using recently heepsy uh they have a free plan we found some good creators on there uh incense I have used as well so I'll put links and Boll up of those on the screen but outside of those three I wouldn't

really recommend platforms because at the end of the day they can't really afford to keep good talent on there good talent always ends up going independent uh at least from what I found when it comes to ugc creators and finally my

favorite way to source creators uh well they not really creators uh is to go directly to your customers when you get a good piece of content back from one of your customers it will be better than anything you could pay any Creator to do

that's because they can't recreate the authenticity of an actual customer speaking of their actual experience so if you're a brand especially you're an established brand that's already got a lot of reviews and a lot of customers put a like a a post purchase flow in

place that says 7 days after uh delivery or 7 days after shipping whatever you want to do um send an email saying hey do you want to make 50 bucks do you want to make 100 bucks we we will pay you 50 bucks if uh if you send a video in and

another 50 bucks if we end up using your video and we've got clients who do that and they've literally Source the content for some of their best performing ads from putting in place a flow like that let's just say that you know one in two

hit or like one in three or actually a good piece of content you're pretty much paying what you would pay a good ugc Creator like 150 200 250 North of that really for a a really good UDC Creator

so please do go and set up custom testimonials if you haven't already testimonials. uh is probably the best

testimonials. uh is probably the best one that we've use not affiliated just fan the platform so once we reach out to creators and we've got some interest on people who agree to the rate that we propos and we pck over a contract via

pandadoc um that then sets off a zap once it's signed uh to send a message to the slack channel that we have internally uploads the contract to Google Drive and then updates notion uh

with the Creator pool database which I'd recommend you set up whether it be a spreadsheet notion air table however you do your internal uh operations for creative and we have uh a database inside of here that logs all the

creators we have different details and information about them so we can just filter down to whatever we want to uh see in here whether that be you know female male country uh source and we've got a gallery version of this as well uh

just to keep everything in uh one place and then once we're ready to complete on boarding and get their first project underway we send over the uh Creator guide that we made which is just a quick

explainer video from me saying uh or about the briefs how to use them how to get the most out of them what we expect from them as a Creator um we've got a default filming guy with some best practice as well and some other best

practice down the bottom here um and yeah and just send that over to them send over their brief and uh and we're good to go brief wise there's a few different styles of briefs we have uh different briefs with different creators

and for different brands sometimes like for example if you're working with a brand that's you know very very broad like let's just say um food like consumables uh you want to give them

more freedom uh because there's you know you wouldn't be able to refer and get creative with it if I was selling supplements or something required a little bit more education then we give a little bit more Direction and be a little bit more like to the point we've

got briefs either way uh we've got full script briefs we got freestyle briefs uh a full script brief might look like this where everything is scripted out audios visuals uh shop types Etc and we just

ask the Creator to go and uh go through this list and film everything for us sometimes we'll do an idea in freestyle uh where we give them an overall idea or a reference video to go and recreate and say like here are the value props we

want you to mention um go and riff and then sometimes we're really confident with the Creator and we're really confident with the product we just say here's a complete freestyle go and you know do what you want here are one or

two value props but like we want you guys to be creative and do whatever uh so there's different ways to do it and it's going to differ from Creator to Creator it's going to differ from Brand to Brand uh but you it's always good to have different types of templates so

that we can uh be flexible with it so yeah build relationships with your creators uh we have an iMessage chat with each one of our creators um so that we we can communicate with them tell them how ads getting on Etc as a brand

like you only really need 5 10 maybe 15 like good to very good creators consistently giving you content uh to have a very sey stream for your ad account and especially if you know how to make that content go a long way and

that is why you need to watch this video here that tells you how to take the content from creators and get the most bang for your buck so you can put out 10x more creative than your competitors so click the link and I will see you over there